Broken Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d
earned a black belt in Shotokan karate while I’d been a cop.
    I sat
back down. “This isn’t going the way I had it planned,” I noted.
    Dan
ignored my attempt at levity. “I am so fucking sick of you, Nevada,” he
continued. “I am sick of watching you kill yourself.” He went back to his side
of the desk. “You know what? Here.” He opened his desk drawer and took out a
.38 revolver. He turned the handle toward me and slammed it down on his desk.
“Do it,” he said, pointing at the gun. “Put that in your mouth and be done with
this shit.” He sat down in his chair and glared at me.
    I stared
back at him, stunned. I’d expected him to be angry with me, sure. But I’d never
seen him like this before.
    I’d have
been lying if I said the gun didn’t tempt me. Part of me wanted to pick it up
and hold it, to feel the cool steel of the barrel, and to find out just what
I’d do next.
    If I’d
been alone it might have been a different story, but I wasn’t going to shoot
myself in front of Dan. I might have deserved that, but he didn’t.
    “I’m
sorry,” I said, my hands clasped together on my lap.
    “You are sorry,” he said. Some of the anger had left his voice, but there was plenty left
to spare. And pain , I thought. I’d hurt him badly.
    We sat
there in silence for a moment. I had no idea what to say to make any of this
better. “Do you think maybe we could start this conversation over?” I asked.
“Hi, Dan!” I said with mock cheerfulness. “How have you been?”
    “No,” he
said, no longer looking at me. His eyes were wet. He wasn’t crying, but this
was as close as I’d ever seen him to it.
    I
sighed. “What do you want me to say?”
    He
looked back at me now. “I have been watching someone I love die,” he said.
    Was his
mother ill? I started to ask him but then I realized he’d been talking about
me.
    “You
have been dying for three years,” he said. His voice carried a quiet urgency.
“Maybe even longer than that. I won’t even…” he waved a hand at me. “How much
do you even weigh now?”
    “Never
ask a woman how much she weighs,” I said. But the truth was I had no idea.
Certainly a lot less than when I’d been healthy.
    “You
look like a damn skeleton.”
    On any
other day a comment like that would have led to angry words being exchanged,
but he’d managed to take the fight right out of me. “It’s not that bad.”
    “It’s
exactly that bad.”
    “Well,”
I said.
    “Well,”
he repeated.
    We sat
there for another minute but I didn’t have any excuses left to make about my
drinking or my health. He wasn’t going to hear that today, and he was right. I
knew I was full of shit.
    I
decided to try a different tack. “Why did you give Alan Davies my name?”
    “You’re
a detective, aren’t you? Why do you think, dumbass?”
    I
already knew the answer, didn’t I? “You had some romantic notion that working a
case could lead to my salvation,” I said. “Especially if there was a child
involved.” I sighed. “You thought this might be just what I need to turn my
life around before it’s too late.”
    He
nodded. “I would have phrased it differently,” he said. “But yeah. That’s about
it.”
    “Yeah.”
I sighed again. “It’s really not, Dan.”
    “We’ll
see. At least we’ll have you doing something useful before your organs start
failing. Have you seen a doctor recently?”
    I
stifled a laugh. “What do you think?”
    He
nodded. “Well, I can’t force you to go to a rehab, and I know nobody will ever
talk you into it. So there’s this. The work.”
    I tried
to think of something clever to say. Everything he was saying was true, of
course. I knew I was dying. I just didn’t care. I hadn’t cared in a long time.
    “Did you
guys really grow up together?” I asked.
    “We knew
each other. The kids in a neighborhood always know each other, you know? We
weren’t all that close but I thought he was a good guy, back then.”
    “And