JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

and particularly not when kids were involved. And I’d had few clients whose stories hadn’t raised at least an eyebrow.
    I turned north onto Irving Place. The street was quiet and yellow light came from the windows of the town houses and old brick apartment buildings. The block was lined with spindly trees, studded with white blossoms. A gust of wind sent some drifting, like fat snowflakes, as I passed. My thoughts turned to Jane Lu.
    We’d met last November, when Jane moved into the loft apartment above mine, and fate— in the form of my younger sister, Lauren— had made our meeting inevitable. Lauren owns the apartment I live in, and she works at the dot-com that Jane has been nursing back to health for the last year. Lauren also takes a touching, if sometimes invasive, interest in the state of my social life. But in this case I had no complaints. My attraction to Jane was immediate and powerful and like nothing I’d felt in a long time.
    Jane and I were lovers by New Year’s, and in the brief hours that we weren’t working— in the odds and ends of late nights and early mornings and rare weekends off— we fell into a sort of intimacy. We slept together and ate together, and we walked the city and talked at length about work and politics and the sad, sorry state of the world. It wasn’t a lot of time as the clock told it, but in the years since my wife had died it was more time than I’d spent with anyone besides myself. It was also a precarious thing.
    By tacit agreement, we kept our relationship balanced in the present tense— with few references to our pasts and none at all to any prospects beyond the most immediate. And when anything threatened that equilibrium, we would retreat to the familiar security of our jobs. I’d had some practice at this, and so had Jane.
    Jane didn’t often withdraw, though she had ample reason to be wary. In fact, she had ample reason not to touch me with a ten-foot pole. Not long after we’d met, Jane was swept up— and almost swept away— in the violent currents of one of my cases, the same one that had run me afoul of the Feds downtown. Her injuries had been slight, but only by a hairsbreadth, and she’d seen firsthand the ugliness that could erupt in my life, that was a part of it. Jane herself never mentioned the violence, and I never asked, but she knew how close she had come— closer than inches— and she knew how my wife had died. I came to the top of Irving Place, and looped twice around Gramercy Park. The sky was reddening, and purple shadows lay on the square.
    It would be four years in August— four years since Anne was murdered, the final victim of a man I’d suspected in a long string of killings. Four years since my own arrogance and stupidity had put her in harm’s way. I’d stopped being a cop— or much of anything else— right after the funeral, though it was another few months before I got sober enough to resign. After that, I was alone with a ravenous, angry grief that I’d been certain would swallow me whole.
    As it happened, it didn’t— at least, not entirely. It left some scraps behind, bits and pieces, some threads and a few shards, and from them I pasted together a life— a half-life, my sister Lauren would say— of work and running and solitude. It was sparse, but it was manageable. It was what I had and what I knew, and I wasn’t sure that I could handle much more.
    I turned north on Lexington Avenue and ran faster.
    It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got back to 16th Street. The arched windows that run across the front of the converted factory building that I live in were dark. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and flicked on some lights. My place isn’t half the size of Nina’s, but it’s big enough, with high ceilings, bleached wood floors, and a wall of tall windows. There’s an open kitchen in cherry and granite at one end, and a bedroom area and bathroom at the other, and in between a few pieces of comfortable