Sleeping Policemen Read Online Free PDF Page A

money would give him the leverage to do just that.
    He paused in the foyer of his apartment house to count it. In the flicker of a dying fluorescent light, he pulled off the thick rubber band and spread the bills. They were all hundreds, most of them the new ones. The bigger Franklin looked more distinguished, somehow more stately. Nick’s heart sped and his mouth went dry. He’d never held so much money; hell, he’d never seen so much. He fingered through the fan, almost a hundred bills, nearly ten thousand dollars.
    In the same moment, he saw Glory receding in his mind’s rearview mirror. Cancer had eaten his mother when he was only six. After that he’d become a punching bag for his brothers, one of those inflatable kinds, the ones that keep coming back for more. Peace came when Jake and Sam left to work the rigs, and Nick had lost himself in books. Then his father came home from the Gulf, condemned for life to a wheelchair.
    Grades had saved Nick. Now, in an accident that felt like the rumble of a sleeping policeman, he allowed himself to see further down the road from Glory. The money meant grad school. He’d sent out half a dozen applications, all to state schools, affordable programs. With this he could make it into Chapel Hill or Vanderbilt. His thoughts clouded suddenly with an image of the dead guy’s face. He snapped the rubber band around the money and stuffed it back into his pocket; he turned and ran up the stairs to his apartment.
    Nick unlocked his door and stepped into his room, already stripping to his boxers. He opened the small freezer in his refrigerator, the light turning the apartment shadowy and mysterious, and placed the money underneath a bag of frozen green beans. He stuffed the bloodstained T-shirt into the trash. He emptied his jean pockets and put his wallet and keys beside the dish drain; he placed the bus station locker key beside them. At the kitchen sink he scrubbed furiously at his face and chest. Toweling dry, he turned to his bed on the far side of the room. The red glow of his alarm clock read 3:57.
    â€œHey.”
    Nick screamed and back peddled over the trash can, trying to escape the dead man. He sprawled across the floor, garbage spilling around him, his T-shirt falling against his face.
    The bedside lamp popped on. Sue sat up in his bed, the comforter swaddled around her legs, her eyes swollen with sleep. She slept topless. Nick’s eyes lingered on the seashell pink of her nipples. He wondered what she had on under the covers.
    â€œBeen waiting for you.”
    Nick looked away. He picked up the T-shirt and crammed it into the trashcan. He piled the rest of the garbage on top of it. When he looked back at Sue, she smiled coyly. Her hair, usually a deep copper, looked darker, almost black in the lamplight.
    She flung the comforter back with a flourish.
    â€œYou coming or not?”
    â€œSo you just left him there?”
    Sue lay half-atop him, her face cradled at his neck. Her breath warmed his throat; he could feel the weight of her breasts on his chest.
    Nick stared at the dark ceiling, doubt gnawing at him. “Forget it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
    And yet what else could he have done? She had known it somehow: had seen it in his face as he crossed the room, maybe, or sensed it in the tense planes of his muscles when she touched him. “What is it, Nicky?” she had said. “Tell me.”
    The dead man’s face loomed out of the dark, mocking him. “Nothing.”
    â€œSomething’s wrong, Nick. What happened? Tell me.” She smoothed the hair from his brow, her voice husky.
    Finney’s question—
    â€” you going to Sue’s —
    â€”leapt unbidden into his mind, and before he knew it the words were out, a boast and a confession, a measure of his trust for her. And something else: a shackle meant to bind them.
    â€œWe killed a man.”
    She did not move.
    He