Shoot to Thrill Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a skinny Eminem, and I hate Eminem. I caught Helen listening to one of his piece-of-shit songs when she was eleven—you ever hear that guy’s lyrics?”
    “Not on purpose. They got him out of the hood, though.”
    “Bullshit. He brought the hood out with him, and now the rest of us have to worry about our kids listening to it. Man, when I was growing up all my mom had to do was worry about me running in front of a car. Now you gotta screen the radio, check out every album, every game, every TV show, and this morning I find out we got snuff films on the computer. Christ. Makes you want to uninvent electricity.”
    The light finally changed. Within minutes they were in sight of the Hennepin Avenue suspension bridge. Gino still took Angela and the kids down here three or four times a year to watch the fire-works from the bridge; Magozzi hadn’t liked bridges much since the night he’d gone into the Mississippi after two babies whose mother had just tossed them over the rail. The babies had drowned, but not before Magozzi had heard the noises they made. The mother took a dive in a halfhearted suicide attempt, but came through the swim golden, which was more of a miracle than anyone knew, considering that every man in the river that night wanted to push her under and hold her there instead of dragging her out. Sometimes Magozzi still dreamed about killing her, and woke up in a sweat, wondering if he was the only one that close to the edge.
    Gino rapped a knuckle on the dashboard. “You know what we ought to do? Drag this out until noon and do a little lunch at St. Anthony on Main. They got a place here that deep-fries cauliflower so even I can eat it.”
    “Jesus, Gino, we’re going to look at a body.”
    “It’s three hours to lunch. We’ll get over it by then.”
    The Mississippi moved like a lady through this part of downtown, taking in the city sights, lapping at the feet of the new Guthrie on one side and the aged bricks of the old flour mills on the other. Until this morning, it had always been Gino’s favorite part of Minneapolis.
    “Why do the floaters always wash up in Minneapolis? Can’t St. Paul get one for a change?”
    He and Magozzi were standing at the crest of a shallow, wooded embankment that led down to the river. The Parks Department took great care with the green areas down here, frequented primarily by good Minnesotans who took their families on picnics and probably ate grass; but there were a few spots where nature foiled their efforts at judicious pruning and brush clearing, and this was one of them. After dark, a different stratum of society sought out such places, well hidden from the eyes that admired the river views from their million-dollar condos.
    Both men moved slowly down the slope on a path a lot of feet had worn through the tangled trees and brush. Nobody hurried to a death scene. The officers stringing tape behind them said it was a woman, and, in their words, fresh. Yeah, it was totally sexist, but there was a different feeling when the body was female. Magozzi beat himself up more for those, trapped in the macho mind-set that men were supposed to protect women, and dead ones were a personal failure.
    “You know what the worst thing is?” Gino grumbled on the way down. “That there’s probably no homicide here; no villain; just another stupid, useless accidental drowning that didn’t have to happen.”
    “No homicide ever had to happen, either.”
    “Yeah, I get that, but at least with homicide you get somebody you can blame, somebody you can hate. Accidental death? You get to blame the victim, or you get to blame God. That’s it. You ask me, that isn’t much of a choice.”
    Magozzi squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to push back one of the headaches Gino always gave him at a crime scene. Twenty hours out of every twenty-four, the man thought of family and food, in that order. But show him a body and all of a sudden he started beating a philosophical drum that