Death Qualified Read Online Free PDF Page A

least she hadn't forbidden that.
     
        He was still nagged by the something else that kept just out of recoverable range. Something else. But he knew he would not wait for the nebulous thought to take shape. No more waiting. Tomorrow he would go to her house and search for the possessions of Lucas Kendricks. She must the computer, and the memory tapes, but I got the disks.
     
        You hear me?"
     
        He was driving too fast up the curved mountain road, and that young voice was there: "Hey, just watch, okay?"
     
        "I can't. I can't." Everywhere the web stretched, bands and lines, taut, shimmering, stretching, smothering him.
     
        He jammed on the brakes, pressed his head against the steering wheel, his eyes closed.
     
        "Hey, it's okay. Don't look. You'll know when it's time to come get them. You'll know."
     
        He found gloves and pulled them on and then lifted 'the battery out of the Honda, put the Corvette battery in its place, attached cables. He siphoned gas from the Corvette and put it in the Honda, put some in the carburetor, found oil for a lawn mower or something. It would have to do, long enough to get to a garage. The next time he turned the key in the ignition, the engine coughed, made gasping noises, and turned over.
     
        He was behind the wheel, and also he remembered being bundled in a blanket, shoved into the car on the passenger side. She drove. So much blood, so much blood.
     
        He looked at the passenger headrest, dusty, gray, no trace of blood. His head had been covered by the blanket. He touched his forehead, felt a scar. She had stitched it.
     
        "Lucas, I need you!"
     
        "I'm coming, Emil. I'm coming."
     
        "You'll know when it's okay to get them. You'll know."
     
        Still in the dream, he got out of the Honda and examined the garage door, found a button that opened it, and then drove out into the driveway, heading out. If the car wouldn't start later, he could push it, get it rolling, and coast down the mountain road. Then he turned off the ignition and pocketed the keys. The license plates, he thought suddenly. He would be stopped. He went back inside the garage and removed the license plates from the Corvette and put them on the Honda, and now he was done.
     
        Something else, he thought. Something else. He looked around, as if looking for the something else. He saw the open garage door and closed it, hoping Miranda would not notice anything amiss before Dr. Brandywine returned.
     
        "Tom, listen to me. Did you touch the disks? Did you move them? Answer me, Tom."
     
        "No."
     
        He didn't search for a direction when he started to walk again, around the back of the house, into the woods on a path that had not become overgrown even if Dr. Brandywine no longer used it, not since Emil's death. Emil, he thought as if from a great distance. Dead. Emil was dead.
     
        His vision blurred and he wiped tears away. Emil Frobisher was dead.
     
        "Tom, listen carefully. He can't ever come out again.
     
        He did terrible, terrible things. It isn't your fault. You are innocent, but you have to keep him buried. That name is forbidden. Everything associated with that name is forbidden.
     
        You will never think of him...."
     
        He came to a stop; almost directly ahead was a small barn. Emil Frobisher's property had once housed a stable;
     
        the barn was still standing. He did not look beyond the barn at the house, did not consider who might be living there now, if they were home. He looked only at the barn.
     
        There was a loft with miscellaneous lumber and some old casement windows piled up in it. Behind all the stuff, back in a dark corner where the side wall and roof joined in a sharp angle, there was a plastic box of computer disks. He moistened his lips and moved toward the barn.
     
        He cut his hand on a broken windowpane