THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

six-inch knife into your chest, and in the evening his dinner date wants to talk about how difficult it is to get exactly the right shade of green.
    Tay gave up thinking about it and went back to contemplating the two jars of peanut butter he was holding.
    The P28 High Protein Peanut Spread looked as if it were something he ought to try. Protein was good for him, wasn’t it? So surely high protein would be even better for him. He had regular conversations with himself about the benefits of exercise. Maybe that extra protein would be just what he needed to spur himself on to do something other than have those conversations.
    He did ride a bicycle for a few months. Well, to be entirely truthful he had ridden it two or three times and those two or three times were spread out over several months. Even that had been a while ago now and the only exercise he got these days was carrying his shopping home from the Cold Storage. He should be exercising a lot more, he told himself, but every time he thought about exercise he got a mysterious urge for a cigarette. And after he sat for a while and smoked his cigarette, the idea of engaging in vigorous exercise inevitably struck him as entirely inappropriate.
    Tay shifted his gaze to the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter in his other hand. He had bought Skippy for years and never noticed it to be lacking in protein. A peanut was a peanut, wasn’t it? All that stuff about high protein on the P28 label was probably just bullshit. These days every food product was high-something or low-something. He didn’t understand half of it and was sure nobody else did either.
    Tay glanced at the prices on the two jars, saw that Skippy was half the price of the P28, and that settled it. He shoved the P28 High Protein Peanut Spread back on the shelf, lurched to his feet, and heard his knees crack. He had turned fifty not long ago and sometimes he felt every year of it. Getting old was shit.
    He selected a loaf of bread, a quart of vanilla ice cream, a couple of steaks, and packages of frozen carrots and peas. Then, overcome by guilt, he went to the produce section and picked out a head of iceberg lettuce, a few tomatoes, and a cucumber. Having a salad with his steak would be good for him, wouldn’t it? Of course it would, he told himself, so he grabbed the first bottle of dressing he saw and headed for the checkout counter. He didn’t even bother to read the label.
     
    Walking home with his groceries, Tay passed a bar called Number Five that was just down the road from him. It had a scattering of tables out front and as the last of the day drained into twilight it looked like such a pleasant place to sit and have a drink that he considered stopping.
    Before he had made up his mind, two women and a man, all of whom appeared to be in their twenties, swept past him and took over the last empty table. The women wore shorts and sandals with skimpy tops and they laughed loudly and talked with her hands and tossed their manes of long, shiny black hair while the guy nodded and smiled, no doubt amazed at his luck in being the object of both women’s attention.
    Enjoy it while it lasts, kid , Tay thought to himself. Because I’ll bet you it doesn’t last very long .
    Tay lived on Emerald Hill Road, a quiet dead-end street in a sleepy neighborhood of classic row houses. It was an area steeped in dignity and tranquility, yet it was barely a hundred yards from busy Orchard Road. Tay’s house was a three-story structure with a tiny front garden surrounded by a high wall of white-painted brick. In the back, through French doors from his living room, was another garden, this one surrounded by an even higher brick wall.
    When Tay got home, he dumped his groceries in the kitchen and got a bottle of John Powers Irish whiskey out of his small liquor cabinet. He had developed a taste for Irish whiskey a year or so back at the same time he developed a taste for a Dublin-born woman he met while standing in line at a bank. He