The Price of Blood Read Online Free PDF

hangers-on who believed in the dream but couldn’t quite live it themselves. I felt sorry for him, but I liked his spirit.
    I nodded at Leonard, and reached my hand across to him, and he shook it. He looked anxious though, and when I went into the hall he came out after me and shut the kitchen door behind him.
    "I’m worried about money," he said in a low voice.
    "Aren’t we all?" I said.
    "I mean, I don’t know how long this will take, and…well, Christmas is here, and…"
    He stopped, and looked at me, his tired gray eyes enlarged by his glasses, his head bowed in exhaustion and shame. I could have pretended Leonard was what I had thought him to be in the first place and taken the money; the guy he wished he was certainly would have: you don’t get to the top cutting losers a break. He wasn’t that guy though, and neither was I, and even though the only reason I was working this case was for the money, Father Vincent Tyrrell’s cash advance meant I didn’t have to test my conscience too hard.
    "Give me five hundred. You’re going to be running the camera yourself. If it turns out that I need to work full-time on it, we’ll figure something out."
    Leonard nodded, his eyes blinking hard. He gestured toward the kitchen in a you-know-how-it-is way, and I shrugged and nodded, as if most guys I knew were married to women who were drunk by lunchtime. Most guys I knew were drunk by lunchtime themselves, which at least meant they didn’t have to worry anymore about their wives, who in any case had long fled the scene.
    I went out to my car and opened the trunk and got an oil-smeared canvas tool bag that belonged to my father. In it, as well as a bunch of small tools, I had a wireless covert video pinhole camera, a half-dozen nine-volt alkaline batteries, a wireless receiver, a DC adapter for the receiver and some cable to connect it to the VCR. I also took a bag of videotapes, closed the trunk and went back to the Leonard house.
    The trellis was about three inches deep, a crisscross lattice with triangular holes the size of a two-euro coin. The camera was about the size of a one-euro coin, so it was easy enough to fix it into the trellis with the help of some sturdy Virginia creeper, and to wedge a battery in behind it.
    When I went back in the house, Annalise Leonard was sitting at the table with her hand on her brow, shielding her eyes. The small boy was running up and down the kitchen floor around his father’s outstretched legs, all the while chanting something about a super-robot monkey team, if I heard it right. Sara was sitting at the table having a jokey conversation with her mother in which she did all the parts, both telling the jokes and supplying the laughter.
    I went into the living room and set up the receiver and its power adapter, connected it to the VCR after a bit of faffing about (I had to find a junction box to connect two cables together in order to make it work), powered it up, selected a channel on the VCR, broke a tape out of its packaging and put it in the machine and checked the sight lines. I went out and adjusted the angle the camera was at slightly, so it had the widest view of the dumping ground; then I went back inside and talked Leonard through the process.
    "Should I start it now?" he said.
    "Do they dump in broad daylight? Better leave it until night," I said. "The camera batteries last eight hours. I’ll turn it off when I leave; when night falls, turn it on and mark what time it is. And they’re two-hundred-and-forty-minute tapes, so…"
    "I’ll set the alarm for four hours after I’ve gone to bed," he said keenly.
    "You might want to sleep on the sofa," I said.
    Might want to anyway, I thought.
    He walked me to the front door, smiled grimly, as if we were men setting out on a terrifying journey, and presented me with a check.
    "Thank you, Mr. Loy," he said.
    "Thank you," I said. "Your wife said something about the Butlers—are they people you suspect?"
    "They’re the most