When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) Read Online Free Page A

at the label.
    “Demerol, sure enough. Nice to know you can read. I used to party on this shit a while back when I broke my thumb. You find it helps your knee?”
    “Yeah, it helps.”
    The cop put the bottle in his pocket, then looked at his watch. “Five-thirty. I’m guessing your doctor’s office is closed by now, so you won’t be able to call them for another prescription. Not that they’d be likely to believe you when you said you lost what you had. I’m gonna be feeling good tonight...”
    “Come on. Please. It’ll hurt like a bitch without the pills.”
    “Well, if you’re hurting, at least you know you’re alive. And that won’t last for long if you talk to any more lawyers. Feel me?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Have a nice day. I’m very glad to see that you’re doing well. Please think of your neighborhood police officers as your friends, and call us if you need anything.”
    As the cop walked to his car, he took out a cell phone and made a call. “Ponto, it’s Diaz. Looks like everything’s cool.”
    ––––––––
    T he weekly paper came out, and the cover story was about Laura. It was long, and she didn’t read all of it, but she skimmed it enough to see that it included her testimony at the parole hearing, her threat against Frank, her assault on Boone, and her firing from her job. It accused the Phoenix Police Department of covering up for a former one of its own, and of intimidating Boone to keep him from pursuing charges. It contained anonymous quotes from cops who had worked with Laura during her own time in a uniform, and an account of how she once beat up an ex-boyfriend.
    Thank God the photos of her they’d found were so fuzzy. At least she could probably go out without being recognized.
    Pat called her. “Hey, how you doing?”
    “Okay,” she said.
    “You see the paper?”
    “You call that a paper? Yeah, I saw it.”
    “I didn’t talk to him. Nobody here did.”
    “I know. He said so in the article.”
    At nearly midnight, restless, she drove to a Denny’s. She sat at the counter and read the whole of the article as she drank coffee. The guy hadn’t gotten a single detail wrong, she had to admit. But a long article tracking her history of violence wasn’t going to make it easier to get a job in Phoenix.
    And, as she looked around her in that Denny’s, looked at the mirrors and the fluorescent lights, she knew she didn’t want to leave Phoenix. She’d done it once before. After she quit the police department, she wasn’t sure what to do next, so she decided to blow town. She wandered for a while, took whatever jobs she could get, and ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She got a job as a receptionist, and for about three months she liked it there. There were down sides – nearly everyone was a Christian, few of whom believed in anything Jesus Christ taught, and nearly everyone who wasn’t rich seemed to live in poverty. It was the only place Laura had ever been to where people were proud of being ignorant, and actually bragged about how little they knew or had experienced.
    But, unlike Phoenix, it had a real downtown, a place you could walk around in, and a good public transport system. In Phoenix, there was nowhere to walk – many streets didn’t even have sidewalks – and a bus service that barely existed.  She lived in an apartment on a hill overlooking downtown Chattanooga. It was in a cold, generic complex the size of a village, with high rents and high bills and draconian penalties for late rent payments or refusal to commit to a long lease. The apartment buildings all looked the same, and each apartment had the ambience of the waiting area at a county clinic. At the entrance to the complex were signs that read “WELCOME HOME” and “WE LOVE OUR RESIDENTS.”
    But at night she could look out of her living room window and see the city’s lights reflected on the Tennessee River. The bars opened late, and there was always someplace with live music within