Read Online Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva - Free Book Online

bats on their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet in the snow. I slowed, rolled the passenger-side window down, and leaned toward it.
    â€œHey, Vinnie! Seen anything unusual tonight?”
    â€œNothing ’cept for Lucinda Miller standing in her window, giving us a good look at her tits.”
    His colleague snorted. “That ain’t so unusual.”
    I pulled out the three-flame Colibri that Zerilli had given me. I didn’t have anything that needed welding, so I used it to fire up a Cuban and smoked as I prowled the empty streets. I didn’t see anyone skulking about with a can of gasoline. I didn’t see anyone resembling Mr. Rapture. Except for the DiMaggios, I didn’t see anyone at all.
    The CD cycled around to “Nasty Habits” twice before I shut it off. Around three in the morning, the Bronco’s heater coughed and surrendered. The eastern sky was lightening when a newspaper delivery truck pulled up in front of Zerilli’s store and heaved out two bundles of city editions. I headed home to catch a couple hours’ sleep, see what my dreams could conjure.
    I heard the phone ringing through the apartment door, stepped in, and picked up the receiver.
    â€œYou!
    fucking!
    bastard!”
    â€œHello, Dorcas.”
    â€œSo, who is she?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe bitch you’ve been out fucking all night.”
    â€œWhat makes you think it was only one?”
    â€œI’m still your wife, you evil bastard!”
    â€œGood morning, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up. Just before I set the receiver down, I thought I heard Rewrite bark.
    *  *  *
    By the time I dragged myself in to work, the editors were meeting behind closed doors, discussing an issue that required their collective experience and judgment: Should the paper start printing the mayor’s name as “aaaaCarozza” or stick with the more headline-friendly “Carozza”? Judging by the muffled sounds coming through the wall, the debate was heating up.
    I snatched a newspaper off the stack beside the city desk and saw that page one was dominated by a four-column picture of Sassy. She had her paws on Ralph’s shoulders, digging at his ear with her tongue while Gladys stood by looking embarrassed. Looking at the page made me feel bad about what I’d done. Not that I gave a damn about Hardcastle, but I cared a whole lot about the paper.
    I was just a kid when Dan Rather broke into a Red Sox broadcast with the news that Pope Paul VI had died. “Maybe so,” my dad said, “but we won’t know for sure till we read tomorrow’s paper.” In a state where politicians lie like the rest of us breathe, the newspaper is the only institution people trust to tell the truth. I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of it.
    That night, I prowled Mount Hope again in the heatless Bronco, giving it up around three in the morning, when hypothermia set in and even Tommy Castro’s guitar couldn’t heat things up. My apartment was warm only by comparison, the landlord thrifty with his heating oil.
    Sleeping alone under a thin blanket, I dreamed of Norwegian brown rats with glowing red eyes and fierce cartoon dogs that wore red baseball caps and wielded Louisville Sluggers. The hair on the backs of their necks stood up as they growled in the dark and swung their bats at a man clutching a gas can in his left hand. He tried to escape the blows by crawling headfirst into an overturned plastic trash barrel, but the dogs clamped their jaws on his ankles and yanked him out. Their snapping teeth tore chunks of flesh from his thighs, and the rats scurried to devour the bloody pieces. A police car, blue lights swirling, roared down the street and screeched to a stop. The cops leaped out, shouted “Good dogs,” tossed them Beggin’ Strips, and stomped the man with their gleaming black jackboots. His mouth opened in a silent scream.
    He had my