A Perfect Crime Read Online Free PDF Page A

would have considered it, since the job they’d found Whitey—spearing trash on the I-95 median—ended at five, and he had to sign back in at six.
    Just before dawn, the DPW pickup began dropping off the crew one at a time, stringing them out a few miles apart. Whitey was last. Riding alone in the back, he saw the sun coming up between two high-rises, and started trembling. He’d been facing west for seventeen years, or maybe it was just the morning chill.
    The pickup pulled over on the north side of exit 42, Delray Beach, and Whitey climbed down. Then it drove away, and there he was on dewy green grass, a free and unsupervised man. He shrugged on his reflective vest, stuffed the tightly folded orange trash bags in his pocket, stabbed a Mars bar wrapper with his steel-tipped pole.
    Stab, stab, stab: Whitey was full of energy. By four, he had filled a dozen bags, all they’d given him, and worked his way almost down to exit 41. With nothing more to do, he stood leaning on his pole, sweat slowly drying, and watched the cars go by, most of the models unfamiliar. Was this a bad way to make a living? Too hot—he’d never liked the heat—but otherwise not bad at all. No watching your back, no taking shit: cake.
    Rush hour now, and traffic was stop-and-go. A woman in a convertible looked at him, not twenty feet away. She had a ponytail, damp at the end, and wore a bikini top—must be coming from the beach, thought Whitey; but he wasn’t really thinking, just staring at her tits, heavy, round, mesmerizing. The combination of visual overload and complete tactile deprivation made him start trembling again, just a little. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but the only word he could think of was
fuck
, and he knew that wouldn’t work. Traffic lurched ahead and she was gone, leaving him with the memory of those big tits. Her shoulders had been heavy, too; in retrospect, it was possible she was fat, even grossly so, but this realization barely surfaced in Whitey’s mind. Retrospection wasn’t one of his strengths.
    Instead his mind wandered, not very far, to those sounds women made when they got excited. He’d heard them in movies. No X-rated stuff allowed inside, of course, but even in normal movies women made those sounds. Melanie Griffith, and who was that other one he liked? Whitey could see her face clearly, mouth open, but he was still fishing for the name when he felt something stir against his ankle. He jumped back—he was very quick—thought
snake
, thrust the steel tip at the reptilian head, right through, pinning it wriggling to the ground. Hadn’t lost his quick, not one little bit.
    As it turned out, the creature was not a snake, not a reptile at all, but a bullfrog. Too late to do anything about that. Whitey watched it die, blood trickling into a crown pattern over its eyes, wriggling becoming sporadic, those pop eyes growing dim. Whitey felt bad, but not too bad: the frog’s own damn fault, after all, for making him panic. Whitey panicked sometimes, especially if he was surprised. That was simply the way he was—didn’t make him weak or anything. But the syndrome—word he remembered from the testimony, so long ago—combined with his quickness, could lead to trouble, as he knew well.
    Which was why he had to stay calm. He took a few deep breaths to settle down, placed his foot on the bullfrog’s back, withdrew the steel tip. The bullfrog hopped up on its hind legs.
    “Jesus fucking Christ,” Whitey said, and let him have it again. The frog lay still after that, facedown, legs spread flat on the ground. That was when the possibility of whores arose in Whitey’s mind, whores that very day.
    A DPW truck picked him up a few minutes later, left him outside the depot at five.
    “Hey, you.”
    Whitey, walking off, stopped and turned.
    “Where you think you’re goin’with that?”
    Whitey thought fast. “No place.”
    “No place is right. Equipment stays here.”
    Whitey came forward, tossed