Chill of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

you put in a pizza?”
    â€œOh, sure.”
    Yeah.
    â€œWhatever we do,” she said, “we can’t bring back Will. It won’t un happen.”
    Why did she say that? Can she somehow know where I am? What I’m intending to do?
    Her voice, heavy with medication, came over the phone. “Like the prosecutor said, there’s no way to unring a—”
    â€œI know what he said!” Justice interrupted.
    â€œThe bastard was right.”
    â€œThe bastard was,” he said after a while.
    â€œI’ll put in the pizza,” she said, and hung up.
    Justice replaced the receiver, stood, and went to the dresser, where he’d placed the package he’d picked up at the desk. He peeled off the brown wrapping paper, opened the box inside, and from wadded newspaper used as packing material he withdrew a .45 caliber revolver. It had belonged to his father, who’d been an avid hunter, and who had bought the gun at a hardware store in Iowa, before permits were required and firearm sales recorded. Justice didn’t hunt. After his father’s funeral six years ago, he’d left the shotguns and rifles to be disposed of by the estate, and for some reason had kept the revolver.
    Now it seemed like fate, helping him to make up his mind to come here and kill Davison, so he’d mailed the gun, loaded, ahead to the hotel, telling the postal clerk it was a book, hoping it would make it through security. It had. Now it was in Justice’s right hand. Now he could point it at Davison and squeeze the trigger.
    Now it didn’t seem so much like fate that he should be here. The simple fact was, while he might not care what happened to him after shooting Davison, he still very much cared what happened to April.
    And he knew what would happen to her.
    He placed the gun back in the box and stuffed the newspaper around it before closing it and using what was left of the brown paper to rewrap it. Then he put his raincoat back on.
    Outside the hotel, he found a trash receptacle and dropped the box into it. Since rain was falling heavier, the sidewalks were less crowded than when he’d arrived, and he was sure no one had seen him. And even if they had, he was simply a man disposing of some trash, perhaps the small box that had contained a gift he’d received, or simply something he’d purchased down the street and that was now in his pocket.
    Feeling a relief that surprised him, he saw that his hand, that had so recently held the gun and was now wet from the rain, was trembling. He crossed the street to a diner and had a tuna melt and french fries for supper.
    The next day, he checked out of the hotel and returned home to St. Louis to watch his wife continue her ever deepening spiral into depression.

6
    The present, New York
    Bev Baker was forty-eight but looked thirty-eight. She stood nude before the steam-fogged full-length mirror in the bathroom and watched the exhaust fan clear the reflecting glass to reveal a woman still wet from her shower. Her breasts were lower than a girl’s but still full, and what Lenny Rodman, in that way of his, had just called bouncily bountiful. Her long legs were still curvaceous, her hips and thighs slim, her abdominal muscles taut from daily workouts. Her auburn hair was wet and tousled. Her smile was wicked.
    Aging nicely and not a bad package, she decided, and one Lenny certainly appreciated, which is what made her appreciate Lenny.
    Lenny was in the bedroom on the other side of the door. Bev figured he was still lying back in bed, smoking a cigarette, even though it was a no-smoking room. Lenny didn’t like obeying rules, which was part of what had led him to the midtown Manhattan hotel room for sex in the afternoon with Bev. The other part was Bev.
    It wasn’t the first time they’d enjoyed an afternoon assignation. Three months ago Lenny, thirtyish and handsome as a soap actor, had come into Light and Shade Lamp and Fixture