Murder One Read Online Free PDF Page B

living with his biological father in California, work was all Sloane had.
    “Someplace warm,” Kannin had suggested. “Heat is good for the soul.”
    Sloane spent a week considering his options. He dismissed Hawaii, which he associated with honeymoons. Europe, with so much history, would only make him feel even less significant. Africa, vast and open, would exacerbate his loneliness. Undecided, he sat one evening surfing channels, not really watching, but stopped when he came upon a movie starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. Robbins, it seemed, was a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife and sent to prison. The topic wasn’t exactly what Sloane needed. About to change the channel, the movie went to commercial and he learned he was watching The Shawshank Redemption . A lifelong Stephen King fan, Sloane decided to watch.
    In the climax, Robbins tunneled his way through his cell wall, a decades-long endeavor, moving one pocketful of rock at a time. When he had finally punched through, he pulled himself to freedom through a sewer pipe, sliding out into a rain-swollen drainage ditch to exact justice on those who had wronged him. Then he fled to a quiet fishing village in Mexico called Zihuatanejo.
    And Sloane found his answer.
    Zihuatanejo was not the quiet 1940s fishing village Robbins described in the movie, but Sloane still found it therapeutic. He rented a house on a quiet street at the foot of the Sierra Madres and spent three months without any schedule, doing whatever he wanted: reading, lying in the sun, swimming in the Pacific Ocean, and exploring other villages on a bike. The days of the week blended. He often didn’t know if it was Monday or Friday and didn’t care. After several months he awoke to a recollection of another scene from the movie. Just before his escape, Robbins had turned to Morgan Freeman in the prison courtyard and proclaimed it time to either “get busy living or get busy dying.”
    Sloane returned to Seattle apprehensive but ready to at least try to get busy living.
    Over the next several months, his progress felt at times like digging one pocketful of dirt from an endless tunnel. Now he thought he had maybe broken through the wall. He was living outside himself again—thinking not of his grief and misery but of Barclay Reid.
    Sloane opened the note Reid left on her pillow.
I’m on the roof. Join me for breakfast. P.S. Put some clothes on. It’s cold!
    His shirt and pants hung in the closet and he found his slippers on the closet floor beside a silver box with a combination lock on top.
    At the top of the staircase, he encountered the heavy door. About to knock, he noticed a second sticky note on the alarm touch pad.
Password: LEENIE
    Sloane keyed the corresponding number for each letter, heard a small click, and pushed down on the handle. Reid reclined in a silk bathrobe on one of the lounge chairs, her legs bent beneath her, bandaged hand holding the handle of a ceramic mug, The Wall Street Journal in her lap.
    “Look what the cat dragged in,” she said. “Or out. I knew you plaintiff’s attorneys kept bankers’ hours.”
    Steam emanated from the spout of a ceramic teapot, and beside it, a bowl of mixed fruit, two smaller bowls, and spoons. “You’re ambitious this morning,” he said.
    Reid poured Sloane a cup. “I worked up an appetite.” She grinned. “Tea?”
    Sloane took the cup and sat on the end of her recliner, the note still stuck to his fingers. “Leenie?”
    “Carly’s nickname,” she said. “Another one of my secrets. Now you have to eat the note.”
    “And the gun?” he asked. “Sorry. I saw the box on the closet floor.”
    She shrugged. “Like I said, I’m a single woman on a crusade.”
    “How bad has it been?”
    “The night we went for a drink?”
    “Saturday?”
    “We were followed. We were also followed yesterday. If you look over the railing, you might see a silver Mercedes with blackened windows.”
    Sloane went to the railing but did