The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”
    That made her smile. “Lately?” she said, looking at me. “Did this just happen in the last week or so?”
    She had me there.
    The truth was, I had been under a lot of stress lately. Not that it had anything to do with what I was or was not eating. But in the twenty years I’d worked for the Promise Falls police—the anniversary had slipped by this month largely unnoticed—I had never had a month like this one.
    It had started with the horrific murder of Rosemary Gaynor. And then there were some strange goings-on around town. Everything from dead squirrels and a Ferris wheel coming to life all on its own to a college predator and a flaming bus.
    As if all that weren’t enough, that bombed drive-in.
    And then there was Randall Finley, the son of a bitch.
    He was running for mayor again and looking for whatever dirt he could get on anybody. The current mayor, the chief of police, anybody . I’d learned that he’d gone so far as to blackmail our son, Trevor, who was driving a truck for Finley’s bottled water company, into telling him things Trevor might have heard me talking about around the house.
    I wanted to kill the asshole.
    Maybe, I told myself, I’d be better equipped to deal with all this bullshit if I weren’t lugging so much weight around.
    Today had to be the day.
    After I’d weighed myself, I shaved. I don’t always bother on a Saturday, but I decided to make an effort. Either my blade was too dull or the shaving cream too loaded with menthol, because my cheeks and neck felt like they’d been set ablaze. I patted my cheeks thoroughly with a towel, which helped. I dug an oversized red T-shirt out of one drawer, and some old purple sweatpants I hadn’t worn in years out of another. Then I went into the closet for my running shoes. When Maureen came upstairs and into the room and saw me, she said, “What’s going on? You look like a down-on-his-luck superhero.”
    “I’m going to do a walk this morning,” I said. “A mile or two. I don’t have to go in this morning. I’m taking a day.”
    I needed a month.
    “I just put on the coffee,” Maureen said.
    “I’ll have some when I get back. And don’t bother making me any breakfast. I’ll just have a banana or something.”
    She eyed me slyly. “You can’t do it this way.”
    “Can’t do what?”
    “I mean, the walk, that’s a good idea. Go. But you have to eat more than a banana for breakfast. You have nothing more than that and by ten you’ll be inhaling six Egg McMuffins. I can help you with this. I can—”
    “I know what I’m doing,” I said.
    “Okay, okay, but if you try to do too much too fast, you’ll get discouraged. You have to do these things gradually.”
    “I don’t have time to do them gradually,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say that.
    “What do you mean?” Maureen asked.
    “I’m just saying, I need to make a change. I might as well do it.”
    “What happened between yesterday and today?”
    “Nothing.”
    “No, something’s happened.”
    Maureen had acquired over the years, as if by osmosis, some of my skill at spotting a lie when it was being told.
    “I said, nothing.” I looked away.
    “Did you go see Dr. Moorehouse?”
    “Did I what?” God, I was terrible at this.
    “What did she say?”
    I hesitated. “Not a lot. Just, you know, a few things.”
    “Why did you go see her? What prompted it?”
    “I . . . the other day, I felt—I was a little, you know, short of breath. At the drive-in. Climbing over stuff.” Also, recently, at Burger King, but I did not see the point in mentioning that particular incident.
    “Okay,” Maureen said slowly.
    “And she said that maybe I might want to start thinking about maybe considering some slight changes to, you know, my lifestyle, as such.”
    “As such,” Maureen repeated.
    “Yeah.” I shrugged. “So, that’s what I’m doing.”
    Maureen nodded slowly. “Okay. Terrific.” She surveyed me, head to