Beneath the Cracks Read Online Free PDF Page A

blank canvass.  No lead
plumbing.  No faulty wiring.  We actually had a fuse box
if you can believe that.  And mortar.  It's far superior
in the 21st century to that of the 19th."
    "You were happy there."
    "For a long time.  That doesn't mean I
felt peaceful.  Getting away from murder and mayhem has been
the best thing I think I've ever done."
    "Hmm.  That doesn't speak well to our
ability to entice you to help out with certain cases as they crop
up."
    "Tony has had a couple," I said. 
Suddenly the rim of my wine glass became utterly fascinating to
me.  "All he had to do was pick up the phone and call."
    "Yo, Eriksson!"
    I spun around toward the sound of Briscoe's
voice.
    "Winslow thinks you're some kinda goddamned
concert pianist.  I got a Jackson riding on you givin' us a
little show."
    I glanced at Orion.  "A Jackson?"
    "Andrew.  Twenty bucks.  Tony bets
on anything."
    "Should I be concerned?"  I handed
Briscoe my wine glass and walked into the great room. 
"Apparently my friend has an overactive imagination."
    Maya grinned.  "We want to hear you
play, Helen."
    I cracked my knuckles. 
"Chopsticks?"
    "Aw, c'mon, Helen.  Don't be coy. 
Who puts a piano like this in their home if they don't play?"
    I cut her off with the very simplistic
opening music everyone knows on a keyboard.  She buried her
face into her hands until I started adding increasingly complex
runs up and down the keyboard before bursting into a full on
Liberace-esque rendition.  Jaws around the room dropped. 
I grinned and segued into a mambo beat for the grand finale.
    "Hah!  Pay up, suckers!"  Briscoe
burst out in glee when I finished. 
    I winked at him and held out a hand. 
"My percentage of course."
    "I knew I liked you the minute we met," he
grinned and peeled off twenty percent of his take.  "You
should get you one of them tip glasses, Eriksson.  We could
take this show on the road and make a killing."
    The mood of the party spiked toward
jocularity.  I started feeling a little less separate from the
guests.  Even Darnell was smiling and forking over a twenty to
Briscoe with good humor.
     
     
     
    His head throbbed in time with the wild
beating of the muscle nestled deep in the left side of his
chest.  What should've been painful was muted by a haze
Preacher couldn't quite identify.
    What the hell had happened?  How could
he feel so miserable on the surface, yet at the same time
fantastic.  Waves of euphoria crashed through him. 
Invincibility.  Confidence.  God, what a rush! 
Preacher wanted to savor it, to sink his fingers inside his skull
if for no other reason than to reassure himself that any of this
was real, the brain quivering beneath flesh and bone, so alive and
aware, was really his.
    He moved two fingers, a twitch really. 
Yeah.  His hand, his nerves awake in a way he'd never felt
before. 
    But the sudden movement, slight as it was,
awakened more nerves, others not so free to move.  Preacher's
eyes snapped open.  The flood of light in his eyes should've
hurt in its brilliance, but there was no pain.  Only keen
vision, and the sudden acuity that felt unnatural somehow, even to
his finely honed instincts.
    Vision traveled down his bared arm, one
sleeve having been torn away, and came to rest on a metal band that
bisected his left wrist.  I know what that is ,
recognition registered swiftly followed by the automatic response
to it.  He jerked his wrist.  The sharp edges of the
handcuff dug into the tender flesh.
    "No!" Preacher rasped.  "Let me
loose!"
    "I don't think so."  A single chair
scraped over the floor into his field of vision followed quickly by
a face he vaguely recognized.  The light bounced off
sun-pinked skin of a smooth scalp. 
    Preacher's eyes absorbed every detail, the
stubble on the squared jaw, black as the dirt he'd been digging in
his last lucid memory, the shiny gleam on the freshly shaven scalp,
the tiny nicks in the skin here and there where bony bumps weren't
so