SK01 - Waist Deep Read Online Free PDF

ones that run away—not the ones who are kidnapped, but the ones who really run away—they usually turn up, right?”
    I drank the last of my coffee, masking my grimace at his naïveté. But his eyes kept boring into me and they held a n insane hope, so I lied to him. “Yeah ,” I said . “ A lot of times they do.”
    Other times, they don’t . That’s what I should’ve told him. Other times they turn to drugs and prostitution or if they’re lucky, they end up in some dead-end town working some dead-end job, toiling away in despair and anonymity for the rest of their lives.
    I should have told him the truth. So he’d stop hoping.

8
     
     
    He told me everything, but it wasn’t until he pulled out a picture of his little girl that I understood.
    It was a glamour shot. One of those pictures with soft, distilled light designed to make its subject look like a model. Only I realized immediately that this girl didn’t need soft lights or a camera to make her beautiful.
    The photo showed her from mid-thigh up. She wore a pair of jeans that hugged her hips but dipped low in front, exposing her flat stomach . The white blouse she wore had small ruffles along the button strip. One hand rested on her hip and the other hung casually at her side. Her breasts jutted out and she was artificially arching her back.
    All of that might have been comical or some girl play-acting, if it hadn’t been for her face. She wore a sultry look borrowed from the video cover of a thousand porn movies. Her lips, painted a glossy red, were parted as if she had just been surprised by a moment of sexual pleasure and liked it. Her eyes bore into the camera, daring you to stare at her and not feel a pull from your loins.
    “That’s my Kris,” Matt said. “Goddamn heartbreaker.”
    Heartbreaker? More like a siren.
    Jesus, didn’t he have a school picture he could show me? A girl in braids or wearing braces or maybe even a nice sweatshirt with a cartoon character on the front?
    “Why’d she run away?” I asked, but I knew the answer. A girl like that can’t live with limits. She would be the first girl in her class to develop breasts and get her period and those things would be commonplace to her while her peers were still sorting out the mystery of them. She would stop being nervous around boys well before high school because she would discover early on what kind of power she could exert over them.
    But I didn’t think Matt knew those things. Or maybe he chose to ignore them. Either way, he answered my question with a shrug and a look of heartfelt confusion.
    “I wish I knew,” he said. “I’ve beat myself up over it ever since it happened. But I can’t figure it out. I just don’t know.”
    “Any discipline problems?”
    He gave another shrug. “A little. Small stuff, really. Curfew issues. What she could and couldn’t wear. Things like that.”
    “Boyfriend?”
    Matt shook his head. “Nothing steady, as far as I know. She was a pretty girl and a lot of boys called, but I think she got bored with them pretty quickly.”
    I sat still and said nothing. Maybe he was right.
    Matt didn’t let the silence lie. “You think it was a boyfriend?”
    It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know. I’m just asking questions.”
    “But you think that might be a lead?”
    “It’s something to look at,” I said. “Girls her age who look like she does don’t usually date boys their own age. They tend to gravitate toward the older ones.”
    “Like freshmen dating the seniors?”
    “Like that. Only…” I hesitated.
    “Only what?”
    How could I tell him that his sixteen - year - old daughter could probably get into a club without being carded? That she could wear something tight and hand the doorman a book of matches and he wouldn’t look at it, just hand it back to her with a dopey grin while he stared at her chest .
    I cleared my throat and decided to test the waters. “She could probably pass for older than high