The Pain Scale Read Online Free

asked.”
    Before I started the car, I phoned in an order for carne asada, chicken veracruz, mixed-bean soup, steamed rice, and chips and salsa.
    It had been more than a year since my partner and I had worked over dinner. Driving south down the 710, I hit the
P LAY
button on the steering wheel. Springsteen started in on “Further On (Up the Road),” and I felt like I was going home.

PART TWO: PRESENTATION

    Severity is in the eye of the sufferer...Pain is pain.
    —David Foster Wallace
, Infinite Jest

Three
    P AIN IS RELATIVE . It’s been years since I’ve been able to sleep through the night on any kind of a regular basis. Even before I nearly lost my hand, I was already in a kind of pain. My wife burned to death in a car accident a few years earlier. I’ve killed two teenagers in the line of duty. And as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been obsessing over homicides for more than a decade. None of these things has ever treaded lightly on my psyche. I was on close personal terms with Grey Goose a good long time before I ever had any major surgery at all.
    On occasion, I consider the two varieties of pain I’ve experienced—the physical and the psychological. And I often believe that I prefer the physical. It’s tangible and palpable in a way that the ghosts that haunt my sleepless nights never are and never will be. There’s a hope, too, in the physical pain, a hope of some cure or remedy, of some relief, no matter how distant, that is forever absent in the other. What hope is there, for example, of forgetting the last time I saw my wife, on a stainless-steel autopsy table, her body burned and blackened, her face charred almost beyond recognition?

    A few years earlier, the brass had wanted to update the furniture in the Homicide Detail squad room when the building got a top-to-bottom refurbishing. They had planned to install cubicles andfabric-covered partitions to “delineate workspaces” and “facilitate a professional atmosphere,” as they were doing throughout the department. Ruiz hemmed and hawed, stomped his feet, and just generally made a stink until the Detective Division commander threw in the towel and let him keep the traditional squad arrangement—three clusters of two WWII-era steel desks, each facing one another, in the large open space.
    I looked at Jen over our gray wood-grain Formica desktops. She’d changed into jeans and an LBPD T-shirt before I’d made it back with the food.
    Over dinner, we’d talked about Jen’s hunt for a house. She’d never owned one before but had some money in the bank and thought the time was right to get into the market while home values were bottoming out. She was looking at places in California Heights and even Lakewood. I was pushing her toward Belmont Shore.
    “That’s where all the cool people live.”
    “I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m looking on the other side of town.”
    A few hours later, the wastebaskets were full of empty Styrofoam takeout containers, the leftovers were secured in the coffee room fridge, and we were wrapping things up for the night.
    It was after nine, and the rest of the squad had drifted out, one by one. We’d spent the last few hours putting together the murder book, setting up the bulletin board that would keep the most significant details of the case in plain sight, running MOs through ViCAP and NCIC to check for possible hits, and probably most importantly, using Sara Gardener-Benton’s calendar and phone and bank records to establish a preliminary record of her movements for the last days of her life. None of it was terribly exciting, but it was the legwork that would, if anything at all did, most likely lead to a break in the case. And so far, there were none of those in sight.
    I looked up from the local usage detail report from Verizon with a listing of all of Sara’s calls and text messages for the last month and thought I caught Jen smiling at me.
    “What?” I asked.
    She looked at me and shook her