With the specter of death looming and with a little time to think, he’d come to a number of revelations concerning such matters as who he was and how he’d come to be driving a diesel delivery truck in bumfuck Arizona on the day a prison riot was destined to take place. Not coincidentally, he’d al...
Corso sipped his coffee. “Don’t play with your food,” he said. “Didn’t I ask for my eggs scrambled soft? You heard me ask her, didn’t you?” She jabbed at the eggs. “These things are hard as a brick.” “So…was it?” “Was it what?” Corso leered and held his hands two feet apart. Then three. She laugh...
Day 6 of 6 His knuckles glowed white around the phone. Again, he paced over and peered down the driveway. Nothing had changed. The van still sat facing the street. Lights on. Engine running. The tired yellow bulb over the front door carved the same deep shadows into the yard. “Come on,” he mutter...
Gutierrez and Hart stood nearby as Harry Dobson studied the pair through the one-way viewing panel of Interrogation Room Number Four. He’d hoped that seeing Corso might loosen her tongue, create some discrepancies in the story she’d told his detectives last night. No such luck. When he looked ove...
While he was a vapid defender of the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, he was not personally inclined to go mucking about in it. He claimed the years of hardship and deprivation had exacted a terrible toll on his body, leaving him with a mysterious collection of bone-grinding ailments that...
mentally reduced the afternoon's festivities to simply The Three H's: hygiene, hair and haberdashery. A trilogy of tasks which, I felt quite certain, would be best accomplished in precisely that order. I got lucky. Seattle is a white-collar town with lots of folks having latitude as to their hour...
And the chips were definitely down. They sent me home on Friday morning with three bottles of pills and a list of "thou shall nots" that would have made a Jesuit blush. Near as I could tell, for the next week or so, my activities were limited to low-impact needlepoint and the contemplation of my ...
“How’d you do?” I asked as I sat down. “Where do you want me to start?” “The eviction,” I said, “seems like the most pressing.” She agreed. “I talked with the city attorney—a man named Mark Tressman. A dedicated letch of the first order.” “Really?” “Mark, as he insisted I call him, assured me tha...
She’d become the body electric. A flesh-and-blood software application. An extension cord for millennial medicine. Her heart reduced to a series of green electronic waves, her brain functions to a skittering red line on a bright white screen, her lungs to the rise and fall of a small black bellow...
We walked in the shade, along the red, weathered side of a defunct Albers Feed Store. "Excuse me for asking, but isn't Chief of Police an elected office around here?" Gardner gave a derisive snort and stopped in his tracks. "So they keep reminding me." "So, why all the animosity?" "Because I insi...
Six French doors at each end created a tiled breezeway running from street to garden. On the right, down a short flight of stairs, what I imagined used to be the solarium had been transformed into a recording studio. The control panel ran the length of the room. Tilted my way, its maze of gauges,...
The digital thermometer in the Blazer’s dash read forty-one degrees Fahrenheit. We’d rolled into town just after two A.M. and followed the GPS up into the hills overlooking town. I found an empty cul-de-sac awaiting tract homes and shut the car down for the night. Over in the passenger seat, the ...