Wicked Fix Read Online Free PDF Page A

Street, cars and pickups
    crowded around the Waco Diner, town men having
    their eggs and coffee before heading out to work.
     
    At the freight dock the Star Hoisin loomed massively,
    cargo bays open. Guys in coveralls and rubber
    boots went down the metal gangways to the finger
    piers and onto the fishing boats, the grumble of diesel
    engines mingling with the slopping of small waves
    against the breakwater and the cries of seagulls. A bell
    buoy clanked as tinges of deep pink rose behind the
    Canadian islands, dark blue blotches against the lightening
    sky.
     
    As we walked, I'd been giving Ellie a few stock
    tips. It was advice I had lagged away from following
    for myself since I'd been in Eastport, but someone
    might as well get the good of it. Ellie had been half
    listening as she always did, or so I'd thought.
     
    Now in the cemetery all thoughts of money flew
    from my mind; instead I was busy trying to hold on to
    my breakfast, breathing the way they'd told me to do
    while Sam was being born. It hadn't worked very well
    then, either.
     
    Ellie reached out and touched a finger to Reuben's
    leather jacket, as if to confirm what she was seeing.
    The whoop-whoop of a squad car sounded somewhere
    down on the waterfront.
     
    "Be careful," Ellie murmured as if reminding herself,
    "what you wish for."
     
    I sat down hard, leaning against one of the old
    gravestones with my head between my knees. The face
     
    was bad, shrouded in red, and his hair was no longer
    the pale whitish color of sun-bleached straw, but it was
    the hands that really got to me. Stiffened into caked,
    curved claws, they had obviously been at his throat.
     
    "Nobody," I managed, "wishes for that."
     
    Ellie turned slowly, expressionless. "No. Not anymore."
     
    Then the sirens started again. I got up and called
    Monday and snapped her onto her lead. The squad
    cars were coming fast. Somebody must have seen the
    body before we found it and gone to find Bob Arnold,
    Eastport's police chief, to let him know.
     
    The thought troubled me; there wasn't much traffic
    on the cemetery road at this hour of the morning.
    Moments later, Arnold's squad car appeared, speeding
    between the maples and the larch trees that made
    a bright avenue of the road in autumn. But behind
    him were a couple of state squads, and that wasn't
    right, either. All three cars pulled to the curb, cherry
    beacons whirling.
     
    Bob Arnold emerged from his squad and stalked
    over to us furiously. "Jesus H. Christ," he grated.
    "One's not enough?"
     
    "One what?" I asked puzzledly, and then I knew:
    the siren, and the state cops already in town. Another
    body.
     
    "He was alive when he went up there," I said, gesturing
    at Reuben. "Somebody tied him and lifted him,
    hung him upside down."
     
    I was babbling. "And then ..."
     
    "I get the picture, Jacobia." Arnold pronounced it
    the Maine way: pictchah.
     
    By now it was full morning and a pickup truck was
    pulling in behind the squad cars. George Valentine got
    out and walked over to Ellie, while Arnold and the
    state guys conferred by the gate.
     
    "The guy Victor sewed up last night," George said.
     
    "In the bar? They found him down on the seawall a
    couple hours ago, cold as a flounder."
     
    A town truck with a bunch of orange traffic cones
    in its bed parked behind George's vehicle, and some
    fellows from the highway department began using the
    cones to block off the road where it entered Hillside
    Cemetery.
     
    "Couldn't figure what happened," George went
    on. "Bruises on him. And something blue sticking out
    of his mouth."
     
    "Blood all over his shirt," Arnold added, approaching.
    "But that was from the events of earlier, in
    the bar."
     
    He looked at me. "No mystery there. We've got a
    complete and fully detailed report of that. Fully," he
    emphasized, "detailed."
     
    Uh-oh. Suddenly one those details came back to
    me: blue. But of course what I was thinking wasn't
    possible.
     
    Behind Arnold, the state men