Read Online Last Ragged Breath by Julia Keller - Free Book Online Page A

like this, healer and wounded, changing roles as the need arose. If, in the final reckoning, her problems had been more profound than his, if her mental instability had kept their lives churned up while his issues were ordinary, a matter of a bad day every now and again, then so be it.
    â€œYou did a good job for this town for so many, many years,” she said, her voice soft, with a gentle ripple moving through it, like a sheet hung out to dry in a mild spring breeze. “You gave it everything you had. All of your time and your energy and your passion. You were a hell of a sheriff. But it’s all over with now.”
    She meant to be kind, so he couldn’t tell her what he was really thinking: That’s exactly what I’m afraid of .
    *   *   *
    Later, dinner dishes loaded and dishwasher under way, the furry thrum of its work sounding like another kind of digestion, they retreated to the big living room. Nick sat in his recliner with a book open on his lap— An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson—and Mary Sue occupied a small corner of the couch, her long legs tucked up under her, watching a TV show with the sound turned low. The phone rang. They looked at each other. It felt at once like one of those Saturday nights before he’d changed jobs, when they would barely be settled into their chairs when the phone exploded over and over again like a series of benign bombs, leaving the evening in shreds and tatters. Those nights, Nick had rarely bothered to take off his boots after he got home for dinner. He knew he’d just have to put them back on again, along with his hat and his coat and his holster.
    â€œHey, Nickie, my man.”
    Nick recognized the voice of Vince Dobbs, grandson of Bundy Barnes, a Raythune County commissioner. Vince ran a car wash a mile or so outside the city limits. He and Nick had gone to Acker’s Gap High School together. That was about the only thing they had in common.
    â€œJust wanna make sure you heard,” Vince went on. He spoke rapidly, so rapidly that Nick had once compared his cadence to a squirrel’s frisky scamper. “Gonna be all over town by morning. ’Member the guy who was running the show around here for the resort? Big man? Lotsa hair? Kinda loud? Real asshole?”
    â€œEd Hackel.”
    â€œThat’s the one. Well, they found him dead this morning and it weren’t no natural causes. And guess who got dragged in for questioning? Okay, you’ll never guess, so I’m gonna tell you. Royce Dillard.”
    Nick scratched his cheek. The twinge he’d just felt had nothing to do with any special kinship with Hackel or Dillard; it was the fact that, until a few months ago, no one had had to call and tell him the news. He knew the news. He knew it ahead of everybody else—including a nosy fool like Vince Dobbs.
    â€œHuh.” He didn’t want to give Vince the satisfaction of his interest.
    â€œYeah. Guy’s head was all bashed in, way I hear it. Big ole mess.”
    Gossip was a commodity, a fungible, tradable article of commerce. It was currency. And always before, Nick had controlled the asset side of things; he was the one who decided to whom to dole it out, and when, and how much. Now he was on the outside. Now he was no different from Vince Dobbs. Or Rhonda Lovejoy, come to that, one of Bell’s assistant prosecutors, another renowned purveyor of local information—except that Rhonda, given her position, would already know a hell of a lot more than he did.
    Two homicides had occurred since Nick had left the sheriff’s office in November, but they were routine, unexciting: First, a domestic violence case in December, for which the crazy-jealous SOB was now serving a life sentence at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex. And then there was a shooting death on New Year’s Eve at a tattoo parlor along Route 6; the perpetrator had thoughtfully shot himself after shooting his