Out of the Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

do know you do your job,” he said, then seemed to draw back, realizing what he said and what it might mean for him.
    Salt forced herself to lean forward, close to the dirty hard plastic. “There’s that,” she said, “and also that I may be able to arrest John.”
    â€œHow you gonna prove what happened ten years ago?” Stone’s voice growled from his battered mouth.
    â€œI don’t know. That’s why I’m here, to ask you.”
    â€œAll I know is what John tell me. He said he gave the bluesman bad junk ’cause he tried to get out of a deal. I thought it was aboutsinging and playing in the club.” Stone brought up his clenched, manacled fists. “Is that enough?”
    â€œWho cut John’s dope for him?”
    â€œBack then it was Man.”
    â€œYou ever know John’s last name?”
    â€œDon’t nobody have no real last name ’round The Homes.”
    â€œWas anyone else involved in John’s dealings with Anderson?”
    Stone stretched back, his long body in a straight line, his bound arms above his head. “Maybe somebody the bluesman played with. I can’t remember all from back then.”
    Down the long hall behind Stone, at the far end, an inmate made wide swipes with a mop, accompanied by a faint but distinct tap each time the mop end hit the bottom of the wall. His rhythm was constant and steady. He faced the other direction but was backing closer and closer.
    A sudden clank from the door behind Salt startled her as it began its motorized draw back into the metal wall frame. “Time’s up,” said the gray-shirted officer waiting on the other side of the door. Another guard appeared behind Stone. Salt stood. “Can you give him my card?” She pulled a generic blue card, on which she’d written her mobile number, from her jacket pocket and held it out. The officer took it and unlocked a tray to the other side where his counterpart retrieved it.
    Stone had stayed seated, the fingers of both his hands again touching the letters and crude drawings on the sides of the space, like a blind man reading Braille. The guard behind him gave him a tap. “Time’s up.” Stone stuck out his long, thick tongue and licked the scratched steel wall.

THE HEART OF HOME
    S alt peered into the lighted kitchen through the twelve small windowpanes of the back door. Wonder, her Border collie mix, kept his sit ten feet from the door while she turned the keys in the locks and let herself in. On the blue table beside the dog was an old amber ice tea pitcher filled with wild poppies and dogwood. The dog sat waving his tail as if he were responsible for and proud of the flowers on the table beside him. He was her dog all right. Five years since she’d found him, emaciated and flea-bitten, five years and he was still a wonder, how he’d taken to the sheep, patrolling the house and grove, and only occasionally investigating the neighbor’s cows.
    â€œGood boy.” She stroked his fur, setting him off, scurrying, bumping, and turning for his greeting scratches. “Good boy,” she repeated, smoothing his silky flanks and scratching his ears.
    â€œPoppies for you and dogwood for Wonder. Love, Wills.” The note was written on a page torn from the small Homicide notebook he kept in his shirt pocket, its pages often damp and curling. Shelifted a poppy to her nose, inhaling the fragrance of a new spring, of green and white blossoms and leaves.
    Wills was practically working twenty-four hours a day on one of the highest-profile cases the city had ever seen, the who-done-it murders of Laura Solquist, a beautiful mother and wife of a prominent up-and-coming real estate lawyer, and her two young daughters, Juliet and Megan. He caught naps at the office and stumbled in at all hours to his house in an old in-town neighborhood, close to the job, where he would have just enough time to get some sleep and walk his