When Old Men Die Read Online Free Page A

of the gate seemed a little too obvious.   Someone was sure to see the Jeep and wonder what it was doing there.   I could have driven to one of the condos, but their parking places were probably guarded a lot more tightly than the building was.
    There was a paved road leading down to the condos located not too far from the old lab building, and just off the road there was a small pool.   Ruts led through the sea oats to the pool, where someone had driven down to it, maybe to cast a net for bait.
    There was no gate across these ruts, so I could drive down to the pool and leave the Jeep, hoping that anyone who saw the Jeep would assume that a fisherman was somewhere around, even if I wasn't in sight.   It was nearly dark now, and I didn't think anyone would see the Jeep down there anyway.
    A big heron flew up off the pool when I drove up and sailed off gracefully, looking startlingly white against the darkening sky.   I sat and watched him for a minute before taking my Mag- Lite from under the passenger seat and getting out of the Jeep.
    As I walked through the nearly head-high sea oats toward where I hoped Harry was hiding out, I wondered who besides me was looking for him.
    And I wondered why.
    I also wondered if Dino had leveled with me.   If he'd been lying, it wouldn't have been the first time.   When he'd asked me to look for Sharon, he'd told me that she was the daughter of "a friend."   Which was true, if you considered that Evelyn was his friend.   Still, he should have told me that Sharon was his daughter as well.   Eventually he did, of course, but he'd held back in the beginning.
    It was a shame that a man couldn't trust even an old friend to be truthful.
    Harry must have known someone was looking for him.   That was no doubt why he had disappeared in the first place.   I just couldn't imagine what anyone would want with him.   He didn't have any money, at least not that I knew about.   For that matter, he didn't have anything, not unless he'd found something in the dumpsters or in the alleys.   If he'd done that, he hadn't told Ro-Jo about it.
    Or maybe he had.   Maybe Ro-Jo had taken it from him and quietly disposed of him.   That was possible, but not very likely.   Ro-Jo was a peaceable sort.   He would take money from me for information, but he wasn't aggressive.   He didn't like to confront people.   He wouldn't even kick a cat.
    The oats slapped against my jeans, and I could hear the gentle sound of the surf on the beach.   It was soothing and peaceful, a little like listening to a New Age relaxation tape.
    There was still a faint glow of the sunset in the west, but the sky overhead was dark and a few stars were breaking through.   The dark gray bulk of the building loomed high on its concrete stilts in front of me.
    When I reached it, I could see what Ro-Jo meant when he said it wasn't much of a place.   Whatever purpose the building had once served, it was now only a skeleton.   There was enough light for me to see that the outside walls were solid, but the windows had quite a few missing panes, and a lot of the ones that weren't missing were broken.   There were a couple of tall antennas sticking up from the roof, but I suspected that there was no receiving or sending equipment inside.
    The place certainly didn't look very inviting, but maybe that was just the kind of place that Harry would look for if he wanted to hole up from the weather.   He probably wouldn't have much company.
    I turned on the flashlight and shined it around the stilts.   Most of them were in the shallow water of the lagoon, though a couple in front were on relatively dry land. There was no sign of Harry's shopping cart, but he would probably have stowed that elsewhere.   Maybe he had even managed to get it inside the building somehow.
    On the side of the building there was a rickety wooden stairway leading upward.   The salty air had just about