Dust Read Online Free PDF

I shouldn’t want him to and I don’t have to be a psychic to predict the outcome, the aftermath. It’s only a matter of time before he’s angry, depressed, emasculated. He’ll get increasingly frustrated, jealous, and out of control. One day he’ll pay me back. He’ll hurt me. There’s a price for everything.
    The ripping sound as I tape another box, building my white walls of cardboard that smell like stale air and dust.
    “Living in Florida. Fishing, riding my Harley, no more snow. You know me and cold, crappy weather.” He blows out a stream of smoke, returning to his chair, leaning back, and the strong scent of him goes away. “I won’t miss a damn thing about this one-horse town.” He flicks an ash on the concrete floor, tucking the pack of cigarettes and lighter in the breast pocket of his sweat-stained tank top.
    “You’ll be unhappy if you give up policing,” I tell him the truth.
    But I’m not going to stop him.
    “Being a cop isn’t what you do, it’s who you are,” I add.
    I’m honest with him.
    “You need to arrest people. To kick in doors. To make good on whatever you threaten. To stare down scumbags in court and send them to jail. That’s your raison d’être, Marino. Your reason for existing.”
    “I know what raison d’être means. I don’t need you to translate.”
    “You need the power to punish people. That’s what you live for.”
    “
Merde de bull.
All the huge cases I’ve worked?” He shrugs in his chair as the noise of the rain changes, smacking, then splattering, now drumming, his powerful shape backlit by the eerie gray light of the volatile afternoon. “I can write my own ticket.”
    “And what would that be exactly?” I sit down on a box, tapping an ash.
    “You.”
    “One person can’t be your ticket and we’re never getting married.” I’m that honest but it’s not the whole truth.
    “I didn’t ask you. Did anybody hear me ask?” he announces as if there are other people inside the garage with us. “I’ve never even asked you on a date.”
    “It wouldn’t work.”
    “No shit. Who could live with you?”
    I drop the cigarette into an empty beer bottle and it hisses out.
    “The only thing I’m talking about is having a job with you.” He won’t look at me now. “Being your lead investigator, building a good team of them, creating a training program. The best anywhere in the world.”
    “You won’t respect yourself.” I’m right but he won’t see it.
    He smokes and drinks as rain pummels gray granite pavers beyond the wide square opening, and in the distance agitated trees, churning dark clouds, and farther off the railroad tracks, the canal, the river that runs through the city I’m leaving.
    “And then you won’t respect me, Marino. That’s the way it will happen.”
    “It’s already decided.” Another swallow of beer, the green bottle sweating, dripping condensation as he refuses to look at me. “I got it all figured out. Lucy and me both do.”
    “Remember what I just said. Every word,” I reply from the taped-up box I’m sitting on, this one labeled
Do Not Touch
.

4
     
    C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS
W EDNESDAY , D ECEMBER 19
4:48 A . M .
     
    An engine rumbles in front of the house, and I open my eyes expecting boxes labeled with a Sharpie and Marino sweating in the folding chair. What I see is simple cherry furniture that’s been in Benton’s New England family for more than a hundred years.
    I recognize champagne silk drapes drawn across windows, the striped sofa and coffee table in front of them and then the brown hardwood floor becomes brown carpet. I smell the sweet putrid odor of blood. Dark red streaks and drops on tables and chairs. Pictures colored with crayons and Magic Markers, and a Peg-Board hung with children’s knapsacks inside a brightly cluttered first-grade classroom where everyone is dead.
    The air is permeated with the volatile molecules of blood breaking down, red cells separating from serum.