A Deadly Shade of Gold Read Online Free PDF

wound too tightly. When I glanced at her, she gave me a big nervous white-toothed grin in the reflection of the passing street lights. The gas station was dark. I parked on the asphalt beside the pumps and got out.
    "In one of those crummy little cabins?"
    "He isn't broke."
    "I don't care if he's broke. I'll come with you."
    "Nora, damn it, you stay right here. I'll send him out. Okay?"
    "All right, Trav," she said meekly.
    I walked around to the back. Cupid McGee. His car was beside his cabin. There was a pickup truck parked beside the end cabin on the left. The others looked empty. I rapped on his door.
    Night traffic growled by on Route 1.
    "Sam?" I called. I rapped again. "Hey Sam!"
    I tried the latch. The door swung open. I smelled musty linoleum, ancient plumbing. And a sharp metallic smell, like freshly sheared copper. I fumbled my hand along the inside wall beside the door.
    The switch turned an unshaded light on. The light bulb lay against the floor, on the maple base of a table lamp, the shade a few feet away. The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures. Sam Taggart was on his side, eyes half open in the grey-bronze of the emptied face, one chopped hand outflung, all of him shrunken and dwindled by the bulk loss of the lake of blood in which he lay. A flap of his face lay open, exposing pink teeth, and I thought, idiotically, the missing teeth are on the other side.
    They're sending a guy to close the account.
    I heard the brisk steps approaching across cinders, and it took me too long to realize who was coming. "Sam?" she called in a voice like springtime. "Darling?"
    I turned too late and tried to stop her. My arms were wooden, and she tore loose and took a step in and stared at what they'd left her of him. There are bodies you can run to. But not one like that. She made a strange little wheezing sound. She could have stood there forever. Lot's wife.

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    I had enough sense to find the switch and drop him into a merciful blackness. I took her and turned her slowly and brought her out. She was like a board.
    In the darkness, with faint lights of traffic touching her face, she said in a perfectly conversational tone, "Oh, no. I can't permit that. I can't stand that. He was coming back to me. I can't have anything like that. I can't endure that. There's only so much, you know. They can't ask more than that, can they?"
    And suddenly she began to hurl herself about, random thrusts and flappings like a person in vast convulsions. Maybe she was trying to tear herself free of her soul. She made a tiny continuous whining sound, and she was astonishingly strong. I wrested her toward brighter light and her eyes were mad, and there was blood in the corner of her mouth. She clawed at me. I caught her by the nape of the neck, got my thumb under the angle of her jaw, pressed hard against the carotid artery. She made a few aimless struggling motions and then sagged. I caught her around the waist and walked her to the car, holding most of her weight. I bundled her in on the driver's side, got in and shoved her over, and drove out of there.
    By the time I walked her into her cottage, she was crying with such a despairing, hollow, terrible intensity that each sob threatened to drive her to her knees. Shaja wore a slate blue robe, her ashy hair tousled, her broad face marked with concern.
    "I took her to Sam," I said. "When we got there he was dead. Somebody killed him. With a knife." She said an awed something in a foreign tongue. She put her arms around the grief-wracked figure of the smaller woman.
    "Do what you can," I said. "Sleeping pills, if you've got any."
    "We haff," she said.
    "I've got to use the phone."
    She led Nora back to the bedrooms. I sat on a grey and gold couch and phoned the county sheriff's department. A man has been murdered at the X-Cell Cottages, in number three, half a mile below the city line on the left. My name is McGee. I found the body a few minutes ago. I'm going back there right