Read Online Book Club by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online

C HIEF D OCKERTY knew the shadiest spot in New Mexico wasn’t the Santa Rita copper mine in Silver City. It was right there in the town of Good Advice, and it belonged to Avery Sharecross’ bookshop.
    Sharecross had established it, years before many of the residents were born, in a three-hundred-year-old mission that had been by turns a community theater, a Salvation Army shelter, a home for armadillos, and a place for juvenile delinquents to smoke cigarettes and listen to rock and roll. Its walls were adobe, three feet thick, its few windows just large enough to shoot Indians from inside without attracting too many arrows from outside. During its empty period, it had been as dark and mossy—feeling as a cave. Sharecross had managed to make it darker still by installing towering bookcases and stocking them with volumes, some the same vintage as the building, with narrow passages between the cases. Generations of children had dared one another to approach the place after dark, when the ghosts of William Shakespeare and Mark Twain prowled among the stacks (or during the day, when the proprietor did the haunting); none accepted. Even at high noon, a visitor needed a flashlight to explore the place without running into Thackeray or Gibbon and cracking a tooth.
    Fortunately for the chief’s new bridge, the bookseller had suspended trough lights from the distant ceiling, with chain switches for the convenience of browsers, who were requested by hand-lettered cardboard signs posted throughout the store to turn them off when they moved from one aisle to the next. The fluorescent tubes flickered and buzzed when activated and spilled watery illumination onto many centuries of literature, but not quite as far as the plank floor, which was heaped with books on both sides of the passages, narrowing the avenues even further. Dockerty groped his way forward with his feet to avoid kicking them over.
    The cases were ancient, built of old-growth oak from the East, and gray with the accumulation of dust that had worked its way deep into the grain. Although the proprietor was scrupulous with a duster so that none of his patrons would shun the place to keep from smearing his best suit or her new dress, the pulverized bones of prehistoric buffalo and extinct Indian tribes that made up the Santa Fe Trail would not be prevented entrance, either to the shop or Chief Dockerty’s nostrils.
    Sneeze. Blow nose. Creep forward. Repeat.
    A reader of bulletins and arrest reports exclusively, he hadn’t visited the place often, and not in months. He had only a vague memory of the layout, and Sharecross’ regard for his customers did not extend to sparing them the annoyance of the occasional dead end: Aisles that were open at both ends alternated with those whose exits were sealed with perpendicular bookcases, and as the bookseller was constantly rearranging his stock and changing how it was displayed, even a Daniel Boone would find himself retracing his footsteps and muttering all the way.
    But it was a Tuesday, and therefore a lucky one for the chief of the Good Advice Police Department (five officers, three of them part-timers). That was the day the book club gathered to drink iced tea, eat lemon cookies, and talk about Plot, Theme, and Character. All he had to do was follow the murmur of voices.
    â€œWell, I hated it. Six hundred pages about dancing bears and a boy biting a dog.”
    This was “Uncle Ned” Scoffield, whose ninety-nine-year-old voice cracked as air whistled through his dentures.
    â€œIt isn’t just about that, Ned. Garp’s a tragic hero.”
    Birdie Flatt: retired after forty years when the phone company yanked out the old switchboard. Dockerty knew her shrill tones from every call he’d placed when he was a patrolman new to the force.
    Someone else snorted. That would be Carl Lathrop, head of the town council, who overrode hecklers at meetings by way of his expressive nasal passages.