Night Train Read Online Free Page A

than Jennifer? More stable? She was, she was 'sunny'.'
           'No you're not wrong, Colonel Tom. But the minute you really go into someone. You and I both know that there's always enough pain.'
           'There wasn't any—'
           Here his voice gave a kind of hiccup of fright. And I thought he must be imagining her last moments. It took him a few swallows, and then he continued: 'Pain. Why was she naked, Mike? Jennifer. Miss Modest. Who never even owned a bikini. With 'her' figure.'
           'Excuse me, sir, is the case being worked? Is Silvera on it? What?'
           'I stetted it, Mike. It's pending. Because I'm going to ask you to do something for me.'
           TV, etcetera, has had a terrible effect on perpetrators. It has given them 'style'. And TV has ruined American juries for ever. And American lawyers. But TV has also fucked up us police. No profession has been so massively fictionalized. I had a bunch of great lines ready. Like: 'I was quit when you came in here. I'm twice as quit now'. But this was Colonel Tom I was talking to. So I spoke the plain truth.
           'You saved my life. I'd do anything for you. You know that.'
           He reached down for his briefcase. From it he removed a folder. Jennifer Rockwell. H97143. He held it out toward me, saying, 'Bring me something I can live with. Because I can't live with this.'
           Now he let me look at him. The panic had left his eyes. As for what remained, well, I've seen it a thousand times. The skin is matte, containing not a watt of light. The stare goes nowhere into the world. It cannot penetrate. Seated on the other side of the desk, I was already way out of range.
           'It's a little fucked up, ain't it, Colonel Tom?'
           'Yeah, it's a little fucked up. But it's the way we're going to do this.'
           I leaned back and said experimentally, 'I keep trying to think it through. You're sitting there kind of idling around with it—with the weapon. Cleaning it. Toying with it. Then a perverse thought. An infantile thought.' I mean, that's how an intelligent infant finds out about something: It puts it in its mouth. 'You put it in your mouth. You—'
           'It wasn't an accident, Mike,' he said, standing. 'That's precluded by the evidence. Expect a package this time tomorrow.'
           He nodded at me. This package, his nod seemed to say, was going to straighten me out.
           'What is it, Colonel Tom?'
           'Something for your VCR.'
           And I thought, Oh, Jesus. Don't tell me. The young lovers in their designer dungeon. I could just see it. The young lovers, in their customized correctional facility—Trader in his Batman suit, and Jennifer shackled to her rack, wearing nothing but feathers and tar.
           But Colonel Tom soon put my mind at rest.
           'It's the autopsy,' he said.
     
     
     
    March 7
     
    What with AA, golf, the Discuss Group on Mondays, and the night class on Thursdays at Pete (together with countless and endless correspondence courses), plus the Tuesday nightshift, and Saturdays, when I tend to hang with my bunkies in the Forty-Four—what with all this, my boyfriend says I don't have time for a boyfriend and maybe my boyfriend is right. But I do have a boyfriend: Tobe. He's a dear guy and I value him and I need him. One thing about Tobe—he sure knows how to make a woman feel slim. Tobe's totally enormous. He fills the room. When he comes in late, he's worse than the night train: Every beam in the building wakes up and moans. I find love difficult. Love finds me difficult. I learned that with Deniss, the hard way. And Deniss learned it too. It's this simple: Love destabilizes me, and I can't afford to be destabilized. So Tobe here suits me right down to the ground. His strategy, I suspect, is to stick around and grow on me. And it's working. But so slowly that I don't think I'll live long enough to see if it all