Absolute Instinct Read Online Free PDF Page B

light of a man like John Edwards, the TV psychic, attributed an entire array of emotions and feelings of love that their cat or dog provided them, when in fact the animal liked your smell, and why'd it like your odor? Because when your smell was nearby, they knew they'd be fed. And this Childe woman with her birds and this crazy belief system she had built up around them, as if they spent time thinking about her, placing her in their little animal dreams and thoughts, as if they gave a shit about her when all they really cared about came out of a bag of feed in her hand. The woman had come to think of herself as a kind of Uncle Remus—like in a Disney film—birds flitting about her cheek, stealing kisses, or a St. Francis of Assisi in a skirt, animals whispering in her ear the secrets of the universe and peace on fucking Earth. And all that crap about the complexity of the bird's brain written by that so-called naturalist who bought his degree was exactly that— crap. “Birds're as smart as my left nipple,” Giles allowed. “Bird Man of Alcatraz only proved one thing—birds contract as many diseases as we do, but it took the brain of a man to combat those diseases.”
    Poor stupid self-deluded reclusive Louisa Childe. Her last thoughts were likely of her birds and Archer.
    Giles went back to the door he would exit from, and there he removed what might be taken as a big blue easel bag, struggling to bring it from deep within his backpack. Successful, he dug from the bag a large towel. Using the towel, he lifted the woman's spine from where he had left it on her buttocks, wrapping the serpentine rack of bones in the towel and carefully working it, section by section, into the oblong bag without its coming apart.
    The vertebral column filled the blue bag, creating a somewhat irregular line, but Giles had read somewhere that the eye saw only what the eye wanted to see. He worried little that anyone would stop him to ask what might be inside the bag. After all, it wasn't as if he were transporting a body. It would appear to anyone he might pass that he carried an easel inside. Nothing sinister about an easel.
    He then located his change of clothes. He quickly pulled on a set of clean underclothes, pants and a pullover sweatshirt to accompany his hat and gloves. Finally, he replaced his shoes and socks with what he'd brought. He then threw on his coat, filled his hands with bags, and with a final look around, surveying the charcoal drawings on the wall, and the one clutched in Louisa's hand, he bid adieu to the place and the woman who had supplied him with what he needed. He inched out the door, careful to make no noise.
    As he walked down the hallway, the bagged spine over his shoulder, he located the incinerator shaft and dropped the trash bag with glass, leftover sandwich, fingertips with his DNA embedded (all save the one the cat had squirreled away), and the bloody clothing he'd been wearing. It would all burn with the Tuesday morning trash as it did every Tuesday morning on the corner of Cologen and Geldman streets, a crossroads intersection with a stern green light in the middle of icy Millbrook, Minnesota.
    The cold air fired brisk chilling needles into the pours of his face.
    “ Thank you, Miss Childe for a lovely evening and a fine trade,” he said to himself as he stepped out onto the street. Surprised, he found that the plumber's van had remained parked out front of the building the entire night. “Looks like someone else got lucky at Number Forty-eight Geldman,” he muttered, hefting the bone sack and sauntering casually toward the bus stop.
    Giles loved riding buses. Loved people watching.

 
    TWO
     
    My days are in the yellow leaf, The flowers and fruits of life are gone, The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone.
    — LORD BYRON
     
    Milwaukee, Wisconsin November 12, 2004
    “ MOTHERS... you gotta back pain in dem joints? Den back outta dem joints.”
    “ I'd say the cure was worse than the