Jeremiah Quick Read Online Free PDF Page A

an
uncomfortable cold patch in her underwear, wet and slippery against
her flesh. It felt somehow like the response to thank you.
    She nodded and let him steer her toward the
mudroom, toward the back door that was never locked. He jingled his
car keys in his fingers while she shrugged into her well-worn
leather jacket.
    Quick turned back once, seeming to scan the
kitchen, eyes probing the dark of the dining room, and beyond, to
the heart of the house, the room where big, comfortable chairs
lived, the kind designed to cradle adult limbs. A couch long enough
for a grown man to stretch out on, or sit next to small boys
playing video games.
    They would be all right.
    Still, Pretty bade them a silent goodbye as
she tucked her phone into her jacket pocket. She would return to
them, find her way through the labyrinth, but she would not be the
same as she was now.
    Every Sarah needs her quest, right? She
followed Quick to his car and settled into the passenger seat,
willing to go wherever he wanted to take her. Would he be the
goblin king, or the cherished friend she would love madly, warts
and all?
     
    Jeremiah drove across the bridge that
spanned the St. Louis Bay between the city where Pretty lived now
and the city they'd grown up in. It was full dark, and as the car
passed beneath the span, all the bridge lights went out at
once.
    For one aching moment Pretty wished she knew
how to pray.
    Was it a sign, an omen? Or was it Quick's
magick, a talent for turning Light into Dark?
    Just a few miles past the bridge he pulled
off the freeway and into the rest area where a State Representative
got busted for having sexual contact with a minor. Craig's List sex
shopping, the news reported, and not the Rep's fault the boy was
only seventeen. He'd misrepresented himself. Probably.
    Dude, Pretty had thought, your
wife's going to be pissed . The story didn't tell her anything
she really wanted to know – they never do, do they? How much
trouble is the man in at home? Is the silence stretched and cold?
Do words rise in his throat, then shrivel and die before they pass
his lips?
    Are the wife's eyes gleaming with the
suppressed glee of I told you so ? Or bitter with the pain of
betrayal?
    He wasn't even a Republican. She'd had to
look it up, sure the House Rep (D) notation had been a mistake.
    She giggled, softly.
    Jeremiah Quick asked what was funny. She
told him.
    He cocked his head slightly to the side, as
if listening for something, then said, "The self-righteous love to
scream their outrage." His posture tensed, and his words came with
an intensity that filled the interior of the car with pressure.
"It's the screaming part they like best, because they don't want
anything to change. They are… glad to see their peers fall. It
validates their superiority. It gives them esteem somehow." He
shook his head, lowered his voice. "Our people, on the other hand,
are curious about the details, the human experience, and rather
than revel in swaggering arrogance, we're capable of empathy."
    She knew what he meant. Only her own people
would try to imagine how it would feel to be that man, that real
person, in that circumstance. What came before, how do you live
with yourself after?
    She imagined it, wholly.
    She imagined it for Monica Lewinski and John
Wayne Bobbitt, Casey Anthony, the kids who got lost in their dark
and brought guns to school. The pain beneath the act. Humiliation
that knew no bounds. Some deserved it, perhaps, some didn't. Like…
the old dog Bill. You'd think he was the first politician to tell a
lie. Blow the President in the Oval Office? She'd have done it,
just for the sheer audacity of doing it. No doubt.
    Jeremiah was getting out of the car, and
Pretty followed. She had no memories of him in this particular
place, and a thrill danced through her that they were already
making one. Right. Now.
    He walked past the ever-so-charming concrete
picnic area, across a small expanse of lawn, and leaned on a
barrier erected at the crest of