Dark Mondays Read Online Free PDF Page A

vanished in the weeds at the edge of the parking lot. She thought of following it, but that was definitely a Samantha thing to do. She used up the last exposure, going around to the front of the garage, to frame a shot with burnt beams and dangling wires against the pitiless white sky.
* * *
    A week later Shadow picked up the developed pictures from the drugstore on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. Sitting in the Impala, she flipped through them. A car wreck, a dead dog with its intestines spread over two lanes of traffic, the bulldozers just closing in on the old Hollywood Motor Hotel… and here was the last shot, the burnt remains of the garage. She didn’t see the shot with the kitten, and went through the envelope again.
    Here was the black pile of cinders: How had she missed it?
    She frowned at the picture and held it up to the light. She had missed it because there was no sign of the kitten. There was, in approximately the same place in which it had been lying, a baby. No; a baby doll, must be. The kitten must have fled just before the shutter clicked. Yet, how could she have missed an image so wonderfully grim as a charred baby doll?
    But there it was, unmistakable, the figure of a baby baked red by its bed of coals. Disturbing on so many levels. Maybe one of the free papers would buy it. She shrugged, putting the envelope in the Impala’s glove box, and drove to work.
* * *
    The following afternoon, Shadow lost a little of the night.
    She had risen early—maybe noon—and gone down to a poster shop in Artisan’s Patio that did enlargements. She dropped off the best pictures and their negatives, including the one with the doll, and ordered a set of eight by ten glossies. Then she drove out to Studio City and bought groceries at the Ralphs market: hair dye, lowfat milk, Flintstones vitamins. As she pulled out of the parking lot onto Ventura Boulevard she noticed the Impala was making a whining noise.
    “Shit,” she muttered, and when the light changed she pulled into a 76 station on the other side of the intersection. The whine got louder.
    “Sounds like you need transmission fluid,” said a man at the self-serve island. She shrugged, but went inside and bought a bottle.
    She got on the freeway and for a while thought the problem was going to go away but the minute she exited at Odin the whine returned. It was worse; it became a groaning scream as she turned onto Highland, and now the Impala refused to change gears. Somehow she swung around the corner onto Camrose, but barely made it thirty feet uphill before the shrieking Impala slowed to a crawl and then lost any forward momentum.
    “Shit!” She managed to steer to the curb as she coasted backward, and put on the emergency brake. She got out and walked around the car, bewildered and furious. The Impala was bleeding red syrup. Was that the transmission fluid she’d just added?
    “Shit!” She kicked one of the Impala’s tires. The nearest gas station with a mechanic was all the way down on Highland and Franklin.
    The mechanic wasn’t interested in helping her. She had to convince him she found him really, really attractive and would do anything, no really
anything
if he’d tow her car off the street and have a look at it. He made her prove it. She never minded hand jobs so much, because at least she was in control, and it was better than him touching her with his black-rimmed fingernails.
    He roared with laughter when he saw the transmission fluid running down, and informed her, without even opening the hood, that she’d need a new transmission. He told Shadow what it would cost, and her heart sank; she hadn’t paid that much for the Impala in the first place. But she went with him when he towed it back to the gas station, and told him she’d be in to talk to him as soon as she’d gotten her groceries out of the back seat.
    Hastily she threw her eight-track tapes into the grocery bag, rummaged around under the seats and found a sweater and