Memory (Hard Case Crime) Read Online Free PDF

absence, its replacement by New York.
    But it was the only way. He thought about it, turning it over slowly in his mind, and nodded without pleasure, gazing at the door and admitting that it was the only way. He would have to stay here, find a job, and save his money. Once he had enough for bus fare back to New York...
    He got to his feet, suddenly with purpose and direction. He left the room and went downstairs, where a younger man, with a sharp guilty defiant face, was standing in the small room behind the Dutch door. Cole went over to him and said, “Where’s the Unemployment Insurance office?”
    “You planning to stay over?”
    “Yes.”
    “Pay in advance.”
    “When I come back,” said Cole with sudden irritation.
    “Checkout time, one o’clock.”
    Cole looked at his watch, and it was ten-thirty. “When I come back,” he said again. “Where’s the Unemployment Insurance office?”
    “On MacGregor Street.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “First street to your left. Turn left, it’s in the second block. New building.”
    “Thank you.”
    Cole started away, and the clerk said, “Remember. Checkout’s one o’clock.”
    Cole ignored him, feeling angry, and went out to the sidewalk, down the slate steps. He turned left, thinking that he could have paid now and not have to come back by one o’clock, but the clerk had irritated him, and in some obscure way it was a victory not to pay now.
    He discovered he had to pass the bus depot to get to the Unemployment Insurance office, and he decided to stop in there first and find out how much money he was going to need. As in the other town, the one he’d left, the bus depot was a small old storefront. There were posters propped in the window of this one for square dances and stock car races.
    He went inside, and once again there was a very old woman behind the counter. It was like being in the other town again, and for just a second he was confused, and wondered if his mind had more things wrong with it than the memory, and in reality he was still back in the other town. But the confusion passed, and he came on into the room and over to the desk. There was another old woman, sitting on the bench along the side wall with such stolidity and patience she looked as though she’d grown there, and aside from these two the depot was empty.
    Cole said to the old woman, “How much is a ticket to New York?”
    “One-way or round trip?”
    “One-way.”
    She looked it up, in a thick small book with flimsy pages, and told him, “Thirty-three forty-two.”
    “Thank you.”
    He went back outside, and turned toward the Unemployment Insurance office again. Thirty-three dollars and forty-two cents. It wasn’t much. He could earn that in no time.
    The Unemployment Insurance office was a squarish one-story building like a truncated block, made of yellow brick and windows. On the glass doors gold lettering read:
    DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
    DIVISION OF EMPLOYMENT
    BUREAU OF UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION
    Warren H. McEvoy, Commissioner
    Cole pushed open one of the doors and went in.
    He came first into a long room with a low ceiling from which were suspended fluorescent lights. The right-hand wall was a bank of windows, but the fluorescent lights were all on. There was a railing across the room, near the front, and two long wooden pews facing the railing, but no one was sitting there. Beyond the railing were rows of desks, each one flanked by a filing cabinet on one side and a wooden chair on the other. About half the desks were occupied, by soft-looking thirtyish men in white shirts and dark neckties, or by firm-looking fortyish women in plain unadorned dark dresses or suits. At a few of the desks there were supplicants, sitting in the second chair, their left elbows on the desk as they talked. These all wore hunting jackets and held caps in their hands.
    One of the women at a desk near the front looked up and noticed him, and made a motion with her arm for him to come forward. He pushed