Read Online Home Free by Sonnjea Blackwell - Free Book Online Page A

would allow, carried
it to the trashcan. I dropped the plastic coffin in the can, peeled
the gloves off and threw them inside, then untied the bandana and
threw it away too. I went inside and scrubbed my arms and hands,
then left a message for Debbie to call when she returned from
work.
    I found a post-it stuck to my computer screen
that read, “Dinner seven o’clock”. I crumpled it up and threw it
across the room, missing the trashcan by a good three feet. I
checked my cell to see if I’d missed any phone calls while I had it
muted for my meeting with Jimmy C.
    The first message was from my mother.
Something about how, under the circumstances, we should pull
together and have a family dinner tonight. The second was from
Kevin. Something about how, under the circumstances, he would
sooner pull out his fingernails with pliers than have a family
dinner tonight.
    The third was from Pauline. “The first number
is a land line, and there were no calls to it at all Saturday
night. The second number is a cell phone. There was one call, at
ten fifty-four, originating from a pay phone at a liquor store on
Martin Luther King near the movie theater. I’ll be by after work.
We need to have a talk about Danny Salazar.”
    Damn. Anyone could have called from the pay
phone. It could have been Jenkins, but it could have been just
about anyone else, too. And I’d venture a guess that Danny had
never spoken to Jenkins before and could not identify him by voice,
but had simply taken the man at his word. Jimmy C had to have known
about the phone call when I’d talked to him earlier. He wasn’t
telling me everything, obviously.
    On the plus side, Danny wasn’t getting a lot
of calls from women.
    I called my mother and told her I had plans
for dinner, which went over like a lead balloon, but I didn’t care.
I couldn’t fathom spending the evening listening to Brian’s
campaign platform, unless maybe I was bound and sedated. Besides, I
had a date with a man who had a big... truck.
    I flipped the computer screen on and went
back online. I love the interwebs. I went to Google again, and then
sat there. I had this incredible search engine at my disposal, and
I had no idea what I was supposed to search for. I stared out the
window. A gray Ford Escort was parked at the curb in front of the
topless man’s house, and I wondered if it was a laundry service,
here to return all his shirts. Hopefully, they wouldn’t take away
all his pants. Other than that, the street was empty. After a few
minutes, a woman walking a scruffy, disreputable-looking mutt
appeared in my line of sight and then disappeared again at the
other edge of the window.
    Dammit, Alex, think.
    For the hell of it, I typed in Michael
Salazar, Jr. I got a few hits for a Michael Salazar, Jr., M.D. who
had written an article on penile dysfunction. I clicked on one of
the headings and a medical article appeared, complete with some
rather disturbing photographs. I guess photography isn’t always the
glamorous job of taking pictures of beautiful models. I clicked
back to get back to Google and did a search for the Minter
newspaper.
    The Sun-Herald’s home page was laid out with
current news headlines, weather and sports scores over the bulk of
the screen, with the left column reserved for other links. There
was a search option, so I typed in Michael Salazar, Jr. again and
hit go .
    The headline for an article from sixteen
years earlier popped up on screen, along with the notice that if I
wanted to read the article, I had to subscribe to the online
newspaper. I filled out the subscription page and dug my credit
card out of my wallet so I could enter the payment information. I
submitted the page and waited for the electronic response. Two
minutes later, I was looking at the article.
    The facts were far less sinister than what I
had remembered. Basically, Junior had been drinking, a month before
his eighteenth birthday, at a dive bar that had a reputation for
violence, and had gotten