Eye of the Cricket Read Online Free PDF

infiltration at the DAR, dryrotin the moral fabric.
    "Still with Chip?"
    "You bet. They finally bit the bullet Got married last year."
    "And your folks?"
    She shrugged.
    "Maybe with time," Richard said.
    Tammy's glance said no way, there wasn't that much time. She dropped our order off at the kitchen.
    "So it wasn't David after all," Garces said, returning to the conversation Tammy had interrupted when she came to our table.
    "No. Though it could have been."
    "Assuming David is still alive," Walsh said.
    I nodded. Of course. "But in some very odd, very particular way, it felt as though it were David—when I firstgot the call." I tried to explain what was going on within me as I walked into that room.
     Warm fronts and cold fronts colliding, high-pressure areas, patches of dazzling sunlight, scatters of raindrops the size of
     cities.
    Tammy brought our drinks.
    "No way to explain the connection?" Richard said. "What he was doing with David's book?"
    "No way to know there was a connection. He'd had the book a long time. Someone had."
    "I take it there wasn't any ID on him."
    "I sent a lab tech out for prints," Walsh said. "Lots of mental hospitals routinelyfingerprint their admissions. He's been
     on the streets long—and it looks like he has—then chances are good he's in the system somewhere, a match is going to roll
     up."
    "I was at the hospital all night. About noon, he stabilized and got shipped upstairs to one of the ICUs." It had looked like
     some futuristic version of The African Queen: three people pushing along his raft of a gurney hung with clear plastic bags, monitors, oxygen tank, respirator the size of
     a lunchbox. "He's since regained consciousness. But he was anoxic during the arrest. No way to know how long, really. Or how
     much damage was done."
    "This may be just another dead end, Lew."
    "Maybe."
    David had disappeared years ago, during a summer in Europe. In effect he fell off the edge of the world. He'd written his
     mother almost every week, then the letters stopped. Two months passed. Her own letters to him, sent poste restante to a post office in Paris, were never returned. I tried to trace him: got Vicky and her husband in Paris to run things down
     at that end, talked to the chairman of his department and to David's sole friend at Columbia, had an old friend of my own,
     a detective in New York, follow up there. Dooley was able to place David on a nonstop flight, Paris to New York, then to a
     cab that dropped him midtown, maybe Grand Central or Port Authority. There the trail went cold. Dead ends.
    It was all dead ends. I had put the minicassette with its two twenty-second segments of blank tape where someone had called, stayed on
     the line, and said nothing—whenever I heaid them, trapdoors fell open beneath me—away in my desk.
    "They're pulling the tube tonight," I said as Tammy brought our food. "If he's able to remember, able to talk at all, I'llfindout
     what the connection is with David."
    "Assuming there is one."
    "Right."
    "Get you anything else?" Tammy asked. We told her no. She told us to enjoy.
    "You want me to come along, Lew?" Walsh said.
    "No need. I've spoken with the doctors. They say it's okay."
    "I'll be home. They give you any problem, you call me." He downed the last half of his Abita Amber in a single gulp and started
     in on his food. Forkful of salad, forkful of rigatoni.
    The smell of Richard's red beans came across the table in waves. A plateau of rice jutted above the beans at one side of the
     bowl, a section of sausage, striped black from the grill, at the other.
    "Something else." I told them about Shon Delany and asked if either had any suggestions.
    Walsh shook his head. "Lew, you ever gonna learn to say no?"
    "No."
    "I'll get it on the network tonight, if you'll write it all down for me."
    I already had, and handed it across. Richard was part of an underground information system, social and mental-health workers
     who'd more or less stumbled onto this as an