Ill Will Read Online Free PDF Page B

already had my one wheeze.
    “You fucking bitch.” My caller was not a happy person.
    “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number; there are only celibate bitches here.” I started to hang up the phone.
    “I’m going to get you, Knight,” was the kind of phrase that caught my attention, so I kept the phone close enough to my ear that I could hear, and far enough away that his voice was reduced to tiny insignificance. It made the threat easier to take.
    “Who is this?” I asked, not exactly expecting a reply.
    “The guy whose house you burned down, bitch!”
    “I didn’t burn anyone’s house down.”
    “Lying bitch!” His vocabulary was limited; “bitch” seemed to be the only epithet he could come up with.
    “I don’t break the law, unlike lying contractors who cheat—”
    “You shut the fuck up. I’m going to do to you what you did to me, you get that?”
    “Good. As I’ve done nothing to you, you’ll do nothing to me,” I said in as obnoxiously cheery tone as I could muster.
    “You burned my house and my car.” My good cheer was not infectious.
    “No, I didn’t.” Why am I arguing with this idiot? It was highly unlikely an appeal to reason would work here.
    “Someone did. You led them there.” Ah, some wavering.
    “No, I didn’t. It’s illegal to burn houses or encourage people to do so.”
    “Then who the fuck burned my house down, bitch?”
    “I the fuck don’t know, bitch. But I do the fuck know that making threats is illegal, and when people break the law, I call the police. Got it, bitch?”
    “I’m not a bitch,” he said, and beat me hanging up by a millisecond.
    Was he outside lighting a match right now? I hurried to the window but couldn’t get a good view of the street. I had to run down half a flight of stairs to get to a window that gave me clear sight to the road below. A large black truck was turning the corner, but it was too far away to get a license plate or even the make of the vehicle.
    I kept going down the stairs, wondering if I’d encounter flames and gasoline at my door step. Shoving through the security door at the ground floor, I didn’t slow, my momentum carrying me halfway across the street.
    And into the path of a puzzled bicyclist. I jerked to a halt, barely missing her front tire, forcing her to swerve to avoid rolling over my toes.
    No flames, no gas, not even a spent match. Only a partly cloudy day and a bike rider who was muttering vague obscenities as she rounded the next corner.
    Had he been watching me? Or was that just some random truck?
    A threatening phone call, a big black truck right outside where I work. Was my fear causing me to see more than was here? Gigantic ugly trucks aren’t a rare sight. If I stood here for ten minutes, I might see five of them. It didn’t mean he was here, about to do something unpleasant. Why waste the gas when you can make a nasty call from the comfort of home?
    I tried to picture him in bunny slippers calling me bitch.
    The image didn’t help. It only made him seem more psychotic and therefore more dangerous.
    Okay, now I was panting. It’s not the stairs , I told myself, it’s the fear that I might have been trapped in a building engulfed in flames . However, the three flights of stairs back to my office convinced me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a look around down here.
    The street was quiet, the bicyclist gone. No abandoned gas cans by the side of the road. The only thing flammable was a cigarette butt halfway down the block. Nothing to indicate someone had been watching my office—no tire marks by the side of the road or tossed-out drinks with ice still in them. The cigarette butt was at least a couple of days old and had been rained on. What happened to the good old days when the perps would leave a telltale pile of smoked butts? Had the crooks gotten as healthy as the rest of us?
    There was nothing to do but trudge back up the stairs.
    But once in my office—and after catching my