Falling Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

you to go. Don’t you care about that? What will people think?”
    â€œPeople?”
    â€œSpider. She loves you. What will she think, if you leave me like this?”
    â€œI’m not responsible for what other people think.”
    â€œAnd me? I love you, Nathan.”
    Rubber band so tight around his wrist, veins popping on the back of his hand. I didn’t speak.
    â€œThen I’m headed out tomorrow,” he said. “I guess it’s best.”
    He stared at his hand, watched it swell and darken from the trapped blood.
    â€œI just wanted you to be all right with this, Laura.”
    â€œWell, I’m not…it’s not all right, Nathan.”
    Â 
    â€œYou’re not going with me tomorrow, are you,” he said later.
    It both was and wasn’t a question.
    â€œI’ll be there the next day,” I said.
    We’d both pretended to fall asleep for a while. My declaration lying between us like a bundling board. But you can’t fool anybody with that, not somebody who knows you well, like a
    partner
    lover
    friend
    Got up, went to my stash of cell phones and accessories, programmed one of them to auto-dial my private line.
    â€œYou take this,” I said. Smoothed the rumpled sheet beside him, laid down the cell. “And here’s a charger. You plug this into the wall, this end snaps into the cell here. Like this. This is a car charger. Your lighter socket.”
    I folded them into his hands. His entire body immovable. A statue.
    â€œI’ll be there the next day,” I said. “Is that so bad?”
    He sat unmoving, eyes on me, eyes cutting from my face to my hands, he dropped the cell and the charger, took my hands in his so that my thumb lay against his wrist and I felt his pulse as his eyes moved back up to mine.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” I said.
    Holding my hands, he lay back slowly, eyes never leaving mine.
    â€œYou know about my past,” I said. “More than anybody alive, you know about my past. You know I’ve been arrested, I’ve done jail time when I was younger and wilder. You know there were federal arrest warrants out on me for years, even I cleared them up. You know that Laura Winslow is not even my birth name. I made that name up, Nathan. You know that. You know all these things. But the bureaucrats in charge of renewing my PI license, they don’t know all that stuff. If they did, I’d probably never get the license renewed. So here I’ve got an offer, no questions asked, my PI license renewed if I just take a few hours to help the Tucson police department. I’ve got to take this opportunity, I’ve got to do this. Please, please, don’t ask me to just drop this part of my life.”
    His black eyes flickering around, studying me so intently it was much more than a stare, as though he’d sent out his spirit to talk to mine, but the line had been busy.
    â€œForget the Glock. Okay? I don’t need that, but I do need my PI license. I may never use it again, Nathan. But I’m the one to make that decision, not some bureaucracy.”
    â€œNot the guns,” he said. “Just the senselessness of it all. Life is falling apart down here, near the border. You talk about needs? I need another world. If you’re not part of that world, I don’t much care anymore.”
    â€œThat’s so simplistic, Nathan. One day can’t make a difference.”
    But he’d already digested my declaration, probably had chewed on it all day and knew what the answer would be, because when I raised my head to kiss him, he’d fallen sound asleep, the cell phone pieces still clutched in his hands.

3
    I never used to dream.
    Or, at least, I never remembered a dream.
    Color, black and white, whatever they might be, those dreams stayed way down there in my head, down in that part of my subconscious where nothing surfaces while I’m awake, and yet…and yet,
    later that night
    three