The Glass Highway Read Online Free PDF Page A

rear wheel, but I stepped back and saved everything above the knees. I stood on the frozen wet grass, watching them roar away and getting rained on the smoking and sounding the depths of my ability to say the wrong thing.
    Windsor’s sullen skyline glowered across a gunmetal-colored Lake St. Clair, its surface sliced by wind and sleet into timid breakers that touched the Grissoms’ backyard and withdrew to tell the others. The house, a Victorian jumble of gables, turrets, and rusty pikes meant to discourage seagulls from roosting on the roof, overlooked a private wharf at the end of a paved cul-de-sac off East Jefferson. Outbuildings included a garage, boat house, and a little hut where the guests could change out of their wet swimsuits into dry martinis. The place didn’t even have a heliport.
    The guy tinkering in front of the garage didn’t hear me pull up and get out. He wouldn’t have heard a Soviet first strike on the garage. He had the hood up on a bright red snowmobile and was listening to the chainsaw motor whine.
    “Expecting snow?” I shouted at his bent back.
    He snapped up like a Vietcong snare and whirled to face me. You’d go some miles before you found someone who looked less like Clark Gable. Long, dirty-blond hair thinning at the crown and hanging limply behind his ears, long acne-scarred face and drooping moustache, long body and legs in fleece-lined denim jacket and dirty jeans, brown cowboy boots scuffed at the toes and splitting at the soles. Sharp eyes under heavy lids. About thirty. He saw me standing with my coat hanging open and my hands in my pants pockets, and he relaxed. He had a heavy wrench in one hand.
    “It’s got to come sometime,” he said. “When it does I’ll be ready. Is it me you want?”
    “It is if you’re Rhett Grissom.”
    “That depends on whether you’re a cop or not.”
    “Do I look like one?”
    “You don’t look like someone who isn’t one. You got ID?”
    “If I showed it to you it wouldn’t mean anything. I’m private. You’ve heard Bud Broderick is missing.”
    “I didn’t even know he was here to begin with.” He picked up a white cotton rag and wiped his hands. His hands were clean.
    “He was, as a matter of fact. Right here. He came to one of your famous parties with his stepsister a few months back. Fern Esterhazy. She introduced him to another guest, Paula Royce. They hit it off.”
    “Man, I don’t even remember who came to my party last Saturday night.”
    “It’s the pills. You should lay off them awhile.”
    His lids flickered. “What pills?”
    Somehow I had known those would be the next words out of his mouth.
    “The Royce girl was a regular at your bashes,” I said. “We both know she didn’t come for the good food and stimulating conversation. I won’t send you over. The cops don’t listen to me anyway. What I want to know is if you were supplying her the rest of the time, and if you weren’t, who was.” I stopped to swallow. “Cut the motor, will you? I’m starting to feel my tonsils.”
    He mouthed two words that were drowned out by the racket and bent over the motor, gripping his wrench. I reached past his shoulder and gave the throttle on the handlebar a flirt. The machine squirted forward. Grissom lost his balance and pitched face first onto the wet asphalt driveway, but not before the vehicle tried to climb the closed garage door, stalled, and fell over. They heard the noise in Lansing.
    “Son of a bitch!” howled Grissom, swiping the wrench at my shin. I hopped over it, kicked his supporting arm out from under him, and planted a foot on his wrist. I found a place for the other foot on the back of his head. Teeth ground on asphalt.
    “Paula Royce,” I said. “Were you supplying her?”
    He braced his free hand on the driveway again and tried to throw me off. I kicked it again with the foot I had on his head and took up the earlier position as his chest struck ground, emptying his lungs with an animal