Act of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside, went to the kitchen, turned on the light and went to the refrigerator. He opened the door and felt the cold, frosty breath of the machine.
    . . . Cold. That's what preserved bodies. Bodies like Bella's . . .
    He got a glass down and poured himself a glass of milk. It was tasteless. He couldn't get Bella off his mind. A woman he didn't even know. A cheap streetwalker with about as much class as bubblegum jewelry. But there was no way he could push it out of his brain.
    Not with the worries of others; not with worries and thoughts of his own. She was there as if she had been burned in with a branding iron.
    What a fucked up job. All hours of the day or night he was on call. Eat fast, sleep light and keep running. Never a break. Never a moment's peace. Run, run, run, and visit with the dead.
    Hanson took a green plastic bowl of tuna mix from the refrigerator and a loaf of bread from the shelf. He took a fork from the utensil drawer and spread tuna on bread, poured himself another glass of milk. He sat at the kitchen table and ate, not tasting the food or the milk. When he was finished he put the bowl in the sink and ran water into it. That was something he tried never to forget, because if he did, boy did Rachel give him hell.
    "Makes the washing easier," she'd say.
    Next Christmas he was going to get her a dishwasher. No more hot suds for his baby.
    He filled the glass with water and set it in the sink next to the bowl. He put the fork in the glass and put the milk and bread away. Wished too late that he had put a slice of cheese on his sandwich. He turned off the kitchen light, went into the livingroom and flipped on the light. The room was paneled in red mahogony—what room there was to see. Most of the walls were hidden by rows of bookshelves. He may have grown up poor, he may have lived in the ghetto, but his grand- daddy had taught him to read and to love books. As a child he had owned one prize possession: A library card. It was hell for him to get to the library, but when he made it he always checked out his limit. In the summers he practically lived there behind one of those long, wooden tables; a world tucked firmly between his fingers; a world made up of paper, ink and imagination.
    His brother Evan couldn't even read and write his name. He had become a boxer. He wasn't very successful at his trade. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't great either, just second- rate. I should have been the boxer, Hanson thought. I've got the hands for it, the chin and the heart. That was all his brother had had—heart. A heart like a stallion.
    In a back alley not far from where Bella had been found, a teenager full of smack put a switchblade knife in that stallion-like heart for three dollars and forty-seven cents. And that was all for Bubba The Kid Hanson. Just another, cold, dead nigger with a blade in his pump.
    Death. It was certainly on his mind tonight. It was as if suddenly the bowl of his head had filled up with all the death it could stand and was overrunning like a clogged toilet. Twenty years on the force, and tonight, he felt as if he were coming to the end of his rope.
    Maybe it was all the years of thinking of yourself as one of the good guys, arresting scum and seeing them on the street the next day due to some hotshot lawyer with all the scruples of a Gestapo agent. Yeah, maybe that was it, and maybe he should say the hell with it all.
    At least for the moment that was exactly what he was going to do. The hell with it.
    Hanson walked about the room, ran his fingers along the spines of the books. What did he want to read? He needed something to distract him; something to suck up his self- pity; something to rest him. Tired or not, he was too geared for sleep. He touched Chandler's The Big Sleep. Nope. Too real for tonight. His fingers caressed The Glory of the Hummingbird by De Vries. Yep that was it. Light, fast and well written. He chose the leather chair next to the window, parted the curtains a bit before sitting