The Dead Do Not Improve Read Online Free PDF

possibility.
    17 . Performance Fleece called the police, but the dispatcher couldn’t figure out how the confrontation had been the Advanced Creative Writer’s fault. She suggested we try apologizing. I called Adam, but he didn’t pick up. While we waited for some idea to present itself, Performance Fleece and I passed around a bottle of Macallan and watched
Access Hollywood
. Performance Fleece told me that she never liked Jennifer Aniston. Through the drinks and the
Access Hollywood
, we put together the following plausible scenario: The Advanced Creative Writer, who clearly was involved in a gang, must have accidentally shot the Baby Molester during a turf war. Racked with remorse, the Advanced Creative Writer, who, despite his gang affiliation, was a sensitive soul (hence his enrollment in advanced creative writing), confessed the crime to his father, who promptly packed his son in the family van and drove to the scene of the crime to snatch up any evidence that might criminally implicate his son. After sweeping through the dirt for bullet casings, footprints, the father had forced his son to stare in at the destroyed window, the slackening police tape that still hung across the front of the building. At this point, the Advanced Creative Writer, sensitive soul, broke down in tears.
    At each commercial break, one of us would sneak up to the window to see if the van had moved. It did not move until after
Jeopardy
. By then,Performance Fleece and I had already fucked twice. Her ass, I remember, was a bit of a disappointment, a trick of restrictive panties and $250 jeans, but she fucked like a real athlete with enthusiasm, impressive force, and limited grace.
    I LEFT AT the end of a rerun of
America’s Funniest Home Videos
because Mel had called to say he was finally heading back. Performance Fleece suggested that I sleep at Adam’s house and copied down two phone numbers on the back of a receipt. The first was her number. The second was the number of the detective who had come by the day after the shooting. She said, “His last name is Kim, just like you, not that it means anything.”
    If I got in trouble, she said, call both numbers.

Nobody who worked in the downtown station could quite remember if Siddhartha “Sid” Finch had picked up the nickname Keanu because he had always been a surfing detective or if the nickname had been the impetus for Sid’s surfing habit. Those who argued for the latter pointed to Sid’s narrow face, his ethnically ambiguous eyes, which seemed half-Asian, but, in fact, were of Welsh origins, his flat, bored manner of speech. Even if Finch had never picked up a surfboard, they argued, even if Keanu Reeves’s filmography had gone from the short-lived television version of
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
straight to
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
, skipping over his only really goodrole as FBI agent Johnny Utah, Sid Finch would still make for a good Keanu.
    Finch, as a rule, maintained that he could barely remember which version was true, and when recruits or witnesses or reporters or women asked him about the origins of his nickname, he would say, “Keanu is my middle name.”
    But if the inquirer was someone he instinctively liked (Finch, like all cops, only really liked people out of instinct), he would tell him the truth. Back when Finch was in the academy, a red-faced, liverous tub of guts, whose oddly tapered haircut and saggy man-tits had earned him the nickname Sergeant Bulldyke, had found Finch’s slow talking so infuriating that he took to calling him Bill and Ted. The nickname led to great confusion in the classroom, especially to fellow recruits Bill Day and Ted Terpstra, who could never figure out why they were being berated in tandem. Eventually, Sergeant Bulldyke came up with Keanu as a replacement, and the name stuck.
    When
Point Break
was released, Sid Finch had been Keanu for six months. It came as a great relief to Finch, who now had a better, more graceful