Living Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

recognized, here’s a tip.” A shred of lettuce clung to Al’s bottom lip. “Don’t show up at the store again.”
    “I waited for Haley to leave.” Dean watched as she crossed the street and disappeared around the corner.
    “Billy saw you.”
    “So? He doesn’t know who I am. If you hadn’t been so weird, he wouldn’t have looked twice at me. Anyway, she’s gone. Let’s go.”
    He climbed out of the car and crossed the road. The cold air nipped at his cheeks and hands.
    “Damn,” Al muttered, breathing into his cupped hands and rubbing them together. “Feels like thirty below out here.”
    Dean nodded and followed Al down a tight walkway between Haley’s store and the used bookshop next door. The path opened into a narrow alley running behind both buildings. He tucked his hands under his armpits and shivered as Al fumbled the key into the lock. The sound of something plastic rattling inside the huge metal Dumpster set his teeth on edge. He didn’t like being there, exposed, despite the alley’s obvious emptiness.
    “Got it,” Al whispered, yanking open the heavy steel door.
    Dean relaxed a little as he followed Al inside. A piercing electronic beep filled the store while Al punched numbers into the alarm system on the wall, then, finally, silence.
    “You are going to get me so fired,” Al said.
    “If that happens, you can come work for me. I owe you one after this.” He sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
    Al flipped on the fluorescents over head. Their faint hum filled the air and an eerie white light fell over the dull gray walls and bits of unfinished furniture.
    Dean stood rigid, determined to ignore the goose bumps spreading over his skin. God, it was like stepping back through time. Almost nothing had changed. From the pungent odors of turpentine and wood stain, to the tools scattered over the workbenches.
    “So what’s next?” Al asked.
    His voice snapped Dean out of his reverie. “This will only take a minute.”
    He opened the gate on the tool cage, an oversized chain link box in the back corner of the room, and worked his way past cans and jugs of chemicals. From the other side of the steel fence, Al watched him move dusty boxes of forgotten accessories and bolts of fabric from rotted wood shelves then, at last, the shelves themselves.
    “I didn’t know there was something behind there,” Al said as Dean stooped to move into a small crawlspace.
    Until the day he was fired, Dean hadn’t known either. That day, with Darren Carling’s hard gaze forever branded in his mind, and Carling’s tight angry words still echoing in his ears, Dean had walked into the back room, shaking and sick, his face hot with shame. He snatched his jacket from the hook next to the bench and started to set his store key down, but the thin metal slipped from his sweat-slicked fingers and bounced into the tool cage, disappearing behind the shelf.
    Even now, the ping of metal on the concrete floor reverberated in his head.
    Now, the crawlspace was empty. Only a thick layer of dust on the floor and tattered cobwebs clinging to the stout ceiling remained. Gone was the green plastic garbage bag he’d found there twelve years ago with an old quilted blanket and a pair of navy coveralls inside, both dark and stiff with reddish-brown stains.
    When he had shown them to Nate, the older man tried to convince him it was just a furniture tint. But Dean had never known furniture stain to smell like that. Sweet and meaty. Still, it was better to believe that than the other. Especially when he thought of those reddish brown stains splattered over the bright white stitching of the name Carling on the patch .
    “So, what’s in there?” Al asked.
    Dean moved back into the tool cage and started fixing the shelves in place. “Nothing.” Had he really expected otherwise after more than a decade?
    Finding them would have made life easier. A smoking gun. Everything he’d gathered on his own may be compelling, but it