Cut and Run Read Online Free PDF

been expecting a crime scene—local cops, a crime scene unit, maybe an effort to hold back the press. Instead it was the Navigator, a Town Car, and one other Navigator, also black. The house was dark, and it took him a minute to realize someone had taped black Visquine or garbage bags over the interior windows. He followed his two escorts inside.
    He was struck both by the hideous color of the living room’s yellow carpet and the abundance of printed matter—books, magazines, and more magazines. The owner was a reader. The place was a litter basket. The furniture wanted to be contemporary but stopped at modern and so looked like the before-shot of a custom-renovation ad. A ’50s ranch for a scientist who belonged in
Back to the Future
, judging by the few shots of Uncle Leo and various dignitaries and politicians that hung on the wall amid copies of Warhol lithographs and some fairly decent black-and-white portrait photography that included John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
    â€œHe knew everybody, once upon a time.” Scott Rotem, forty-one or -two going on fifty-five. He sported bulging eyes a comedian would kill for if they’d been capable of carrying any expression at all. A patch of missing hair cried out for Rogaine. Rotem was all right if you liked your bureaucrats with zero sense of humor, a mean streak burnished into a crease between the eyes, and the vague aura of foot odor following one about. The man not only woke on the wrong side of the bed, he also willingly entered it from that side, too. Not simply a stick-in-the-mud, but a phone pole, pile-driven at that. Larson liked him, though it confounded him exactly why this was. It might have been the beauty and polish of Rotem’s stubborn persona, that never-give-an-inch, bastard-at-a-glance attitude that made him both an asshole and yet someone Larson could rightfully respect. Rotem was consistent, if in a vaguely pernicious way, and that struck Larson as a noble attribute in this day and age.
    â€œYou owe me half a performance of
Much Ado about Nothing
. Your guys pulled me at intermission.”
    â€œCome in here.”
    Larson followed. Whenever possible he took the high ground against Rotem, took it early and fought to hold it, because the man had a way of getting under his skin, getting him to do things, to take assignments he didn’t want. Larson would say yes before he meant it, even if the one time in his life he should have, he hadn’t.
    The moment he entered the side hall, now passing framed snapshots of what had to be family, he smelled the blood. Once you’ve been around it a few times, your nose can pick it up at a distance, and Larson had been around it more than a few times, so the memories attached to that odor like ticks. Each step down the hall was a step down memory lane, only the snapshots on the walls of his recollection were all of victims.
    He found the silence of the house disturbing. He wished Rotem would say something. He caught himself humming and wishing he could carry a tune better than he could.
    The smell grew riper now. All of a sudden, it reeked like someone had opened a long-ignored trash can. It hit Larson like twisting the cap off a bottle of ammonia. Hit him in the eyes and deep up into his sinuses where he knew it would lodge and remain for hours to come. Days perhaps. It came from a Macy’s parade balloon, facedown in a vanity bathroom, fallen to the linoleum floor, the body so swollen and distorted that the wrists puffed out above the shirt cuffs, straining the buttons. Two to three weeks. Decomposition so advanced that the skin on the back of the neck had split as it swelled, leaving a set of narrow trenches running from the shirt collar up under the hair.
    â€œIt’s not Leopold Markowitz,” Rotem informed him.
    â€œNot Uncle Leo?” Larson asked. “Then this was . . . ?”
    â€œOne Emerson Brighton Doyle. Name’s not important. A graduate student.