Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A Read Online Free PDF Page B

and hugging the commode.
    Finally he stood and urinated. The jackhammer was not going to let up. He had to try to get back to bed, to sleep some of this off. He should call a doctor.
    The bathroom light was an explosion that nearly knocked him down again but he had to wash his face, brush his teeth. There were two of him in the mirror, he couldn't focus down to one.
    Cold water on his face. Washing off crust from the beating. Still two faces, both swollen, cut.
    Back on his bed, the room spun some more.
    The jangle of the telephone ringing next to his ear almost tossed him out of the bed. He jolted up, arms and ribs feeling ripped from their sockets, joints, whatever it was that attached them.
    He got it halfway through the second ring.
    'Kevin?'
    A girl. Melanie. No, it couldn't be. They'd broken up – face it, he'd dropped her – three weeks before. He flopped back on the bed, the phone pressed to his ear. 'Timezit?' he moaned.
    A pause while she processed the slur in his voice. He was sure that was it. Now, if tradition held, would come two minutes of rebuke.
    Okay, he was drunk. Did she want to fight about it? Again? Well, not tonight, honey, I've got a headache. He almost hung up, then heard her say, 'It's five-fifteen.' The time didn't surprise him. During the school year, when they'd still been going out, she'd always set her alarm for five so she could get up and study and get a jump on the day. It was another reason they'd broken up.
    'Melanie...'
    'God, Kevin, how could you
do
it?'
    'Do what?'
    She told him.
     

10
     
    The streetlights glared off the wet-looking street. The whole short block – it was a cul-de-sac that backed up to the Presidio – was empty, dark, forbidding. The windows facing the street caught a glint here and there, ghosts flitting across the fronts of the buildings.
    Abe Glitsky, noticing all this, told himself he didn't used to think this way. It was only since Flo had died.
Only
. Sure,
only. Only
nine months of her struggle against the ovarian cancer that killed her in its own quick time, in spite of the chemotherapy and other atrocities they had colluded to commit to ward off the inevitable. Nine months with Glitsky at her side every step of the way, both of them struggling against the urge to despair and – perhaps more difficult – the random appearances of their irrational yearning to hope. And then, after she was gone, trying to maintain the facade these last fifteen months – not to show the pain, not even (and it tortured him on the days he managed it) to feel it as fresh as it had been.
    Fifteen months.
Only
fifteen months. God.
    It was – unusually – still shirtsleeve weather in this the darkest hour before the dawn. Since his duplex didn't come with a garage, he'd wound up parking in the nearest spot – four blocks away – and by the time he hit his block he was almost shaking from fatigue. But still, in no hurry to get home. He never was anymore.
    There was a sliver of moon through the trees in the Presidio – the morning was dead still and his footfalls echoed. He realized he hadn't heard a siren since he'd started walking. That knowledge didn't fill him with any hope. He knew what it was – he knew what false hope was and he wasn't going to indulge anymore. Today would be hotter than yesterday, and today it would all break loose.
    Behind him as he turned up the sidewalk a bus rumbled by on Lake Street. Turning, he saw that it was empty except for the driver and a passenger sitting alone way in the back.
    His wife Flo had always wanted a real house. Their plan was to have Flo stay with the kids until the youngest, Orel, got into junior high, which would have been, would be, the next September. At that time Flo would have gone back to teaching and they would have saved for a couple of years, maybe moved out of the city, got their house.
    Would have, should have ...
    Putting it off a minute longer, he stood in front of the cement stairs leading up to the second floor.