Deceived Read Online Free PDF

joint. For all the time you were on parole, your PO could search you or your house or your vehicle without probable cause. All they had to do was show up.
    Gordon Slezak loved to show up.
    Mac sat down heavily in the old, cracked leather chair that had come with the place and waited. This shouldn’t take long. His place wasn’t much. One bedroom, one bath. A bed and this chair that had once belonged to Pastor Jon. Only a little more than they gave you at Soledad. But it was his.
    Mac rubbed the sides of his head, keeping the flames down.
    Slezak took his time, opening drawers, looking under cushions, keeping up a line of patter.
    “Yep, you got that old reverend snookered,” Slezak said. “You know what snookered means? My granddaddy liked that word.”
    Mac said nothing.
    Slezak paused at the scuffed desk that served Mac as both dining room table and storage for odd papers. The PO opened the top drawer and rummaged.
    “Yeah, the old man worked vice in Kansas City, did you know that? I ever tell you that?” Slezak opened a second drawer, put his hands in it. “The confidence men he brought in, the stories he’d tell. Taught me one thing. You can’t trust anybody. You just can’t. His own chief of police he brought down.”
    This guy is talking to himself, Mac thought. Or he might as well have been. All Mac wanted was for him to finish his show — because that’s what this always was with Slezak, a show — and get out. Get out so he could throw down some painkillers.
    Slezak had stopped talking. He was holding something in his hand, looking at it. “So this must be what’s her name,” Slezak said. “Aurora?”
    Mac stiffened. It was the photo of his daughter taken five years ago, when she was two.
    “That her name?” Slezak said.
    You know her name. He’d play along. “Yes,” Mac said.
    “Pretty name,” Slezak said. “Real pretty. Pretty little girl, too. When’s the last time you saw her?”
    You know that, too. “A few years,” Mac said.
    “She and the mother, now what was the mother’s name again?”
    “It’s in your records,” Mac said.
    “Where’d they move to?”
    Mac said nothing.
    “She’ll be just fine, the little girl,” Slezak said. “Your wife remarries maybe, the girl gets a new dad. It’s all for the best. Things have a way of working themselves out.” He stopped talking then and lingered over the picture.
    Mac clenched his teeth — a move that didn’t help his head — and tried to think of something other than Gordon Slezak. What Mac got was a memory of Aurora being born, back before he went to the slam. It was a hazy memory, in part because he’d been high, in part because he kept trying to remake the memory so he wasn’t high. So he could pretend he wasn’t a jerk who lost everything before he even knew what he had.
    He told himself once again to keep cool. He prayed to keep cool. Because if he ever had any hopes of seeing his daughter again, of getting a court to let him, he couldn’t violate his parole and get sent back to jail.
    Which seemed to be Gordon Slezak’s one goal in life.
    Why?
    “Now the girl you impregnated,” Slezak said. “What was her name again?”
    Mac said nothing.
    “Never married her. Am I right about that?”
    Mac stared. Slezak knew he had married Athena. Yes, he had gotten her pregnant, but he also did what they used to do, what he thought was the honorable thing. He had married Athena and tried to make a go of it. Really tried.
    And blew it.
    “That’s the thing about responsibility,” Slezak said. “Most of you guys never learn that. You think you can go on through life day by day, no plans, no work. You know what that’s called? Recipe. Recipe for disaster. Another phrase my granddaddy liked.”
    Slezak finally put the photo back in the drawer.
    “Don’t want to see you follow that recipe, Danny Boy. But if you do, I’ll be right there to flush you down the toilet. You know that, right?”
    Mac looked into Slezak’s