Read Online Elvendude by Mark Shepherd - Free Book Online

might have hung on to it for his mother to examine, but if he were caught with it, he doubted she would be able to bail him out. Even if she could, it would be an awkward situation, one his mother didn't need. Being a cop was hard enough without having to fix charges against your son.

    The hallway just outside the johns was vacant, and he concluded that no one was after him. They knew him here; he was clean, and he was, to the off duty cops who moonlighted there, family. Still. Better safe than sorry.

    From the rest room, he should have turned right to return to the Yaz. That's where he needed to be. Instead, he hesitated and took note of his surroundings. The walls in the corridor were painted white, with blue on the lower half. The effect, he assumed, made the space look larger than it was.

    Why am I going down here? he thought as he turned left. I need to get back to work.

    The encounter with Cory left an acrid taste in his mouth. He felt tainted, as if whatever drug or drugs the boy was on had transferred to his bloodstream. Cory's breath had been foul, and he wondered if he had inhaled something evil, intoxicating; he felt a desperate need to take a shower, run laps, something, anything.

    What's wrong with me? he thought. This is crazy. There's no way he could have infected me. But his feelings told him something different. He felt . . . poisoned. Cory, what did you do to me?

    Got to get back to the Yaz. Biz is picking up. Spence doesn't even have the bank yet. Got to . . . 

    But he couldn't. He proceeded down the hallway with the white and blue walls, toward another area of the Marketplace, a large space that hadn't been leased yet. He'd seen it before, a nice large room with lots of exposed ducts and hanging lights, the ubiquitous concrete columns. Six large rectangular windows, eight panes, about a foot square, in each. This would make an excellent nightclub, good dancing, even bet the acoustics are favorable. . . . The place reminded him of an old gymnasium, with the high ceiling, wooden floors. Only thing missing was the basketball hoops. Here, in this unoccupied space, he smelled the age of the building, something he missed in the other shops, which had new equipment and furnishings and goods, all made in the last ten years. Ancient and earthy; Adam sensed something reaching from below, several floors down, past the basement.

    His mind glazed over with a mixture of exhaustion, confusion, and a lingering surge of hormones from his talk with Moira. If perhaps he had caught some secondhand something from Cory, he could imagine how messed up the kid was. A lightness seized him, as if he were suddenly a hundred pounds lighter, or if he were drifting away; but no, his sneakered feet still touched the wooden floor. Though his knees felt like wet sponges, they firmly supported him.

    Thin trails of smoke poured from the vents, but he didn't assume this meant fire; he found the sight tranquilizing, not alarming, as it might have been under other circumstances.

    But what's happening now? he thought, and a small part of him told him it was nothing, this was as natural and necessary as the sun rising in the morning.

    The smoke was actually fog, heavy fog, which clung to the wooden floor and spread out from several points. Sunlight pouring in from outside flickered, dimmed, as if dark storm clouds masked the sun. The round hanging lights simply ceased to be on, though he didn't remember when they switched off.

    At some point the voice within him that fought against the change gave in and allowed him to go with this new experience. He felt comforted and safe, despite the strangeness of what he was seeing. What it was he saw remained vague, and at the same time he knew that he was not capable of comprehending any further.

    Just below the surface of the fog, which continued to spread in a layer, lights flickered. A circle of small fires formed in the center of the fog.

    He tried to count the candles, but