Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn Read Online Free PDF

They were in uniforms that reminded him of firemen’s utility uniforms—dark clothing with neither shape nor creases, like old pajamas, a dyed kimono, two sizes too large and needing to be ironed. They took his handcuffs off.
                  “Wash your nose and comb your hair,” they told him.
    There was an old towel next to a lavatory and a small, seemingly used, plastic comb.
                  “I don’t have a toothbrush,” Lucas said.
                  “Do you want to run to your house to get one?” one of the guards asked. “If we let you go, do you promise to catch the bus back?” the jailer wanted to know, while the other laughed, silently but with insufferable breath.
                  Lucas saw the cell half open. The first police, plainclothes, treated him harshly, but he felt they had some respect. Respect when they slyly went up Acacia with their lights out, whispering to him, “We know you’re a man, run, jump out the window, try to disappear into the city” or when they took him into the station through an unmonitored door, defying him, “Go on, try to get past us, you have a chance to escape” and even respect, by their posture, not only in their relaxed appearance as they leaned against the inspector’s door—the one interrogating him, but in whom Lucas detected a state of alertness, of readiness. Those, in uniform, no. They were at home. He was one prisoner among many. As if he’d never had a life outside. Or they didn’t know about his previous life or were careful that it be buried forever. When they had to work mornings, they guarded prisoners. Lucas was their property.
                  Two sharp blows and they fell soundlessly. Gagged, one underneath his bed and the other naked on the mattress. Lucas put on the guard’s uniform, cap crammed on his head, the bill covering his eyes, and advanced down the hall after locking the cell. The guard at the end of the corridor asked him, “Did you see the hard time we gave you last night?”
                  He continued walking and said nothing, looking down, pretending to see what time it was on the watch he’d appropriated a few seconds earlier. The guard laughed and continued, “Was it the referee this time, too, oh Lion?”
                  The guard was surprised by his colleague’s shoes. “Carlos? Is that you?” It wasn’t Carlos and it was too late for it not to be him. It was Lucas Zuriaga, a direct blow and unconsciousness before the policeman touched the worn floor. This time, he tumbled noisily, ending the quiet with no gentle notice. Two others tried to pull their guns from their holsters. As if they were wax statues in slow motion, their faces disfigured from fear. They fell with two kicks that closed out the sequence. Shooting the pistols, he destroyed the locks on the barred window through which the sixth guard who had come running threw himself, with Lucas’s help.
                  There below, the police were moving about, beginning the blockade that awaited his defenestration, but it never occurred because, simultaneously, an alternative solution presented itself; he ran back with a sharp scream that froze the blood of the two men guarding that lair and, with the metal desk that preceded him in the air, he liberated the large barred window from the wall at the end of the corridor. He did defenestrate himself, but before that, he had defenestrated the window itself, ripping it from the concrete. He fell unscathed into the street out back, beginning his flight, far from the blockade.
                  And then? Where would he go? His parents, how were they? His plans for the future, how would they survive that noisy confession of a crime he had not committed? Perhaps this wasn’t a victory. It was still early.
                 
                  “Wake up, snot face,” one of the firemen disguised as