The Silver Bear Read Online Free Page B

himself so he could do it again. While I trained, trying to make my body stronger so I could one day fight back, Pooley cracked a mirror in the back bathroom, sharpened a shard on the side of the bedroom headboard, and waited. When Pete came home early and found me getting stronger, he knew he could wait no longer.
    The police picked us up before we had gone a mile. We were indicted for killing Mrs. Cox, and my descriptions of our treatment seemed to fall on deaf ears. I had a petty-crime juvenile record in my past, and Pooley was done talking to adults for a long time. I can’t say I blamed him; he saved my life, after all. Nor was I surprised when we were convicted. But because of some of the oddities that came out of Pete’s mouth when he talked cryptically to the judge about swift, painful discipline—lending some credence to what I had said about our treatment—we were tried as juveniles and sent upstate to finish out our youth.
     
     
    SO Pooley was the first assassin I had known. When I decided to begin this life professionally—or you might say it was decided for me—he was a natural to be my middleman, though he wasn’t my first.

CHAPTER 3
    POOLEY agrees the coincidence surrounding my father is too odd to let pass without some digging. Since I need to head west without delay, he’ll handle the shovel for me. We agree to speak again when I call next week from the road.
    My rule is eight weeks out. I will not agree to complete a job in less than that time, and, as such, have turned down quite a few assignments, even when offers for more money have been dangled like grapes. I can flawlessly plan and execute a job in less time; of that, I have no doubt. But assassinating a target takes psychological preparation, and shortchanging yourself in that area can lead to debilitation long after the mark is in the grave.
    I open the folder again and this time, study the contents without flinching. He will be traveling by bus, a “whistle-stop” tour crisscrossing the country, culminating in Los Angeles at the Democratic National Convention. His path is strategically haphazard, planned randomness, with stops in most of the major television markets surrounding battleground states and enough small towns peppered in so that no economic demographic will feel slighted. Three thousand miles and a million handshakes in eight weeks. I will follow the same route, and will wait for him in the Midwest, allowing him to catch up, before I follow him the rest of the way to California.
    The next morning, a rental car is parked out on my street with no paperwork to sign, no instructions to receive, the keys on the floorboard under the steering column. A beige car, a sedan, with nothing to distinguish it from the millions of other cars sprawling across American highways at any given time. With only a small duffel tossed in the backseat and a larger case lodged in the trunk, I head west, the sun at my back.
    When I pull over to eat lunch at a small roadside dinette with the provocative name Sue’s No. 2, I am approached by a prostitute. I had grabbed a booth in the back of the restaurant in order to avoid contact with the local denizens of this somewheretown, but this girl could care less where I sat. She honed in on me as soon as the bells jingled on the door.
    She is dressed in a skirt that stops well above her knees and a white halter that exposes the baby fat around her middle. Her hair is stringy blond with burgundy roots and hangs away from her head like a web. She possesses a crooked nose but an uncommonly pretty mouth with perfectly straight teeth. Her eyes are sharp and intelligent.
    “Hey there, mon frer,” she says, plopping down in the seat across from me. My guess is she cannot weigh more than a hundred pounds nor be older than seventeen.
    I don’t say anything, and she proceeds, unfazed.
    “Here’s what I’m thinking. I got dropped off in this shithole town, and I need a lift outta here.” This comes out between