The Other Shoe Read Online Free PDF Page B

wheat germ. They’ll go through you like a dose of salts.” He shook her hand, and, without ever releasing it, he backed away from the curb.
    â€œWho’d you say you were?”
    â€œI didn’t. I’m Hoot Meyers.”
    â€œOh. You’re the whatta-you-call-him, huh?”
    â€œThe county attorney.”
    â€œYeah? Shit. Sorry, but you know, shit. I mean, really.”
    His name had blossomed in gold every four years for as long as she could remember. The same gold-on-maroon signs at every important junction of Highway 200, instructing travelers to reelect Hoot Meyers, Independent, for County Attorney. Justice himself, if you believed the River Register , called to comment on everybody’s troubles. A big shot. His name came up when people were going to jail, and she’d never heard it spoken fondly.
    â€œAnd here I thought you were just tryin’ to be neighborly.” Karen had found a brassy tone she liked but knew she’d never sustain; she regretted her life very much, the secretive life to come. Not that she’d ever been too relaxed in public.
    â€œLost a filling,” said the county attorney. “Had a filling about the size of a Subaru fall out of my tooth last night; Loosma told me he’d get me in this morning, get me kinda comfortable.”
    â€œOn Sunday? It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”
    â€œDr. Loosma’s a good man with that novocaine needle, too, so I’m headed to Red Plain. You’re right along the way.”
    â€œNot exactly.” As a criminal, she felt, she’d already become a quicker, keener judge of character, almost animal in her acuity, and she’d got the criminal’s tendency toward outrage at any deception not her own. A lumber train clacked and rattled by, a half-million two-by-fours headed west; the county attorney’s truck rolled east down Main Street. She smelled bacon and burnt coffee. After years of her husband’shigh regard for her, Karen Brusett had finally come to believe that even such as she might be cherished, that she might be somehow adequate in this world; but now she foresaw a future of lying. They passed a gaggle of geese in City Park and out onto the highway, through the empty log yards of the Caradine and United mills. This town was her town, so far as she had any, but beyond her education here, and now groceries and licenses and medications, she had never discovered any deeper design in it nor the slightest bit of charm, and it appeared ramshackle and shabby even though she had little to compare it with. Leaving it always lifted her spirits.
    She rested her head on the passenger’s side window, and the county attorney’s truck, a disgraceful vehicle for a man with a steady job, sent every bit of roughness up from the road and through the chassis and rattled her skull on the glass, and though she tried to nap, the prospect of sleep was terrifying. Her neck kinked. She sat up and opened her eyes.
    â€œYou all right?”
    â€œAm I all right? I mean—what? Why couldn’t they let us ride down in our own truck last night? Was there any reason we had to ride with those police guys? You know, they never really said we were under arrest, in fact they kept sayin’ we weren’t—but I think we were anyway. Kind of.” Complaint seemed the thing to do, but she was not accustomed to despise the tone of her own voice.
    â€œThey probably had other things on their minds besides your transportation arrangements. We got some sloppy deputies, and they’re always the first ones to a crime scene. Makes ’em feel important. Then they go ahead and screw things up.”
    â€œYeah. I meant to ask you, though, do you . . . do you know me?” He’d be one to know the dirt on everyone.
    â€œRuth Hemphill? Remember her? Gal from Social Services, she brought you by my office one day. Been a while, you would’ve been about twelve, thirteen, around in