Anyone Can Die Read Online Free PDF

crack smoker, emerged, exchanged a few words and headed toward their cars. Max watched Jake take a long piss against the side of the Dumpster, at the same time listening to the manager’s car start up and leave the parking lot, empty now except for Jake’s car.
    When Jake got in the driver’s seat, smelling of alcohol, Max put a toy gun to his ear, a decent hardened plastic replica of a snub-nosed police revolver he had had since he was a boy.
    “It’s me,” Max said, “Max. Your stepson.”
    Jake tried to turn to look at him, but Max pressed the gun hard into his ear and at the same time took hold of a hank of the half-drunk man’s long greasy hair and gently pulled his head back.
    “Don’t make another move,” Max said. “I don’t want to have to kill you.” Yet, he said to himself.
    “Max,” Jake said. “Max . . . they told me you testified for me at the parole board.”
    “I did. I wanted you to get out.”
    “Put the gun down, Max. Let’s talk.”
    “O.K.,” Max replied, putting the gun on the seat next to him and picking up from his lap a hunting knife that had been among the things left behind by his father when he went to Viet Nam. Still holding Jake’s stringy hair in his left hand, he put the point of
the thick six-inch blade against the nape of his mother’s killer’s neck.
    “Is this better?” Max asked, jabbing the knife a half inch into Jake’s neck, between two vertebra. Jake heaved and tried to pull away, but Max pulled him back hard by his hair. This movement drove the knife in, and—outside of himself now, seeming to be watching from somewhere above the action—Max drove it in to its hilt. He held on in that position, pushing the knife in and up, as Jake wildly clawed the air. Max pushed and pulled harder as the life drained out of Jake—Jake the abuser, Jake the woman killer—ending in one last convulsive spasm. Returning to himself, Max let go of the knife handle and the hair and nudged Jake’s body forward.
    Outside the car, Max calmly scanned the stillempty parking lot before taking off the woolen gloves he’d been wearing and tossing them in the Dumpster along with the toy gun. He held his hands in front of him for a second. They were rock steady. Before heading for his car, which was parked on the other side of the tracks behind an abandoned shack, Max turned for a last look at Jake. His cheek was resting on the steering wheel, his dead eyes staring into infinity. The polished wood knife handle with its brass bands at either end was protruding from his neck. He was bleeding from his mouth. Max recalled the gurgling sound as the knife reached Jake’s throat and he began to choke on his own blood. Under that sound, deep in his bones, something was murmuring to Max, something that he would later identify as the lust to kill.

    On his way out of town, a car pulled next to Max at a red light. Looking over, Max saw that the driver was Dr. Lee.
    “Max,” the psychiatrist said. “Is that you?”
    “Yes,” Max answered.
    “Its me, Dr. Lee.”
    “Dr. Lee,” Max said. “Hi.”
    “I tried to reach you,” the doctor said. “Where have you been?”
    “They put me in a foster home in Seattle.”
    “Where are you living now?”
    “In Kent. I’m starting U-Dub in the fall.”
    They could see each other clearly through the cars’ open windows, their voices carrying easily on the warm night air. The light on the side street was now yellow. Max stared at the kindly old doctor, who stared back at him.
    “Call me,” Dr. Lee said as the light changed to green.
    “I will,” Max replied, as he slowly drove off, watching Dr. Lee turn left in his rearview mirror. He had rented a cheap room at the A-Town Motel on a quiet stretch of the Valley Freeway out near the Indian reservation. It was only a few miles away, but he was in no hurry to get there, no hurry to find out what the rest of his life would be like.

    Max had never seen Francis Lee again after that night in Auburn