Read Online Light Before Day by Christopher Rice - Free Book Online Page B

discovered that Nate had smashed through the back of them with a hammer, pulled coils of wiring through, and taped the individual strands to the shelves in a pattern that made sense only to him. I found a dirty glass and scrubbed it as if I'd retrieved it from a sewer pipe.
    Once the pills were in him, Nate rolled onto his back, his eyes wide and his chest red and heaving, and started picking at the skin on his left arm. I asked him to stop and he told me he would as soon as he could feel his arm again.
    For a while, I just stared down at him. My Daniel Brady story was dying on the vine. I had just been fired from the only media outlet I had access to, and my only source was a speed freak who believed that an organism had taken up residence behind his eye and that the Department of Homeland Security was having him tailed. I did believe that Nate had seen Daniel Brady in West Hollywood, but I didn't think there was a chance in hell I could make anyone else believe it too.
    I wanted to hurt him as much as he was hurting himself. That's when I realized that pursuing Daniel Brady and Scott Koffler had been nothing more than an attempt to escape from myself, and I felt a sudden surge of guilt that kept me from shaking the gasping deranged wreck of a young man before me.
    The look in Nate's eyes told me that he was seeing eight of me or none at all. I leaned against the wall until his eyes started to drift shut; then I went into the living room where I pulled the blankets and towels from the windows and stacked them next to the sofa. Screw Nate's privacy. If he got any more privacy, it would probably kill him.
    I checked on him again and saw that he lay limp and twisted on the mattress, as if he had been dropped from the Emser Tile building. I put one hand to his bare chest to make sure he was still breathing.
    Out in the hallway, Nate's neighbor was standing in the open door to his apartment. He was tall and lean, with a shiny bald dome and sympathetic eyes behind invisible-framed glasses.
    "You guys finished yet?" he asked in a soft, high-pitched voice.
    "I wasn't with that crew," I said.
    "I've talked to that kid," he whispered. "Back in my day, the drugs were about the search for the soul. That drug is about getting rid of it."
    "Are you sober?" I asked.
    "Twenty years," he said. "You?"
    "Forty-eight hours."
    He disappeared inside his apartment. When he returned, he handed me a business card
    printed with his first name and last initial, along with his home and mobile numbers. The guy was obviously a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Your generation," he said quietly. "You die too quickly to get anyone's attention."
    After he went back inside his apartment, I turned and slid the card under Nate's door, even though I knew that I was the one the man had tried to reach out to.

    Rod Peters had left three messages for me expressing his condolences and asking me to meet him for dinner. He made no mention of Jim, the former Scott's kid he had been trying to locate. I figured he had assumed I had dropped the story.
    The six o'clock news had just started when I heard a harsh knock on my door. I thought it might be one of my neighbors, but when I opened the door, Scott Koffler brushed past me before I had time to collect myself.
    "How'd you get in?" I asked him.
    "Your neighbor's nice," he said.
    I leaned against the edge of the open door as he studied the Krewe of Dionysus poster above my love seat. He was wearing a backward baseball cap and a USC Trojans football jersey. I still couldn't tell if his costume was a device for earning the trust of his young charges or if the guy genuinely lived in a state of perpetual adolescence.
    "How's not drinking going?" he asked, giving me his full attention. "I hear you had a rough day."
    "You need to leave, Scott."
    He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. "I thought you were a southern gentleman.
    You're not even going to offer me anything to drink?"
    "There's a sink right behind you."
    His