Keepsake Read Online Free PDF

TV dinner, much less an automobile. Rand is right. I'm out of control.
    But then, wasn't that what lazy Rand would think?
    She sprinted across the snowy street rutted with tire tracks, just two steps ahead of the sluk-sluk-sluk of a Jeep Cherokee bearing down on her. After a last look at the softly lit window in all of its holiday charm, she flipped up the hood of her coat and hurried through falling snow to her van.

Chapter 3
     
    "Glad you could squeeze me in, Tony."
    "Ah, don't worry about it," said the barber, shaking out the folds of a white linen smock with a snap, then circling it around Quinn's neck and jamming it inside his collar. "To tell the truth, business ain't been so brisk. I'm losing customers to that ... that franchise down the street. Aagh! Don't get me started. So. How you want it? Short?" he asked hopefully.
    "Maybe take an inch off the bottom."
    Tony gave Quinn a dry look in the mirror they faced. "And the other twelve?"
    "I'll keep a rubber band around it for now."
    The gray-haired barber sighed and, with a look of exquisite distaste, rolled down the band from Quinn's ponytail.
    "Why you want to look like this?" he couldn't help saying as he took up a comb and a small pair of shears. "You're a good-looking guy. Still in good shape. Why you wanna go around like some hippie?"
    "You think this is bad, you should've seen me with the full beard," Quinn said with a smile.
    "Aagh."
    Quinn didn't bother to explain that the beard and long hair were part of an effort to disguise himself during those first years in hiding. Eventually he had felt secure enough to lose the beard, but the ponytail stayed. He still liked to believe that with his hazel eyes, hawk nose, and ever-present tan, he could dye his sunstreaked hair black and pass for a Native American if he had to.
    In the thoughtful pause that hangs between threads of conversation, the barber ran a comb to the bottom of Quinn's hair and began, under Quinn's watchful eye, to cut it back the inch.
    "I hear you had a little trouble last night."
    Ah. Same old Keepsake. Thank God he hadn't mentioned the bloodied carnations to Vickers.
    "Yeah, some jerk bashed in the windshield," he said. "Do you get a lot of that nowadays?"
    "Never. Mailboxes, yes. Not windshields. Windshields are in the city."
    Quinn grunted, the way men do in barbershops, and then he took a flyer and said, "This guy was driving a pickup."
    There was an infinitesimal break in the rhythm between snips. "That so? What color?"
    "Couldn't say. I'm figuring a truck by the look of the wide tire tracks."
    A much more pronounced gap between snips now. Thinking ... what?
    "Aw, you can't go by tire tracks. That could be anything. SUV, souped-up Camaro, an old clunker Caddy, even. What, uh, did Vickers have to say?"
    So he knew that, too. "He didn't offer an opinion," Quinn said. "Just took down the details and warned me to keep my insurance up to date."
    "Always good advice."
    A dozen snips later, Tony was done. He took a soft bristled brush to the back of Quinn's neck, removed the smock, and after Quinn got out of the chair, spun a push-broom flattened with wear in a quick circuit around the chair's pedestal.
    Quinn fished out a ten and a five, then waved away the attempt to make change.
    "You're doing all right with that landscaping business, then," Tony said, pocketing the cash.
    Quinn had the presence of mind not to show surprise that the barber knew he had a business. Instead he merely said, "Actually, my father worked the landscaping side of it; I work mostly with stone. Y ou'd be surprised what Califor nians will pay for an old-looking New England wall."
    "I heard millions for the fancier ones," said Tony, fishing for confirmation.
    Quinn merely smiled and said, "I'll be selling off the landscaping part."
    "Oh?"
    "I'm tired of California ." Quinn wanted that word out. This was the perfect place to launch the rumor.
    "Never been there myself. Took the wife to Vegas once, though."
    "How'd you