Finders Keepers Read Online Free PDF Page B

notebooks worth more when we sell them.” Which wouldn’t be until he’d read every word in them, but Curtis wouldn’t understand the need to do that, and didn’t need to know. Nor did Freddy. He tried to sound patient and reasonable. “We now have all the John Rothstein output there’s ever going to be. That makes the unpublished stuff even more valuable. You see that, don’t you?”
    Curtis scratched one pale cheek. “Well . . . I guess . . . yeah.”
    â€œAlso, he can never claim they’re forgeries when they turn up. Which he would have done, just out of spite. I’ve read a lot about him, Curtis, just about everything, and he was one spiteful motherfucker.”
    â€œWell . . .”
    Morrie restrained himself from saying That’s an extremely deep subject for a mind as shallow as yours. He held out the valise instead. “Take it. And keep your gloves on until we’re in the car.”
    â€œYou should have talked it over with us, Morrie. We’re your partners .”
    Curtis started out, then turned back. “I got a question.”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œDo you know if New Hampshire has the death penalty?”
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    They took secondary roads across the narrow chimney of New Hampshire and into Vermont. Freddy drove the Chevy Biscayne, which was old and unremarkable. Morris rode shotgun with a Rand McNally open on his lap, thumbing on the dome light from time to time to make sure they didn’t wander off their pre-planned route. He didn’t need to remind Freddy to keep to the speed limit. This wasn’t Freddy Dow’s first rodeo.
    Curtis lay in the backseat, and soon they heard the sound of his snores. Morris considered him lucky; he seemed to have puked out his horror. Morris thought it might be awhile before he himself got another good night’s sleep. He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?
    â€œSo you really think we’ll be able to sell those little books of his?” Freddy asked. He was back to that. “For real money, I mean?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd get away with it?”
    â€œYes, Freddy, I’m sure.”
    Freddy Dow was quiet for so long that Morris thought the issue was settled. Then he spoke to the subject again. Two words. Dry and toneless. “I’m doubtful.”
    Later on, once more incarcerated—not in Youth Detention this time, either—Morris would think, That’s when I decided to kill them.
    But sometimes at night, when he couldn’t sleep, his asshole slick and burning from one of a dozen soap-assisted shower-room buggeries, he would admit that wasn’t the truth. He’d known all along. They were dumb, and career criminals. Sooner or later (probably sooner) one of them would be caught for something else, and there would be the temptation to trade what they knew about this night for a lighter sentence or no sentence at all.
    I just knew they had to go, he would think on those cellblock nights when the full belly of America rested beneath its customary comforter of night. It was inevitable.
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    In upstate New York, with dawn not yet come but beginning to show the horizon’s dark outline behind them, they turned west on Route 92, a highway that roughly paralleled I-90 as far as Illinois, where it turned south and petered out in the industrial city of Rockford. The road was still mostly deserted at this hour, although they could hear (and sometimes see) heavy truck traffic on the interstate to their left.
    They passed a sign reading REST AREA 2 MI., and Morris thought of Macbeth . If it were to be done, then ’twere well it were done