Think of a Number (Dave Gurney, No.1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

asking if we could get together.” He thrust them toward Gurney like a little boy showing his father two new bruises.
    They appeared to be written by the same meticuloushand with the same pen as the pair of notes in the earlier communication, but the tone had changed.
    The first was composed of eight short lines:
    How many bright angels
    can dance on a pin?
    How many hopes drown in
    a bottle of gin?
    Did the thought ever come
    that your glass was a gun
    and one day you’d wonder
,
    God, what have I done?
    The eight lines of the second were similarly cryptic and menacing:
    What you took you will give
    when you get what you gave
.
    I know what you think
,
    when you blink
,
    where you’ve been
,
    where you’ll be
.
    You and I have a date
,
    Mr. 658
.
    Over the next ten minutes, during which he read each note half a dozen times, Gurney’s expression grew darker and Mellery’s angst more obvious.
    “What do you think?” Mellery finally asked.
    “You have a clever enemy.”
    “I mean, what do you think about the number business?”
    “What about it?”
    “How could he know what number would come to my mind?”
    “Offhand, I would say he couldn’t know.”
    “He couldn’t know, but he did! I mean, that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? He couldn’t know, but he did! No one could possibly know that the number six fifty-eight would be the number I would think of, but not only did he know it—he knew it at least two days before I did, when he put the damn letter in the mail!”
    Mellery suddenly heaved himself up from his chair, pacing across the grass toward the house, then back again, running his hands through his hair.
    “There’s no scientific way to do that. There’s no conceivable way of doing it. Don’t you see how crazy this is?”
    Gurney was resting his chin thoughtfully on the tips of his fingers. “There’s a simple philosophical principle that I find one hundred percent reliable.
If something happens, it must have a way of happening
. This number business must have a simple explanation.”
    “But …”
    Gurney raised his hand like the serious young traffic cop he had been for his first six months in the NYPD. “Sit down. Relax. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

Chapter 5
Unpleasant possibilities
    M adeleine brought a pair of iced teas to the two men and returned to the house. The smell of warm grass filled the air. The temperature was close to seventy. A swarm of purple finches descended on the thistle-seed feeders. The sun, the colors, the aromas were intense, but wasted on Mellery, whose anxious thoughts seemed to occupy him completely.
    As they sipped their teas, Gurney tried to assess the motives and honesty of his guest. He knew that labeling someone too early in the game could lead to mistakes, but doing so was often irresistible. The main thing was to be aware of the fallibility of the process and be willing to revise the label as new information became available.
    His gut feeling was that Mellery was a classic phony, a pretender on many levels, who to some extent believed his own pretenses. His accent, for example, which had been present even in the college days, was an accent from nowhere, from some imaginary place of culture and refinement. Surely it was no longer put on—it was an integral part of him—but its roots lay in imaginary soil. The expensivehaircut, the moisturized skin, the flawless teeth, the exercised physique, and the manicured fingernails suggested a top-shelf televangelist. His manner was that of a man eager to appear at ease in the world, a man in cool possession of everything that eludes ordinary humans. Gurney realized all this had been present in a nascent form twenty-six years earlier. Mark Mellery had simply become more of what he’d always been.
    “Had it occurred to you to go to the police?” asked Gurney.
    “I didn’t think there was any point. I didn’t think they’d do anything. What could they do? There was no specific threat, nothing that