Michael Lister - Soldier 02 - The Big Beyond Read Online Free PDF

pale moonlight, dew-dampened surfaces shimmering silently, parking lots, businesses, alleyways barren, appearing suddenly and abruptly abandoned.
    Our offices were in a walkup on Harrison just down from the Tennessee House and Ritz Theater, where Hitchcock’s
Shadow of a Doubt
was playing at the moment, and it was as haunted for me as any other place on the planet. Haunted in the way the little house in the Cove where I had my arm blown off was.
    Headlights on dim, the top halves painted black, we crept around a while, searching for signs of cops and the perfect place to park, as Tommy Dorsey sang “In the Blue of the Evening.”
    Deciding breaking into the old building from the back was best, we eased down Grace, beams followed closely by car body piercing the low flung fog.
    Ray Parker, the guy whose agency it had been, was a big, squarish former Pinkerton who had been like a father to me—right up until I had killed him.
    Creeping up the back stairs while Ruth Ann waited in the car, I trailed the bobbing little beam down the hallway to July’s desk.
    July.
    Our Rosie-the-riveter receptionist had worn her hair in a short feather-cut, pin curls around her ears and on top of her head, and had been as cute as someone’s yappy little puppy. She had worked hard, worshipped Ray, and wanted nothing more than to be Nancy Drew.
    Her desk looked untouched, the strewn papers in the same place as the night I had searched through them to find her murderer.
    I pictured her there, two-finger typing, answering the phone with attitude, filling in logs, sorting through ration tickets. Though not too many years younger than me, she had seemed like such a kid,
had been
such a kid.
    The hours we had spent together in this dingy little place.
    She and Ray both dead.
    It was hard to believe what once had been an impressive agency was down to a wounded, one-armed, lovesick sap wanted by the police.
    I stood at the door to my office, taking it in, the small circle of light falling on stacks of books, a dusty old chess set, an uncluttered desk and uncomfortable chair, a few unhung paintings on the floor, a General Electric shelf-charging portable radio, a Motorola Spinet with records stacked around it, and around and among it all, the fingerprint powder and evidence markers and police-trampled appearance that even in the dark whispered it was a crime scene.
    When I looked at my chair, pushed back from my desk and at an odd angle, an old empty wooden chair was all I saw, but as I looked at anything else in the room, in my periphery I would see July’s lifeless, crumpled body slumped in it.
    Ghosts.
    July’s death haunted me but good, but it was Lauren’s presence here that most affected me. It was here, in this small room she had first walked into my life, the scent of Paris perfume wafting up from the wake behind her.
    She had disarmed me with her disconcerting honesty, unconventional beauty, and her complete lack of pretense and illusion.
    My desire for her had been instant and incomprehensible.
    Beneath her dark brown hair, combed smooth across the top and hanging in soft curls above her shoulders, worn lower on the right side of her face to conceal the burns, her otherwise flawless skin seemed nearly too perfect, the almond eyes beneath the razor-sharp eyebrows nearly too dark, too deep, too … Nearly, but not too.
    “Of the infidelity cases you investigate, how many of the people turn out to be cheating?” she had asked.
    “Nearly all.”
    “Really?”
    “Most people don’t come to us the first time they have suspicions.”
    “So what percentage?”
    I shrugged.
    Her silhouette-style black dress emphasized her trim waist and narrow hips and grew broad above her breasts. The war had made stockings mostly a thing of the past, but her dress showed plenty of pale leg beneath black silk stockings, the backs of which had seams running down them. The rest of the girls had to go bare-legged and draw seams down the back of their legs with