Ghost Dance Read Online Free PDF

troopers turned completely white when he saw the disfigurement.
    By the time they reached the shallows, three more vehicles had pulled into the yard around the fishing cabin. One was a green but otherwise nondescript sedan. The second was a midnight-blue, four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban with ‘Lawton Police’ emblazoned on the door. A new gray Dodge pickup brought up the rear.
    The doors of the Suburban and the green sedan opened simultaneously. Two men got out of the Suburban. The driver wore a gray athletic sweatshirt with a blue ‘Lawton’ printed in an arc across his chest. He tugged on a blue baseball-style cap with gold embroidery that said ‘Chief’ and popped a grape lollipop into his mouth. His sidekick wore a conventional tan police uniform. He was portly, in his late twenties, with a mop-top haircut, a wispy mustache and a sleepy expression. A bleached-white-haired woman in her early fifties sporting a khaki trench coat climbed out of the green sedan. Then the door to the pickup opened and a sharply dressed, pink-faced man with a dramatic silver handlebar mustache exited. He was barking orders into a cell phone. ‘I don’t care what those bankers down in Boston say—it’s a legitimate deal and it’s going through. Lawton’s depending on it. You hear me?’
    ‘Gang’s all here,’ Nightingale mumbled and she ran her fingers awkwardly through her hair.
    She turned to Gallagher and gestured toward the cabin. ‘Wait over there out of the way. I’m going to want to talk with you.’
    Gallagher shambled to the steps, sat and slumped against one of the support beams that held up the sagging porch roof. The ambulance drivers had already lain a sheet over the body, which now rested on the lime-green grass between two of the birch trees. Talons of chilling ground fog groped through the trees toward the sheet and the body. Gallagher shivered. The shivers turned to chatters. He went into the cabin to get out of the waders and into something dry. He dragged himself upstairs and as he was getting into a pair of flannel-lined khakis and a fleece pullover, he felt suddenly seasick, so he opened the double-hung bedroom window to breathe and watch the crowd gathering in the cabin yard outside.
    The white-haired woman in the trench coat had led Nightingale away from the others. They stopped right below Gallagher’s window, unaware of his eavesdropping.
    ‘Sergeant,’ the white-haired woman said.
    ‘Lieutenant Bowman,’ Nightingale replied, smiling stiffly. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you here so soon.’
    ‘I was only twenty minutes out and thought you could use a hand,’ the lieutenant replied. Brigid Bowman wore swaths of makeup that almost concealed acne scars and accentuated a pair of distrusting, pale blue eyes. Her white hair had been razored short at the ears to draw attention to pearl stud earrings and a matching necklace.
    Nightingale squeezed her hands into fists. ‘Or maybe you hustled along because you didn’t want me here alone.’
    ‘Maybe a little of both, Andie,’ Bowman replied coolly.
    Before Nightingale could respond, the hulking man in the Lawton sweatshirt and the ‘Chief’ baseball cap approached, followed by his sleepy deputy and the nattily dressed chubby fellow with the silver walrus mustache who was snapping shut his cell phone.
    The chief’s name was Mike Kerris. He was roughly Gallagher’s age, but taller, more muscular, with stainless-steel eyes and a shock of thick brown hair. He had one of those pronounced and chiseled jaws that suggests steroid use. He popped the sucker from his mouth. ‘What do we got?’
    Nightingale turned flinty at the question. ‘Hank Potter. The body’s been mutilated.’
    The pudgy man with the silver mustache waved the cell phone overhead and cried, ‘Hank Potter! The man’s a dentist. He doesn’t have an enemy in the—What do you mean, mutilated?’
    ‘Cut up, Mayor, badly,’ Nightingale said. ‘Looks like he was hit ten, maybe fifteen