No Cure for Death Read Online Free PDF

his pair of flares), Brennan trailed off the highway, stepped across the fence and began angling down the underside of the drop-off at the place where it became less cliff and more hill.
    It didn’t take long for me to lose all sense of direction: I just followed the Stetson and flashlight up front of me and stumbledalong after. John was behind me, but wasn’t having any trouble; he was used to seeing at night, and, to a jungle fighter like him, the dry dead weeds, brush and trees we were moving through must’ve been nothing.
    Four minutes later we saw the car.
    It was in a small, relatively open space of ground, standing on its head, a blackly humorous monument balancing with its ass in the air, just off-center in the semi-clearing. It was a dark color Ford, fairly new, but that was all I could make out: it’d squashed itself down like a bug in the process of its nose dive.
    At that moment, for the first time since I’d got out of the car up on the Hill, I noticed the cold. There was no breeze, just silent dead cold, smoke-breath cold. I stood at the edge of the little clearing and let Brennan and John run over to the upended car, digging my hands down in my pockets, hunching my shoulders together, listening to my teeth chatter in my head. I stood among the trees that circled the open area, trees standing ’round like old women with tall thick bodies that for icy instants became their own long, cartoonish, wrinkled faces, with hair of skeletal branches that reached into the sky like dark seaweed, hanging upward.
    They were having trouble getting the door pried open, so I went to help. Above us the sound of an ambulance’s siren cut the air, distant and remote as a weak radio signal, but growing; the ledge up there where we’d been a few minutes ago cast an orange blush against the darkness. The door finally gave, and the smell of alcohol crawled out.
    An empty bottle of Haig & Haig rested on the floor on the rider’s side in the front, unbroken, the sole ironic survivor of the trip. The driver was not so lucky: a young blond woman crushed against and into the steel and glass of the smashed auto,a limp rag doll barely containing her stuffing, with the doll-face turned toward us, pretty much intact, eyes mercifully closed.
    “Christ,” I said, and covered my mouth, trying not to heave. I leaned against the wreckage and looked away. Looked out toward where the river was supposed to be, but through the trees and blackness I could see nothing, though the presence of the river was there, in the soft but distinct sounds of waves lapping, lapping.
    Brennan snorted, disgusted by my reaction. “Seen a hell of a lot worse,” he said.
    “So has he,” John said. “What is it, Mal?”
    “The woman. In the car.”
    “What? Who? Somebody you know...?”
    “Somebody I just met.”
    “Christ,” John said, understanding, and covered his mouth, and looked away.

PART TWO
    NOVEMBER 27, 1974 WEDNESDAY

SIX
    “So you told Brennan all of it,” John said.
    “That’s right.”
    “The bruiser at the bus station, Janet Taber’s story about the burning house, everything.”
    “Yup.”
    “And he just sat there. Didn’t say a thing.”
    “Oh, he said something. He said, ‘Why don’t you go write one of your silly stories and leave me alone?’”
    John was sitting across the table from me, wearing a blindingly orange turtleneck ski sweater. It was too early in the day to look at that sweater. John and I were upstairs in Brennan’s living quarters over the jail, a study in drab browns except for the yellow kitchen the two of us were sitting in. It was nine o’clock, give or take a few minutes; I’d waited till this morning to tell my story to Brennan, downstairs in his office—last night at the accident scene, things had been too harried for that.
    “Didn’t he say at all what he’s going to do about it?” John spoke through a bite of the eggs and potatoes I’d stood and watched him cook for himself minutes