Near Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

backward, away from the river.
    “Hey!”
    Everything reversed with stunning speed. He was back in the tunnel, zooming in the opposite direction, back to the motorway, back to the crash, back to the burning car and when he got there, he was aware of being dragged out the passenger side rear door by the shoulders, feelingviolent pain all over and being racked by wicked paroxysms of coughing.
    Men were shouting.
    He was looking into the face of a bearded stranger. “Can you hear me, boy?”
    The coughing stopped long enough for him to sputter, “Please let me go back.” He didn’t want to be here. He desperately wanted to be
there
.
    The stranger looked confused. “The only place you’re going is to hospital. The ambulance’ll be here soon enough. Lie still. Put your head on my jacket.”
    He coughed some more and rasped, “I want to go to back to my Dad.”
    The man looked at the gaggle of Samaritans standing over his father’s broken corpse, shaking their heads. Others were kneeling over his mother arguing about mouth-to-mouth technique. Nearby, at a safe enough distance, the car was fully engaged by fire. There were shouts as someone discovered his brother crawling through the woods.
    “I’m sorry, son,” the man said tremulously. “You’re safe now. You’ll be okay.”
    He defiantly tried to sit up. “I want to go back!”
    “You’re not going anywhere! Just lie still and wait for the ambulance to come.”
    At that, the boy lay back down on the ground, turned his head away and began to sob. “I want to go back.”

Five
    Cyrus held the crime scene photo in his hand and studied it before setting it down on a growing pile. Avakian kept them coming: dozens of shots of a fully clothed Caucasian girl in a roadside ditch, attractive as corpses go, discovered by a highway crew, her flesh nicely preserved by the chilled autumn air. In some angles, she looked like she could have been woken with a good prodding. If the family had wanted an open casket it was definitely doable.
    He sat at the little round conference table shoehorned into Avakian’s office, a meager symbol of the older man’s seniority. His own office was even more of a nutshell; his ex-wife’s walk-in closet was larger. He looked away from the photos for a moment and glanced out the window onto the moonscape of Government Center, an ugly expanse of municipal concrete made grayer by the steady rain. He sighed, unavoidably breathing in the other man’s cologne, that sickly spicy smell, day after day, month after month, year after year. Avakian was a creature of repetition: same striped ties, same bagged lunch every day, same deprecatingstories about the wife and kids. He was shiny-bald and powerful, the physical embodiment of a bullet with a flat pugnacious boxer’s nose and a black Vandyck neatly trimmed and smattered with gray.
    The two shared over a decade of history. The office didn’t have a formal partner system but as the Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence Divisions had expanded post–9/11, Major Thefts and Violent Crimes had shrunk. Cyrus had always been able to avoid a transfer to another squad. The FBI had a boatload of specialists among their ranks: accountants, lawyers, computer jocks, internationalists. He was more of a glorified cop and so was Avakian. With a dwindling supply of special agents to do battle against ordinary villains, Cyrus found himself working with Avakian most of the time. Not that he minded it. Avakian was many things to him, most of them agreeable.
    “The last set is from her autopsy.”
    In the best of times, Cyrus wasn’t wild about seeing snaps of a young woman cut open on a slab and these weren’t the best of times. He hardened his jaw and reluctantly stuck out his hand. The first photo showed her head on its side. She had a nice profile, a pleasing upturn to her nose, a good chin. A neat rectangle of bleached hair had been shaved from her right temple by the coroner’sassistant and a steel metric