White Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page A

pleasant face, brown eyes, and full cheeks.
    “I wish I had one of these to get out from my wife,” Gore said.
    Behind the door, Dodge looked into a long, concrete hallway. He and Gore followed the tunnel for several feet, their shoes making hollow echoes down the way to the garage. Gore knocked on the walls, ringing back the solid thud of steel.
    “Nifty.”
    “Sure is,” Dodge said.
    “One of the neighbors said he had this thing built years ago,” Gore said. “That way, he could walk from his car to his house without someone blasting him with buckshot.”
    Dodge moved through the garage tunnel and back into the bedroom. He didn’t say a word. He glanced back down at Charlie Wall, facedown in the carpet. Blood flecked his white, empty face like splattered paint or some kind of pox.
    He looked over at the bed and at a green armchair.
    Tiny pellets. Lead shot.
    Dodge inched closer.
    Birdseed scattered over the chair and deep into the carpet.
    More pictures taken. Inside. Outside.
    Every angle of the house. The flashes hurt his eyes.
    Outside, the wind ruffled his hair and blew strong in his ears. Over the fence and into the street, there was the murmur of people talking, but a still quiet in the backyard. Somewhere a rooster crowed. There were too many people there, talking and moving around and smiling and laughing about the old days and how Charlie was quite a guy for an old gangster, and they talked a lot about bolita and shotguns and money, but no one was looking. All that noise and radio static of empty talk was hurting Dodge’s head, and he stood outside for a moment trying to think, because when you left a scene all you had left was what you took with you. So he would take the photos and would gather the evidence and then they would canvass the neighborhood and then no one would have seen anything and then they’d talk to the usual hoods and no one would know a damned thing about it.
    He knew he needed to think. Locked doors and drawn blinds. Lead shot. And beating and stabbing. There was money on the dresser. There was jewelry and watches and rings and a television. He just kept thinking about all that rage that came down on that old man, nearly ripping off his head and crushing in his skull like a piece of rotten fruit.
    The two deputies Dodge had run out of the crime scene bent over in Wall’s backyard close to a metal cross used to hang laundry. They poked at the ground like children playing war, and Dodge sauntered up behind them.
    They pulled the broken end of a baseball bat—the fat end—away from some tall grass. It was covered in dirt; he noticed no blood.
    “Leave it.”
    They got to their feet.
    Two more photos. No flash.
    The pieces, fragments of nothing, was all he had. Dodge collected that nothing while the lawyers and cops talked and smiled about an inevitable end to the Old Man.

    DETECTIVE BUDDY GORE walked Charlie Wall’s bungalow and the grounds with Dodge and helped him tag the bat for evidence before they followed brick steps to a back door, only to see more cops, deputies, and detectives in the kitchen. The station houses for both departments had emptied out, deputies and patrol cops wandering around and checking out the Old Man’s house.
    Mrs. Audrey Wall sat at a kitchen table drinking coffee and talking to one of the police detectives, Fred Bender. She was a worn old woman with stiff dyed hair and glasses shaped like cat eyes. Her chunky legs were crossed; there was a half-eaten piece of pie in front of her and another old woman—Dodge had been told was her sister—by her side.
    “That’s when we arrived back at the bus station,” Audrey Wall said. “We took the Greyhound. I will never do that again. Some of the people smelled very badly. An awful odor about buses.”
    “When was that?” Bender asked.
    “Oh, twelve-thirty or so?” she asked, looking over at her sister. The other old woman nodded. “That’s when we got hamburgers and pie.”
    “This pie?” Bender