The Killer Is Dying Read Online Free PDF

Rankin, “anything out of the ordinary?”
    “Like?”
    “Anything. Doors left open that are usually shut, a change in someone’s routine.”
    It’s all about patterns, Sayles thought. You map out the patterns, look for the disturbance in them, the one thing that’s not quite right.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Rankin,” Graves said. “We’ll need to come back again later, talk some more.”
    Sayles held out his hand and waited. They shook. “I’ll leave a card here on the mirror above the sink,” he told Rankin. “Anything comes back to you, day or night, call me.”
    They shared the elevator with an attendant pushing a man in a wheelchair. IVs of fluorescent-looking yellow fluid hung from poles; a bag almost filled with rust-colored urine swung beneath the seat. As they walked outside, Graves asked, “Where are you?”
    He was thinking, of course.
    “Of course.” Graves looked off. Under a nearby Chinese elm two grackles, feathers shining black in sunlight, were making enough noise for a dozen. “You love this job, don’t you, Sayles.”
    Sayles shrugged.
    “Most don’t. That surprise you?”
    “Not really.” Very little surprised him, when you came right down to it.
    They got to the car, a Chrysler only a year old and already beat to hell by a hundred wayward drivers. The patrol cars got checked shift to shift and taken care of; pool cars, no one much cared.
    “Summer I was sixteen, desperate for money,” Sayles said, “I got a job at the slab fields down by the river. Lied about my age, but they didn’t care. Not much around in the way of work, it was either that or selling stuff no one wanted in run-down stores. And it paid well. So there I was, hundred-degree heat, bent double most of the day, hauling around crap that weighed as much as I did. Sun slammed down like a wall falling on you over and over, river stank of something huge and ancient and dead a long time.”
    Sayles fired the car up.
    “Now that’s work to hate.”
    Under the tree, the grackles making so much noise had been joined by another. Wings spread wide, feathers blown out, two of them were jointly attacking the third.
    “Copy,” Graves said.

 
     
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    SOMETIMES HE IS THERE AGAIN, with the field burning around him, trees at the perimeter igniting one by one, flaring up like birthday candles. Sometimes he hears the pop-pop-pop of rifles in the distance set against the whoosh of trees igniting, sometimes it all takes place in silence.
    He woke in a pool of sweat.
    And sometimes he is elsewhere, in the cardboard shipping case that’s been roughly stuccoed into permanence, into place. The ceiling is so low that, legs spread and raised straight up, short as she is, her toenails scratch at it. He listens to this, listens to the hollow thump of his head against the wall as he pushes into her, hears the cry of hawkers in the street outside with their vegetables and rice, their twine-tied bundles of lemongrass and herbs and canvas bags of prawns and tiny crabs. She has not said a word the whole time. Two infants stand on tiptoe in a crib made of green bamboo, watching, eyes white as boiled eggs.
    He lay awake, still awake or awake again, he really can’t tell, staring up at the ceiling, remembering how they all took to calling him Christian because once, as they left a village, he had turned back for a moment and stood with head down. “You praying, Christian?” one of his squad said. He was tired, nothing more. But the name stuck.
    He was tired all the time now. The drugs added to it. Fired him up, left him unable to sleep. Made him stupid. And when he did sleep …
    The worst of it was the dreams. Dreams of things that had happened, of things that hadn’t; maybe worst of all, those dreams that took place in some no-man’s-land between, dreams of things that had happened but that in the dreaming got twisted, changed.
    He shifted in bed, trying to get away from the wetness. A storm was building outside.