The Wrong Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

and top sheet were ripped away, drooling onto the floor, leaving the fitted sheet totally exposed. Three of our four pillows were mashed against the headboard. The fourth was obviously on the floor on my side of the bed where I couldn’t see it. We had matching bedside lamps and the one on Jill’s side was on the floor. Beside it was a pair of her panties.
    I stared for a long moment, feeling the way you feel when you’re looking at books in the warm safe environment of the library and you come across those old pictures of war atrocities or hollow-eyed, skeletal prisoners in death camps gazing frankly at the camera. What I was seeing wouldn’t fit into my understanding of reality. It disturbed me on a level I couldn’t have prepared for. I had a weird thought of Jill screwing someone else on our bed, and me coming home while they were halfway into it, but I knew that was impossible.
    “Jill?” My voice was louder and shrill, and I was up against the bathroom door now. I rapped three times and said, “Jill!” then rapped again.
    The toilet flushed. I heard rustling, feet on the floor, and the latch clicked and the door came open.
    She was naked.
    “I need   . . . to take a shower,” she said. Her face was bloodless and without expression, her eyes huge and empty.
    “What? Jill! Look at me.” I took her shoulders. There was a bruise on her neck, the size of a thumbprint. I already knew. “Did someone come in here?”
    “They   . . . they knocked, ” she said, and took a huge breath, as if thinking of it exhausted her. “There were two of them. A white guy and a-a-another guy, and they just backed me in there.” She glanced at the bedroom.
    I think I said “No!” but maybe I didn’t. There was a humming growing in my ears, speckles in my vision, and I might have rolled my eyes up in my head and passed out if Jill hadn’t started crying.
    It was just a sniffle at first, but it brought me back like smelling salts, made me smart with the knowledge of who the goddamned victim was here. She was starting to shake, and I reached out, pulled her against me and began rubbing the silky planes of her back and telling her everything was all right.
    But even then a blinding rage, a need to do something, was clouding my thinking. We were going to the police. Modern investigative techniques would turn the motherfuckers up and I would arm myself, go into the courtroom during their trial and execute them. Right through the face. The cops could drag me away after that. I didn’t give a fuck.
    “We have to go the police,” I said into her hair, my voice sounding thin, almost metallic. “Go to the doctor, do all that.”
    “There’s nothing!” she sobbed into my shoulder. “Sam, they had on ski masks.” And lower, she said, “The even used rubbers. All I could tell, the first guy, he was white, and the other guy was dark. Mexican––probably.”
    And it came to me. Hit me so hard I felt the breath go out of me. Owen Ferguson. Oh Christ, he had given up on getting me at the liquor store but that guy wouldn’t just give up altogether, would he? How could I not know that he would teach me, one way or another, what happens when some punk crosses him? My body felt so hot it might begin steaming. My rage was suddenly corrupted by guilt and the combination was so poisonous my knees were buckling.
    “Jill, I think—”
    “Sam?” Her voice was thick with crying now, tinged with hysterics, and it took her a couple of times to get it out. “I want you to take   . . . I want to go   . . . to my mom’s !” And with the last word she began sobbing too hard to speak.
    “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Jill.”
    I nearly had to carry her into the bedroom to get her dressed.
     
    We were mostly silent and Jill didn’t seem to want to be touched on the drive. All I could think about was Owen, but I couldn’t bring myself to put any of it into words.   I tried to comfort her a couple of times but wound up stammering and