SK01 - Waist Deep Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’s having,” he told her, sounding like we were at a bar and he was ordering cocktails. I clenched my jaw at the thought of how inviting that scenario still was to me. I guess you don’t ever completely beat booze, do you?
    Matt didn’t seem to notice, but took a deep breath and then renewed his tired grin. “Thanks for seeing me.”
    I shrugged.
    “How’s your leg?” he asked.
    “Fine.”
    “It looked like you hurt it, is all.”
    “Nothing big.”
    He gave a short nod. We sat silently for a bit, until Cassie finished with his coffee and brought it to the table. He sipped it immediately and burned his lip.
    “Ouch,” he muttered. “It’s hot.”
    I watched him. I wanted to say Same ol’ Matt to myself, but the truth was, I didn’t know if it was or not. I struggled to remember if I’d been friendly to him in high school, or if we’d even talked .
    Matt finished licking his burned lip and met my eye. His own eyes were glassy and tired and a bit sad, though it seemed he was hiding the last part as much as he could.
    “I s’pose I should get straight to the point,” he said.
    “Okay.”
    He blew carefully on his coffee, tried it again, then set it down to cool.
    I waited. His stalling was starting to irritate me.
    Matt sighed. “There’s just no easy way to start,” he told me.
    “Then just start.”
    “Yeah,” he said.
    I thought I heard a wavering in his voice, but I couldn’t be sure.
    “It’s…it’s my daughter,” he said, then broke off, his eyes watering.
    I didn’t know where he was going so I didn’t know how to answer.
    “Hell,” he muttered. “Hell’s bells.”
    I decided to help him along . “Something happened to her?”
    “I hope not,” Matt said, looking away. “She’s run off. I can’t find her. I’ve looked everywhere, checked with all her friends, but she’s nowhere. Leastways, nowhere I can find her at.”
    “Did you call the police?”
    “Yeah,” he nodded. “I filed a runaway report. But I don’t think they really go looking for those kids, you know?”
    “They don’t.”
    He looked at me sharply, as if he hadn’t wanted to have his suspicions validated. “No?”
    “Nuh-uh. They deal with them if they come across them, but no one goes looking. It’s not even a crime anymore to be a runaway.”
    “Not a crime? Oh, great.” Matt wiped a finger across his nostrils, then on his napkin. “So she can run away and there’s nothing I can do?”
    “You didn’t have this discussion with the police officer?”
    “I only spoke with one on the phone.”
    I sipped my coffee, not wanting to tell him that the person he talked to on the phone probably wasn’t a police officer, but a city employee who took minor reports like his over the phone. Unless things had changed since I was on the job, anyway. And given what I just read about the city budget, I doubted things had improved.
    “I’ve been spending all my free time looking for her,” he said. “I’ve checked every place I could think of a hundred times. I can’t find her. I don’t know what else to do.”
    I sipped again. Matt watched me and I watched him back. Finally he said, “So when I saw you at the game last night, I thought that with you being a cop, maybe you could help me.”
    “I’m not a cop anymore.”
    “I know. You told me last night. But then I figured that you could help me because you were. ”
    “Yeah, I was. But not anymore.”
    Matt didn’t respond to the challenge. He picked his own coffee up and sipped it. In the relative quiet of the coffee shop, I heard his heavy exhale. “I just don’t know how it got to this point. I don’t understand where I went wrong.”
    “Do you think that she’s not a runaway? That she was abducted? ”
    His eyes snapped to mine. “Oh, no. God, I hope not. Is that what you think?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think anything. All I know is what you’re telling me and all you’ve said is that your daughter ran away.”
    “But the