Read Online Be Mine by Rick Mofina - Free Book Online Page A

feel their
anguish, their suffering, their loss, and their rage.
    “I know Cliff loved police work and thought the world of all of
you.” Molly lifted her head to the congregation, cast a sweeping gaze over
them, before seeing something that made her heart stop.
    A man who had been standing at the rear of the church, listening as
the others eulogized Hooper, was now taking slow steps up the aisle toward her,
his face coming into view until Molly recognized him. She was stunned. He found
a pew with an empty seat. He settled into it and looked at her.
    Oh my God! This can’t be!
    Transfixed for a moment, Molly struggled with her composure before
she finished reading her words. Afterward, the priest gestured to Beamon to
assist her back to her seat. Everyone at the service had assumed she’d been
overwhelmed by grief. No one knew the truth.
    Molly had just been visited by a ghost.

THIRTEEN

     
    Warm breezes fingered along the
waterways that laced the heart of the San Joaquin Valley to the small country
cemetery near Lodi where San Francisco Police Homicide Inspector Clifford
Hooper was buried.
    There was no marker. His headstone was not yet finished. Dying
flowers blanketed the dark earth of his grave. It had been a few days since
mourners stood to watch his casket being lowered into the ground. Then returned
to their lives and private fears.
    Only Bleeder was here today. Alone in the silence, broken by the
panicked chirp of a small bird in high-speed flight, as if fleeing the fact
that a murderer stood among the dead.
    Bleeder had come to pay his final respects. And as the sun dropped
beyond the Pacific, casting twilight over the valley and the Sierra Nevadas,
one question burned in his mind.
    Why hadn’t Molly acknowledged what he’d done?
    Hidden in the shadows at the edge of the cherry orchard bordering
the burial ground, he reached down for a long stalk of grass, placed it in his
mouth, and chewed on his situation.
    Molly must know. Deep in her heart she had to know. So why hadn’t
she signaled to him that he was getting through to her? It’d been days since
he’d removed Hooper. Why was she ignoring him? He repeated the question during
the drive back to San Francisco.
    The road rushed under him, time blurred, and memory pulled him back
through his life. His father was a career officer in the military, a job that
pinballed his family across the country. As an only child, Bleeder grew up
associating the smell of cardboard moving boxes with the sting of being the new
kid at school, the perpetual target of humiliation by hometown boys.
    He grew accustomed to his loneliness.
    When he reached his teens, he found the adventurous girls were drawn
to the mystique of the new guy. Their boredom led to the occasional sweaty
embrace at slow dances on Friday nights in the gym. But nothing beyond that.
That is, until he met Amy Tucker, a goddess from another world.
    She was a local beauty, a contender for homecoming queen who shocked
him at one dance when she appeared before him, her eyes hinting at danger, like
embers that had swirled from a distant fire.
    “You’re real cute,” Amy had said, taking his hand, peeling him from
the wall for a few dances. The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” floated in the
air and he held her so close he could feel her heart beating against his chest.
They were bathed in light streaking from the mirror ball. She smiled, then
kissed his cheek, then his mouth. Her lips tasted like cherry candy. She parted
them and her tongue found his. Later that night they made love under the empty
stadium bleachers. Amy was his first. She blew away his loneliness and his soul
came to life.
    He bought her flowers. They held hands between classes. But he
missed the warning signs, the stares and stifled giggles in their wake at
school, until the afternoon he walked home alone through the field by the train
tracks. Then it all became crystalline.
    Kyle Chambers and his friend Rowley Deet were waiting. They