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

couldn’t be explained away, no actual crime. I didn’t have anything concrete to take to them. A couple of nasty little poems? A warped high-school kid could have written them, someone with a weird sense of humor. And since the police wouldn’t really do anything or, worse yet, would treat it as a joke, why would I waste my time going to them?”
    Gurney nodded, unconvinced.
    “Besides,” Mellery went on, “the idea of the local police grabbing hold of this and launching a full-scale investigation, questioning people, coming up to the institute, badgering present and former guests—some of our guests are sensitive people—stomping around and raising all sorts of hell, poking into things that are none of their business, maybe getting the press involved … Christ! I can just see the headlines—’Spiritual Author Gets Death Threats’—and the turmoil that would raise.…” Mellery’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head as if mere words could not describe the damage the police might cause.
    Gurney responded with a look of bafflement.
    “What’s wrong?” Mellery asked.
    “Your two reasons for not contacting the police contradict each other.”
    “How?”
    “You didn’t contact the police because you were afraid they wouldn’t do anything. And you didn’t contact them because you were afraid they would do too much.”
    “Ah, yes … but both statements are true. The common element is my fear of the matter’s being handled ineptly. Police ineptness might take the form of a lackadaisical approach or a bumbling bulls-in-the-china-shop approach. Inept lassitude or inept aggressiveness—you see what I mean?”
    Gurney had the feeling he’d just watched someone stub his toe and turn it into a pirouette. He wasn’t quite buying it. In his experience when a man gave two reasons for a decision, it was likely that a third reason—the real one—had been left unstated.
    As if tuned to the wavelength of Gurney’s thought, Mellery said suddenly, “I need to be more honest with you, more open about my concerns. I can’t expect you to help me unless I show you the whole picture. In my forty-seven years, I’ve led two distinctly different lives. For the first two-thirds of my existence on this earth, I was on the wrong path, going nowhere good but getting there fast. It started in college. After college it got worse. The drinking increased, the chaos increased. I got involved in dealing drugs to an upmarket clientele and became friends with my customers. One was so impressed with my ability to spin a line of bullshit that he gave me a job on Wall Street selling bullshit stock deals over the phone to people greedy and stupid enough to believe that doubling their investment in three months was a real possibility. I was good at it, and I made a lot of money, and the money wasmy rocket fuel into lunacy. I did whatever I felt like doing, and most of it I can’t remember, because most of the time I was blind drunk. For ten years I worked for a succession of brilliant, thieving scumbags. Then my wife died. You wouldn’t have known, but I had gotten married the year after we graduated.”
    Mellery reached for his glass. He drank thoughtfully, as though the taste were an idea forming in his mind. When the glass was half empty, he placed it on the arm of the chair, stared at it for a moment, then resumed his story.
    “Her death was a monumental event. It had a greater effect on me than all the events of our fifteen years of marriage combined. I hate to admit this, but it was only through her death that my wife’s life had any real impact on me.”
    Gurney got the impression that this neat irony, spoken as haltingly as though it had just come to mind, was being delivered for the hundredth time. “How did she die?”
    “The whole story is in my first book, but here’s the short ugly version. We were on vacation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. One evening at sunset, we were sitting on a deserted beach.