The Clinch Knot Read Online Free PDF

miles up. A careful Y-turn, shavings of road taken about a hundred times, might do it.
    But I keep on. The road worsens. The Cruise Master bucks and shudders a full mile upgrade until at last another opening signals the little spur to the pond. I have made it. I can swim now, reminisce, leave my underwear, maybe even get the Cruise Master turned around and down the mountain.
    Why am I not relieved?
    Maybe it’s the altitude, or my aging nerves, or all the forest fire smoke in the sky. Or maybe it’s too many Swisher Sweets and too much vodka. I can’t figure out the bad feeling I have. As I hike that spur along the shoulder of the mountain, I can’t suck a breath down past the top half of my chest. And then my breath stops completely when I see Jesse’s car.
    The girl’s golden Oldsmobile is parked on the piney bank above the pond, nosed into a little thicket of huckleberry brush. I see Sneed’s dark head inside the car. I see a liquor bottle spun out across the pine needles, just beyond the passenger door. Then I see Jesse about thirty feet away—Jesse face down. I am running—arms and legs spread like she’s getting a suntan, except with no towel under her, only a wide, dark stain.
    I skid to my knees. “Jesse!” Her face is split open at the nose, stuck in a black crust of blood that has soaked into the dry ground. Her wild blond hair parts just slightly behind one ear where a bullet has entered.
    I freeze. Everything—heart, breath, thought—stops.
    The car, Sneed, everything else, is at my back. But I cannot turn. My whole body wants to vomit, wants to jerk itself inside out, but I am as rigid as the hard ground, eyes fixed on Jesse’s lifeless body until they burn out and stray away for relief to the liquor bottle drawing ants just beyond her left foot. The bottle is empty.
Frangelico,
it says.
Premium hazelnut liqueur,
it says.
Enjoy!
it says.
    Then I lose it. I stand and stumble backwards, coughing, spilling bile across my front and calling, “Sneed … Sneed …”
    He is inside the car. He is naked to the waist, his jeans on but unzipped. He is slumped in a corner of the backseat, his beautiful brown skin turned ashen purple, his lips nearly white and his eyes half open.
    I grab door handles but they snap back. Locked. Front and back. “Damn it! Come on, Sneed!”
    I circle, tearing at the stubborn handles. Strips of silver duct tape hang from the inside door and window seams. A can of lighter fluid rests on the seat, and on the floor, between Sneed’s long, splayed legs, squats the little hibachi grill that Sneed uses to cook hot dogs when he and Jesse go on their “picnics.” The grill’s coals have burned out.
    “Sneed, God damn it!”
    I stagger to the pond edge, come back with a heavy rock. I slam the rock through the driver’s window and reach in. I rip the side door open. On a tide of stale air, Sneed slumps out against me, heavy and limp.
    “Dog,” he moans.
    “Sneed … what the …”
    He makes a second feeble moan as he drags down my leg, flops onto his face and lays still on the pine needles. My eyes jerk back inside the car: on the seat, beneath the sweat-damp spot where Sneed has slumped away, rest my Glock and Jesse’s keys.
    I turn my face to the sky and howl.

Severe Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
     
    Murder Shocks Paradise Valley
    Death Penalty Possible for Killer, Authorities Say LIVINGSTON, Montana (News Service) Residents of the Paradise Valley expressed shock and sadness over Wednesday’s brutal slaying of a local woman, while death penalty advocates called for swift justice for her alleged killer, an Arkansas man who survived a suicide attempt and remains under guard at Livingston Memorial Hospital.
    According to investigators, D’Ontario Sneed, 20, shot his victim in the back of the head with a stolen pistol. Sneed then locked himself in his vehicle and attempted to take his own life by asphyxiation, Park County Sheriff Roy Chubbuck said at a press conference