Thicker Than Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes.
    “Honey? What you doin’ here?” A woman wearing glasses, a black woman, was towering over her.
    “You’re the gal from the garage, aren’t you. Can’t sleep here. Ain’t safe.”
    Rachel shrugged off the hand. “I’m okay.” Then, realizing where she was, she bolted upright on the bench and looked about. “Really, I’m fine. Sorry. You a cop?”
    A deep laugh bubbled up from somewhere in the woman’s mid-section. “Don’t I wish! I just run the cleaning crew, honey.” She cocked her chin at the van parked across the street. Merry Maids was written in script across the side. “We’re not real merry, and we sure ain’t maids, but we do a bang-up job of cleaning offices.” She examined Rachel’s face. “You don’t look real good, honey.”
    “Just tired, really.”
    “Tell you what. I could use me a sit-down, and the rest of them aren’t quite through over here. Why don’t you just scoot yourself over a little?”
    Rachel slid to the side. “I don’t usually sleep on the street.”
    “Don’t guess you do.” The woman relaxed onto the bench, stretching her legs out and crossing her ankles. “How come you doing that tonight?”
    “I was too tired to sleep.”
    The woman nodded. “I know how that is. ’Specially when we got something big on our mind.”
    “I don’t—” Rachel shook her head sharply. Then, in the way that even the most private people sometimes confide in strangers, she said, “I guess you’re right.”
    “Of course I’m right,” the woman said lazily. She leaned her head back and the eyes behind the glasses closed.
    Rachel examined her thumbnail. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
    The woman chuckled dryly. “There’s damn little I ain’t seen or at least heard.”
    Rachel drew in a breath, paused, let it out. “A guy I sort of know was killed, maybe on purpose.” A car passed, its lights making the black street look watery.
    When Rachel described the tie tack, the tortoise and why she was certain it was Jason’s, a low whistle came from the sprawled-out form next to her.
    “You telling me that water company over there—that place where I scrub toilets and empty trash—has got itself a murderer in its midst?” The woman turned her head, purplish streetlight glinting from her glasses, but she didn’t sit up.
    “I guess that has to be one possibility.”
    “Damn rhinoceros-size possibility, if you ask me. Horn and all.” The woman turned and looked Rachel in the eye. “Well, honey, it seems like you got to do something. You got to go to the cops.”
    Rachel rubbed her fingertips across her forehead. “If I do that, I could be buying myself a major stack of trouble.”
    “How so?”
    Rachel knotted her hands and dropped them to her lap. “I’d rather not say.”
    “Mmmm,” the woman nodded, sagely, then asked calmly, “You a criminal or something, yourself?”
    “Of course not,” Rachel sputtered.
    “Then maybe your reasons are a little bit small.”
    Rachel studied the steel arm of the bench. “Look, I do have reasons, honest-to-God big reasons why I can’t go to the cops.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like for one thing, I don’t trust them, and they wouldn’t trust me.”
    “Why not?”
    Rachel gazed at the pinkish-purple haze that passed for sky in the streetlight and smog. “I’m an alcoholic and an addict,” she began. “I’ve been sober and clean for three years and two days and,” she looked at her watch, “about twenty hours. My mother died and my father bet the farm—literally—in Vegas, and lost it. I started taking some of my mom’s codeine. When that was gone, I had to drink. A lot.” She drew a ragged breath.
    “But being hung over and strung out all the time wasn’t exactly great, so one night, I got me a noseful of some really terrific stuff. I wondered where it had been all my life. Here was the ultimate answer: Drink till you fall down, then snort a little coke or crystal and, wow, you’re ready to go again. And