Anatomy of a Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

jerk.”
    “That kind of talk,” said Jordan, “doesn’t cut any ice with me either.”
    “Maybe there’s more cut to it, if I tell you this looks like you maybe got the shakes?”
    “You can stop talking crap,” said Jordan. “You hear me, Sandy?”
    I’ve got him, thought Sandy. Like everybody he’s got to be perfect and don’t-mention-the-shakes-to-me. Nice. I’ve got him. And then Sandy pushed his point.
    “If it isn’t the shakes, then why get prickly about it?”
    Jordan shrugged this time. What had made him sensitive was the word and everything it implied. The shakes themselves were not bothering him, though Sandy could think so, if he wanted.
    “Or is it something else?” Sandy said, and while he did not know it, he had Jordan again.
    “No. Nothing else.”
    “What then? I want to hear this.”
    “You can stop riding me, Sandy.”
    “I’m not riding you, I’m asking a question. I want to know why missing your in-between break shakes you up enough so you can’t take on the next job.”
    “Nothing like that shakes me up.”
    “Then what does?” Sandy kept at it.
    “Nothing does.”
    “So why is it no?”
    “Don’t take that tone with me,” said Jordan.
    It meant different things to everyone in the room. Turner thought the next thing might be a shot. Jordan thought, this will change the subject. It better change the subject, because some things are nobody’s business. And Sandy thought nothing. He carefully dropped every thought because Jordan talking this way was not usual.
    “You going on this job or not?” he said quietly, the way Jordan had talked.
    Before he asks again, thought Jordan. Before he stirs up what I just found out myself. About the change having crept in.
    “I’m going,” Jordan said.
    This means no change, Jordan thought. This means there was nothing important, and he struck another match and this time lit the cigarette he had in his mouth.
    After that it was cut-and-dry business and Sandy stayed out of it. He felt there was nothing else that he needed to do.
    “And bring two more glasses,” somebody said in the hall, and a door slammed. Jordan took the cigarette out of his mouth, knocked the coal out of it on the window sill, put the dead butt back in his mouth. “So whatever you’ve got,” he said to Turner, “let’s have it.”
    “And the beer,” somebody said in the hall, and the door slammed.
    Turner made the bed squeak and smiled. “My,” he said. “A beer would be nice now, huh?” Then he pulled folded papers out of the inside of his jacket. “Well now,” he said, and put the sheets down on his knees.
    Jordan sniffed, smelling dust.
    “First of all,” said Turner, “the name. You got the name, right? Do you want a piece of paper and my ballpoint to write all this down?”
    “No.”
    “Yes. Now. Thomas Kemp. Same name he uses now. And the town is Penderburg. Address—” and he looked at his paper, “505 Third Avenue. He-he, they got avenues.”
    “What does he look like?”
    “What does he look like? Here you are. I brought this shot. This picture, I mean,” and he held it out.
    Jordan took the small photo and looked at the old man in it. The old man sat in a chair in the sun, garden hedge behind him, and smiled. He had all his hair, Jordan saw. Maybe kinky.
    “Is he gray?”
    “Gray? Just a minute…. Yes. Sort of streaky.”
    The sun was bright, and Jordan could not tell much about the man’s eyes because of the black shadows. Small eyes perhaps, but then Kemp was smiling. Lines in his face. From smiling? He looked fit, and built chunky.
    “When was this picture taken?”
    “When was this—let me think. Let me think what they said…. This year. It happens he’s got a daughter in L.A., and the way we got this picture, knowing he was going to visit her, we went….”
    “I don’t need to know that.”
    “Oh. That’s right.”
    Jordan gave the picture back and then leaned on the window sill again. “Tell me more about where