Midnight Haul Read Online Free PDF Page B

Can you image? This house must be seventy, eighty years old—it’s beautiful—and he fills it with modular this, and modular that. The son of a bitch. He sold me out. He sold us all out. Himself especially. That’s the worst fucking part.”
    “People change.”
    “Oh, fine. People change. They drift apart. Like in, one of them stays in Iowa and digs ditches, and the other one comes home to New Jersey and slashes her wrists.”
    It hit him like a physical blow. She saw it and said, “Sorry. Sorry. I keep taking it out on you, don’t I? Mary Beth didn’t get depressed and kill herself, Crane. Kemco killed her.”
    “Yes, well,” Crane said, rising. He handed her the half-empty glass of juice and said thanks.
    “You’re writing me off as a nut, aren’t you?” Boone said, quietly, calmly, following him to the door.
    “Good night, Boone,” he said, and let himself out.
    “You’ll be back,” she said from the doorway.
    He’d have felt better about it if there had been some hysteria in her voice, when she said that; some bitter craziness.
    But there wasn’t.
    “They killed her, Crane,” she called out to him. Quiet. Sane.
    He walked away from the house and crossed the quiet town and went to his motel room and tried to sleep.

Chapter Six
    Waking up came as a surprise to Crane: he didn’t remember falling asleep and, for a moment, didn’t know where he was. Then the yellow walls brought the motel back to him. He sat up in bed. He had a sense that he’d been dreaming, but he didn’t remember what about. He did know that he was glad the dream was over.
    He got up and showered and put on his jeans and a shirt and stuck his head out the front door. A brisk morning, but he wouldn’t need a jacket. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes after ten. Had he slept
that
long?
    He sat back down on the bed, feeling disoriented, off balance. He didn’t feel so hot, his stomach grinding at him. Then he realized, suddenly, that he hadn’t eaten yesterday.
    He walked from the motel to the business district, five blocks of double-story white clapboards, an occasional church and the constant trees for which Greenwood had undoubtedly been named, a few of which were turning color as fall took hold. The business district took up a couple of intersecting streets and consisted of old buildings with new faces: hardware, florist, druggist, accountant, insurance, jewelry, medical clinic, pizza place, laundromat, one of everything, and two each of bars and cafes. An American flag drooped outside the Wooden Nickel Saloon, an old brick building painted white with a Pabst sign in the window;next door was a unisex hairstyling salon. Across the street was the Candy Shop Restaurant, a two-story brick building with a white wooden front and a green-and-black striped awning that said: “Since 1910.” A neon sign, circa 1940, said candy in yellow, soda in red and lunch in yellow. He went in.
    On the right was an old-fashioned soda fountain, with a mirror wall behind it upon which magic marker menus were written; on the left, a “penny candy” showcase—the penny candy starting at a nickel—and an oak cabinet displaying everything from sunglasses to aspirin. There was a high, white sculpted ceiling and walls that were dark wood and mirrors, with booths on either side of the long, narrow room, with porcelain counter tops and reddish brown leather seats.
    Behind the soda fountain was a man about seventy with white hair and a white coat and wire-frame glasses who was probably called “Pop.” Crane felt like Andy Hardy.
    “Help you?” the man in white said, his voice high-pitched and forty or fifty years younger than him.
    “Can I still get breakfast?”
    “Sure. Take a booth and the girl will be with you.”
    None of the five seats at the counter was taken, but several of the booths were; there was a cop in one of them, drinking coffee and looking at a paper, a guy in his mid-twenties, thin, dark. Crane took a booth.
    The person