Read Online The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis - Free Book Online

again shut down. He’d fallen asleep without shutting off lights, and they had come back on just long enough that his eyes had to readjust to the darkness. As they did so, and as stars came back into the sky above, he remembered.
    The telescope.
    It was supposed to have gone out days ago. He’ d bought it from a woman in Texas whose grandfather had recently died. Produced by a company that, originally a processor of 3-D films, had surfaced briefly in the fifties to send into the marketplace a stream of high-quality, low-cost optical products—microscopes, binoculars, reading glasses, prisms—the telescope shared its birth year, 1957, with Sputnik. And the Seattle-based collector of all things Sputnikian would be wondering where his expensive telescope was.
    Very unlike him to forget things like this, not to follow through. Maybe those dreams were having a greater effect than he realized. Taking their toll. He’d have to send an e-mail to the buyer right away.
    Automatically, he went to the computer and hit the switch. Nothing. Of course. No power. And standing there, for a moment he felt something he couldn’t at first identify, then knew to be panic—occasioned, he initially thought, by his lapse. But the veil fell away, and he came to understand that the feeling was something more elemental: panic at being out of touch, at having his connection to the world torn away.
    The moment, the feeling, quickly passed, but a shadowy residue, like an afterimage, remained.
    When the lights flared back to life, he stood there blinking.

 
     
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    FOUR YEARS AGO he’d hit a pothole.
    Man’s name was Les Baylor, and he worked midnight shift at a hospice, there for most of his adult life, twenty-some years. His routines had been simple to track because they were just that, routine, hard and fast. Lived in an unadorned, unkempt, underpopulated apartment complex eight blocks from the hospice. Stopped off at the Recovery Room for a beer on his way home when working since the Recovery Room opened at six A.M., walked up that way most late afternoons for an hour or so. Two, three beers was his limit. Breakfast he took at the hospice cafeteria. Every other evening he visited Blackhawk Diner for the special of the day; the rest, he dined at home on sandwiches and the occasional order-in pizza.
    After it was done, Christian stood in the apartment looking around. Such a bare existence had gone on here. No television, maybe a dozen library books long overdue. Three radios, one for each room including the bathroom. Jeans, shirts, and scrubs folded and kept in layers on steel shelves in the single closet, socks and underwear left jumbled in a laundry basket beneath. No medications in the bathroom, only toiletries, comb and brush, safety razor caked with mineral deposits. In the kitchen, bags of health-food cereal, a keglike container of orange juice, cheese and cold cuts, mustard, milk, dark bread.
    Simplify, simplify.
    He shouldn’t care, of course, or stay around to ask questions. It was done. And strangely enough it wasn’t the why of it that rattled about his head, but the who of it. The man lying on his bed as if asleep had taken up little enough space in this world. He worked, he ate, he slept. Listened to the radio, one would have to suppose. Had no family and no apparent friends aside from a couple of fellow workers who occasionally joined him at the Recovery Room after shift.
    The reason, the why, belonged to the person or persons who arranged this gig. But what of the man himself, Les Baylor? Had he left so much as a shadow in crossing this world? And what could the shape of that shadow have been, for someone to want him dead?
    Christian poked at the clothes, picked up shoes to look at their laces and soles, shuffled through bills and recent mailings on the desk, which was particleboard, crumbling back to sawdust at the nearest edge. He turned each radio on. Two set to classical music, the other to easy