Twice Dying Read Online Free PDF

about taking down a bad physician, outside the courtroom. Isn’t that what you do?”
    She was watching him. Her hair and skin wore a faint damp sheen of mist. Monks tried to sort through his emotions. The evening’s events in the Emergency Room, still playing in his mind like a background tape. The invisible chain of responsibility tugging him to return to the hospital. His past with Alison Chapley, with that uneasiness still close to the surface.
    Her nearness, now, this minute.
    Monks said, “I’ll think it over. I’d better get back.”
    She handed him the sheaf of papers.
    “Can you come back inside for just a minute? There’s someone I’d like you to talk to.”
    Her wineglass had not been refilled. The bartender was at the far end talking to friends, and ignored her signal for what seemed to Monks a pointedly long time. Finally he approached with obvious coolness, a stocky man with a handlebar mustache and a tilt to his head.
    “Warren, this is Dr. Monks.” Neither offered a hand. “He’s an investigator,” she said. “He’s going to help me about that man who said he was from the licensing board. Will you tell him what you told me?”
    The bartender shrugged. “It’s history.” He started moving away.
    “Warren,” she said. This time there was a faint tone of pleading. “It doesn’t have anything to do with here, it’s somebody trying to get me fired from my job. I’m
going
to get it straight.”
    He leaned forward across the bar and said with sudden harsh intensity, “Are you fucking crazy? First that and now this?” His head gestured contemptuously at Monks. “There’s a million bars in this town, honey. Go find one.”
    Sudden comprehension came to Monks. The bartender was her drug connection, a not-friend who assumed that Alison had drawn the attention of police. He had cut her off, and that was why she had brought Monks here: to repair the damage.
    He knew how it went: irritations and tension building into anger that hovered just below the surface, until finally something, usually some-thing small, pushed the button and you blew up, usually at the wrong person.
    Usually, you did not care.
    Monks said to him, “Where’d you get the cowboy hat?”
    His eyes narrowed. “I don’t own a cowboy hat.”
    “I can see it.”
    The bartender reared back, then thrust a finger toward Monks’s chest. “You’re
out
of here, asshole.”
    “I’ve got a special dictionary at home,” Monks said. “Next to the word ‘shitweasel,’ there’s a picture looks just like you.”
    He walked to the door, half expecting the bartender to follow, his mind already supplying novelty headlines for tomorrow’s
Chronicle:
DOC DECKED IN DUKE-OUT, SAWBONES SLAMS SALOON STUD, PHYSICIAN FAILS TO HEAL SELF. The last time he had punched a man had been some years before, when he had taken a verbal cheap shot from a cardiac surgeon in a hospital cafeteria line, but you could not really call that a fight.
    He waited on the sidewalk, fists tightening when the door opened. It was Alison, alone.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea.”
    Monks said, “Yeah, you did.”
    She smiled, very slightly, the look of a child found out in something mischievous.
    “You can take the boy out of Chicago, but you can’t take Chicago out of the boy.”
    He shook his head and walked on, but allowed himself to be caught, his arm hugged, a warm wet kiss planted on his cheek.
    “Are we still on?” she said.
    He nodded stiffly.
    They paused at her car. Monks recognized it with confused warmth: a vintage champagne-colored Mercedes sedan that had been the scene of more than one fevered teen-style coupling.
    He held the door open. She brushed deliberately against him as she slid behind the wheel.
    “You left just when things were starting to get interesting,” she said.
    Monks watched her go, back to the Bolinashouse with its windows that turned golden in the afternoon sun and its ocean-facing deck where she had first begun