The Glass Harmonica Read Online Free PDF

waiting for the police.
    Every now and then, the guys in the gatehouse had looked straight across at him, their mouths turned down at the corners like they were having a hard time believing it, like it was the kind of expression they thought they were supposed to have.
    In the truck, Tony could only sit and look down at the cracked blue plastic of the dashboard, reaching across with one finger and picking away at a spot where the plastic had blistered and split from sun and age.
    He thought for a moment, just for one fleeting moment, about stomping on the gas pedal and running straight through the thin wooden arm of the gate, smashing through the alternating yellow and black stripes like they weren’t even there. But they knew him anyway, so it wouldn’t have made any difference, it would have just meant that the police would have come to his house, the front wheels of their cruiser crackling as they rolled up onto the loose gravel of the driveway, and how stupid would that be? Making them come and find him, come and hunt him down, on the run for ten lousy sheets of plywood?
    And even then Tony knew it wasn’t as simple as the plywood. Because there was a zero-tolerance policy at the depot for stealing, a policy written right into the contract now in lawyer’s language, so it was twenty-three years of driving plow in the winter, dump truck in the summer, all of it down the drain, and Helen was going to kill him, he thought, even if he really was doing it all for her.
    When the police came, they’d be all set to write it all up in simple police shorthand. Anthony David Collins, 54, of 177 McKay Street. Longtime employee of the City of St. John’s, caught red-handed stealing city property —he could see it like it was already written in the paper, just a couple of sentences, and the paper would be going into mailboxes all the way down the street.
    It was the kind of case that would barely get a ripple of interest on the court docket, the courthouse regulars all gravitating towards the graphic testimony of sexual assaults or the gruesome violence of the occasional St. John’s murder, almost always family members killing family members, or a fight that had started between friends in a kitchen. Once in a long while, stranger killing stranger.
    Just the same, Tony knew it was the kind of case that marked the complete end of the way life used to be. The police report wouldn’t explain anything, Tony thought, even if every single word on it was perfectly true. It wouldn’t even begin to explain.
    It wouldn’t explain how Helen’s dad, Mike Mirren, had left his only daughter 117 McKay when he died, that the house had been all paid off and Mike had been proud of that, but that now, almost inexplicably, it was carrying eighty thousand dollars in a mortgage in Helen’s name, a mortgage that was pretty close to as much as the place was worth.
    It wouldn’t explain why Tony was running just as fast as he possibly could, every single day, and that there were only so many places money could come from before you wound up looking at stupid last resorts, at bad decisions made good by desperation.
    At first, he’d taken every scrap of overtime he could get, driving the big green dump all night long for snow removal, up the sharp hills and then down again to the harbour to dump the snow from the blowers so the tide could carry it away, and then he’d fallen asleep one night and put the front end of the truck, with the big square rack for the plow, right through some guy’s fence on the low side of Empire Avenue. It was a good thing the curbs were high there or, sound asleep behind the wheel, he would have gone into the guy’s living room, Tony thought.
    Two o’clock in the morning, and he had to stand outside and listen to the guy who owned the house screaming at him about his damned fence until the supervisor got there, the front end of Tony’s truck stuck through the