Night Train Read Online Free Page B

panned out.
           Tobe is no choirboy, obviously: He rooms with Detective Mike Hoolihan. But when I told him what was going to be on TV that night he took himself off to Fretnick's for a couple of cold ones. We keep booze in the apartment and somehow I like to know it's there even though it will kill me if I touch it. I cooked him an early dinner. And around seven he finished mopping up his pork chop and sloped out the door.
           Right now I want to say something about myself and Colonel Tom. One morning toward the very end of my career in Homicide I came in for the eight to four—late, drunk, with a face made of orange sand, and carrying my liver on my hip like a flight bag. Colonel Tom got me into his office and said, 'Mike, you can kill yourself if that's what you want. But don't expect me to watch you doing it'. He took me by the arm and led me to the second tier of the headquarters garage. He drove me straight to Lex General. The admissions doc looked me over and the first thing he said was, 'You live alone, right?' And I said, 'Mo. No, I don't live alone'. I live with Deniss... After they dried me out I convalesced at the Rockwells' residence—this was when they lived way out in Whitefield. For a week I lay in a little bedroom at the back of the ground floor. The distant traffic was music and people who weren't people—as well as people who were—came and stood at the foot of my bed. Uncle Tom, Miriam, the family physician. And then the others. And Jennifer Rockwell, who was nineteen years old, would come and read to me in the evenings. I lay there trying to listen to her clear young voice, wondering if Jennifer was real or just another of the ghosts who occasionally stopped by, cool, self-sufficient, unreproachful figures, their faces carved and blue.
           I never felt judged by her. She had her troubles too, back then. And she was the daughter of a police. She didn't judge.
     
     
    First I recheck the case folder, where you're going to find every last bit of boring shit, like the odometer reading on the unmarked that Johnny Mac and myself drove that night—the night of March fourth. But I want all the chapter and verse. I want to shore up a sequence in my mind.
           19:30. Trader Faulkner is the last to see. Trader has stated that he took his leave of her at that time, as he always did on a Sunday night. Jennifer's apparent mood is described here as 'cheerful' and 'normal.'
           19:40. The old lady in the attic apartment, dozing in front of her TV, is woken by a shot. She calls 911.
           19:55. Beat cop shows. The old lady, Mrs. Rolfe, keeps a set of spare keys to Jennifer's apartment. Beat cop gains access and finds body.
           20:05. Tony Silvera takes the call in the squad-room. The dispatcher gives the name of the victim.
           20:15. I am summoned by Detective Sergeant John Macatitch.
           20:55. Jennifer Rockwell is pronounced.
           And twelve hours later she is cut. Taceant colloquia, it says on the wall. Effugiat risus.
           HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.
           Let talking cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.
           Die suspiciously, die violently, die unusually—in fact, die pretty much anywhere outside an intensive-care unit or a hospice—and you will be cut. Die unattended, and you will be cut. If you die in 'this' American city, the paramedics will bring you down to the ME's office on Battery and Jefferson. When it's time to get around to you there, you will be trolleyed out of the walk-in freezer, weighed, and rolled onto a zinc gurney under an overhead camera. It used to be a microphone, and you'd take Polaroids. Now it's a camera. Now it's TV. At this stage your clothes will be examined, removed, bagged, and sent to Evidence Control. But Jennifer is wearing nothing but a toe-tag. And it begins.
           Maybe I'd