The Dead Run Read Online Free

probably nothing. Then you can go to Dippin’ Donuts, get some more caffeine . The only way to make it through the days was with a hundred little if-thens. The summer days, especially.
    He let it ring a few more times. No sense picking up unless they were serious.
    They were.
    â€œDel Verde County sheriff’s office. Nichols.”
    Already, the phone was making his ear sweat. He promised himself an egg-and-cheese, to go with that iced coffee. No sausage, though. A man was nothing without discipline.
    â€œBuenos días, Señor Nichols. Sitting in your office, scratching your huevos?”
    â€œAnd thinking of you, Señor Fuentes.”
    His Mexican counterpart. Their offices were sixty-seven miles apart, and anything that happened in the barren desert between was both their problem. It was a gray zone, both Texan and Mexican. The kind that doesn’t appear on any map.
    â€œI’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to put away your copy of Anal Gay Sex magazine and take a drive.”
    â€œActually, I’m reading Tiny Mexican Cock today. Love your photo spread. The nipple tassels are a classy touch.”
    Fuentes cackled. Nichols tossed his coffee at the trash can across the room, banking it in with a satisfying thump.
    â€œLet me guess. Another gringo asshole with a backpack full of drugs?” It would make the fourth this month.
    â€œNo, no.” Fuentes paused. “This is something else. A girl.”
    â€œAlive or dead?” asked Nichols, palming his chin. The Mexicans were vague about the strangest things.
    â€œMuerta.”
    â€œAmerican, or you don’t know?” Instinctively, he swiveled toward the file cabinet, reached for the Missing Persons folder.
    â€œWe don’t know.”
    â€œWell, what makes you think . . .” Nichols sighed. “Forget it. Where should I meet you?”
    Instead of an address, Fuentes gave him a mile marker. Great. An hour’s drive to stare at a corpse lying in the middle of the desert in what was, on a good day, another country. Nichols tacked a cruller onto his Dippin’ Donuts order, proud of himself for making the bribes junk food rather than whiskey shots.
    â€œCause of death?” he asked.
    â€œIndeterminado. My men just found her. We got an anonymous tip—guy called in, said he came across the body while he was sneaking across the border.”
    â€œCommunity-minded chap,” said Nichols, resting his forearms on the thick folder full of hopelessly open cases. “I’m telling you, Fuentes, these boys you all keep sending us are the salt of the earth.”
    Nichols didn’t get the laugh he’d been expecting. Silence on the line, and then Fuentes said, “We’ll wait for you. But . . .”
    Again, Fuentes paused. In the silence, Nichols could hear the bustle of the Mexican police office: voices speaking impossibly fast, phones ringing. Even the hum of an air conditioner, though that was probably his imagination.
    He grew tired of waiting. “All right, well—”
    â€œMurder,” Fuentes blurted.
    â€œThat a fact or an opinion?” Nichols shot back.
    â€œAn opinion.”
    â€œI don’t do opinions, Fuentes. You know that. See you in an hour, pendejo.”
    N ICHOLS SPENT THE drive playing a game called In a Real Department, one of his old standbys.
    It went like this: In a real department, the sheriff would have a real car, not a broken-down hunk of crap that overheated if you pushed it past sixty. Fifty, if you ran the air.
    In a real department, that sheriff would have had more than eight men to patrol a county three times the size of Rhode Island, and in a real department half those men wouldn’t have been drinkers.
    In a real department, he’d have had a forensics kit on the seat next to him right now instead of a balled-up McDonald’s bag. Better yet, a cop who knew how to use it.
    Then again, in a real department,