Absolute Rage Read Online Free PDF

dying, finally, on the Orient Express. Marlene loved her family, of course, and the main attraction of this fantasy was that it would remove them all from the sphere of danger and catastrophe that she felt she dragged around with her. She had been lucky so far, but she understood that good luck builds up like an electrical charge and that at a certain point it sparks over into the bad kind. Although she now tried hard to be good, she believed that the pattern of her life almost demanded this result: that when confronted with certain kinds of situations—arrant injustice, for example, or certain forms of cruelty—she would make decisions and take actions leading to violence. She had personally killed three people and caused the death of several others, and while she hoped that this aspect of her life was over, she had no real confidence in a permanent escape.
    She shook herself like her dog to put these thoughts aside and turned her attention to her business, humdrum thinking about accounts and vet fees and three-inch galvanized pipe and diesel pumps. She wished, really, that she were a struggling businesswoman supporting her children by honest labor and frugal housekeeping, but this was not the case. The kennel and training operation was a tax dodge. Marlene had made a great deal of money in the way that such money was often made in the midnineties, by being in the right place at the right time. She had been a partner in a security firm that had grown rapidly and gone public, and which had profited vastly from a spectacular rescue of a kidnapped client on the eve of its initial public offering. The stock went up and up, on its merits and on the publicity, and later as a refuge for the smart money when the dotcoms tanked. Marlene had, however, discovered that the spectacular rescue was a scam, although the people killed in it had been real enough, and had demanded a buyout, to which her partners reluctantly acquiesced. She assuaged her Godzilla of a conscience by giving almost all the money to the Church, stashed in a religious foundation. A Jesuit named Michael Dugan ran it for her, as Billy Ireland ran the dog farm. So she could slip away without anyone really noticing she was gone. The twins had each other, Karp had his work, Lucy had her forty-eight languages. They would all sit down to dinner and wonder why there was no food. No, that was unfair to Lucy; she could cook as well as Marlene herself.
    Idiot thoughts. Demonic ravings. She was a little crazy, too, tried to keep it under control, mostly a success, except when she drank. She shook herself again, and this time the dog took this as a cue to shake, too. Unlike his mistress, he sent long streamers of white drool in every direction. She stared at her reflection and made gargoyle faces, crossing her eyes. She could really cross them now that she had been fitted with the latest high-tech socket for the left one, which was fake. Now they tracked together, instead of, as before, the fugazy staring out motionless like the orb of a dead mackerel. Most people no longer thought she looked odd, which said something about the perceptions of most people.
    She checked her watch, arose, and looked down the track, into the reddening west. Tiny twin balls of light hovered above the rails out at the limits of vision. It was rather nice having a little summer vacation from being married, she thought. Karp came only on the weekends, so it was almost like college dating again, except you knew the guy wouldn’t be a complete asshole, assuming one’s husband was not one and you still loved him. Hers was not, by and large, and she did, by and large, although she was not adverse to having an attractive stranger around on the weekdays. Not that she would ever do anything, knowing herself to be the kind of woman who, once unfaithful, would bring her whole life crashing down and end up penniless and drunk in a trailer park in Tempe, Arizona.
    She sat down on the bench again. The