Rogue Island Read Online Free Page B

his wedding. He was a family man and I wasn’t, so we hadn’t seen all that much of each other the last few years, but last week at Hopes he’d shown me pictures of his three little kids. The girl was still in diapers. What was her name? Michelle? Mikaila?
    I stood in the cold with the gawkers, pretending a professional detachment I didn’t feel. Together we gulped the acrid, frigid air and waited to see what Rosie would be carrying when she came back out.
    When the chief finally strode from the building into the light, cradling something blackened and broken in her arms, sound seemed to stop again. I squeezed my eyes shut, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing the toothless grin of a baby girl waiting for her daddy to come home.
    *  *  *
    I dashed off a quick news brief for our online edition, but it was late afternoon by the time I filed the full story for the paper. My computer flashed with a message from Lomax. It didn’t say “Good job.” It said:
    D OG STORY.
    He glared as I shrugged on my jacket and walked to the elevator. As soon as the door slid shut, I tugged off the jacket and punched the button for the second floor, which housed the cafeteria, mailroom, and photo lab.
    â€œEverything or just what we published?” said Gloria Costa, the photo lab tech.
    â€œEverything,” I said. “Especially crowd shots.”
    Gloria pecked at her keyboard, and a menu of Mount Hope fire photos filled the screen of her Apple monitor. We stood close, our shoulders touching as we bent toward the screen. Her skin smelled of something spicy and sweet. She was a little pudgy, but subtract twenty pounds, give her a makeup lesson, squeeze her into something by Emilio Pucci, and you’ve got a young Sharon Stone. Add twenty pounds, dump her into a shapeless shift, and you’ve got my almost-ex.
    It took us nearly an hour to examine every frame and pick out about seventy crowd shots—at least a few from each of the fires.
    â€œYou want prints?”
    â€œSoon as you can, Gloria. There’ll be crowd shots from today’s fire too. This morning I asked the picture desk to make sure we shoot spectators at Mount Hope fires till further notice.”
    â€œPrints could take a few days, baby. We’re understaffed here.”
    â€œHave them by Monday and you can drink on my tab at Hopes for a week.”

7
    â€œCan’t you turn off that damn police radio?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œYou know why not.”
    â€œWho has a police radio in his bedroom anyway?” Veronica said.
    â€œI do.”
    She smirked and shook her head, then rolled on top of me. We kissed, all open mouths and heat. But it was a heat with no flame. What I pulled down, she pulled up. What I tried to unsnap, she twisted away. We were consenting adults, but she wouldn’t consent. I had more luck in middle school.
    It was the first time I had brought Veronica to my place, three rooms on the second floor of a crumbling tenement building on America Street in Providence’s Italian neighborhood of Federal Hill. Three rooms was an extravagance because I was living in just one of them, unless you counted the time I spent in the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator.
    I’d tidied up the place in anticipation of Veronica’s arrival, even dragged a damp paper towel through the dust. I would have tried distracting her from the decor with music, but Dorcas still had my LPs, and my only CD player was in Secretariat’s dash.
    All the floors were covered in the same linoleum made to look like red brick. Real brick wouldn’t have had all those scuffs. The beige walls were bare except for a few plaster cracks and my only piece of art, a shadow box holding a Colt .45. It had been my grandfather’s gun when he wore Providence PD blue. He carried it until the day someone laid a pipe across the back of his skull on Atwells Avenue, jerked it from