No Accident Read Online Free PDF

thought. There must be a thousand people in L.A. with that name. It had to be a coincidence.
    Didn’t it?
     

5
    Alex left the police station and drove home. He still lived in the first house he had bought and, as long as he could, he would keep on living there. It was small, and the kitchen appliances hadn’t been updated since the 1950s, but Alex didn’t cook much anyway and the house was two short blocks from the shore, close enough to tote a surfboard.
    Alex didn’t pull into his driveway, though. He drove past his house, saw that his street looked quiet, then turned the corner and parked on the other side of the block. Exiting the truck with a file folder pinched under his arm, Alex approached the front gate to the house immediately behind his own. There Alex saw the owner of that house coming toward him along the sidewalk, with a little dog on a leash. So Alex waited at the gate and opened it for the man when he arrived.
    “Evening, Scott,” Alex said.
    “After you,” the man said.
    Alex reached down to scratch the dog’s head, and the dog licked Alex’s hand. Alex passed through and held the gate open for Scott, who entered his home without looking back. For an uptight yuppie, Alex thought, Scott wasn’t so bad.
    Alex went around the side of Scott’s house to the wooden fence at the rear of the back yard. There he peeked through a crack between the planks, looking for any sign of movement on his property.
    Alex’s house was dark. His yard was dark.
    Alex hoisted himself onto a low, thick branch of his neighbor’s lemon tree and, taking care not to drop his file, climbed over the fence and dropped down onto his own patch of dirt.
    This was Alex’s new routine, morning and night—all to ensure that his coming, his going and his staying in his house were as invisible as possible. Maybe his precautions were extreme, but if the bill collectors didn’t know when Alex was home, they couldn’t bother him there.
    Alex entered his house through the back door. The curtains were drawn, and the inside was darker than the outside. Navigating by touch, Alex made his way to the front room. Alex’s furniture looked better in the dark, as its various blemishes, including scratches in the upholstery left by a former owner’s cat, weren’t visible. “This house has the potential to be great,” his fiancée used to say when trying to convince him to buy new furniture. No, this house is great .
    Alex stood for a moment by his front door, straining to identify a sound he heard from the street outside. A kid skateboarding, he decided. Or just the rumble of the ocean.
    Alex dropped into a chair, felt around a table top for his flashlight and opened the file folder he had brought from his truck. He pulled out the police report on the Cummings accident and read it by the focused, eye-watering glow of his flashlight. A man named Jorge Ramirez had died in the crash, the report said. Jorge had been a passenger in the van that was at the front of the collision. Alex assumed that meant Jorge was employed by the company that owned the van, an oil company called Liberty Industries.
    The Jorge Ramirez that Alex used to know was a low-level insurance scam artist. The last time Alex saw him was several years before in a courtroom where Alex gave testimony that led to his conviction. Alex tried to imagine whether that Jorge Ramirez would have ever settled for a straight job at Liberty Industries. Maybe —after all, Jorge wasn’t very successful as a criminal.
    Alex’s musings were interrupted by a sharp knock at his front door, five feet away from where he sat. The sound froze Alex in his chair. It wasn’t the hesitating, respectful knock of a neighbor or a salesman. It was the assertive knock of someone who expected a response. Only a very determined bill collector would knock at a darkened house. The visitor knocked again.
    “Dude, Alex, it’s Del,” a voice shouted. “Lemme in, bro.”
    Hearing his brother’s voice filled