Double Whammy Read Online Free PDF

of this as he drove into Harney County, starting a new case, working for a man he didn’t like at all.
    Â 
    Harney was Dickie Lockhart’s hometown, and the personal headquarters of his bass-fishing empire.
    Upon arrival the first thing Decker did was to find Ott Pickney, which was easy. Ott was not a man on the move.
    He wrote obituaries for the Harney Sentinel , which published two times a week, three during boar season. The leisurely pace of the small newspaper suited Ott Pickney perfectly because it left plenty of time for golf and gardening. Before moving to Central Florida, Pickney had worked for seventeen years at the Miami Sun , which is where Decker had met him. At first Decker had assumed from Ott’s sluggish behavior that here was a once-solid reporter languishing in the twilight of his career; it soon became clear that Ott Pickney’s career had begun in twilight and grown only dimmer. That he had lasted so long in Miami was the result of a dense newsroom bureaucracy that always seemed to find a place for him, no matter how useless he was. Ott was one of those newspaper characters who got passed from one department to another until, after so many years, he had become such a sad fixture that no editor wished to be remembered as the one who fired him. Consequently, Ott didn’t get fired. He retired from the Sun at full pension and moved to Harney to write obits and grow prizewinning orchids.
    R. J. Decker found Pickney in the Sentinel’s newsroom, such as it was. There were three typewriters, five desks, and four telephones. Ott was lounging at the coffee machine; nothing had changed.
    He grinned when Decker walked in. “R.J.! God Almighty, what brings you here? Your car break down or what?”
    Decker smiled and shook Ott’s hand. He noticed that Ott was wearing baggy brown trousers and a blue Banlon shirt. Probably the last Banlon shirt in America. How could you not like a guy who wasn’t ashamed to dress like this?
    â€œYou look great,” Decker said.
    â€œAnd I feel great, R.J., I really do. Hey, I know it’s not exactly the big city, but I had my fill of that, didn’t I?” Ott was talking a little too loudly. “We got out just in time, R.J., you and me. That paper would have killed both of us one way or another.”
    â€œIt tried.”
    â€œYeah, boy,” Ott said. “Sandy, get over here! I want you to meet somebody.” A wrenlike man with thick eyeglasses walked over and nodded cautiously at Decker. “R.J., this is Sandy Kilpatrick, my editor. Sandy, this is R. J. Decker. R.J. and I worked together down in the Magic City. I wrote the prose, he took the snapshots. We covered that big voodoo murder together, remember, R.J.?”
    Decker remembered. He remembered it wasn’t exactly a big voodoo murder. Some redneck mechanic in Hialeah had killed his wife by sticking her with pins; safety pins, hundreds of them. The mechanic had read something about voodoo in Argosy magazine and had totally confused the rituals. He loaded his wife up on Barbancourt rum and started pricking away until she bled to death. Then he pretended to come home from work and find her dead. He blamed the crime on a Haitian couple down the street, claiming they had put a hex on his house and Oldsmobile. The cops didn’t go for this and the redneck mechanic wound up on Death Row.
    As Ott was reinventing this story, Sandy Kilpatrick stared at R. J. Decker the way visitors from Miami got stared at in this part of Florida. Like they were trouble. Kilpatrick obviously had heard Ott’s voodoo-murder story about four hundred times and soon started to shrink away.
    â€œNice meeting you,” Decker said.
    Kilpatrick nodded again as he slipped out of the office.
    â€œGood kid,” Ott Pickney said avuncularly. “He’s learning.”
    Decker helped himself to a cup of coffee. His legs were stiff from the long drive.
    â€œWhat the hell brings you