Read Online The Perfect Crime by Les Edgerton - Free Book Online Page A

through his mind.
    “Eddie, the only hard part of this is I have to convince St. Ives that a single mistake on his part gets him blown to hell and back and I won’t blink an eye doing it.” He straightened around in the seat and put the car back in gear.
    “You think I can convince him of that, Eddie?
    ***
    On the drive back to town, Eddie was quiet for a long time until he began talking again. “Where’d you say you got all this shit, Reader? Why can’t it be traced?”
    Reader reached into his pants pocket and felt around for a bill. They were approaching the toll booth for the Pontchartrain Causeway.
    “Easy. I got the only traceable part from someone who won’t talk.”
    “Bullshit! You can’t trust anyone.”
    “I can trust this guy, I think.”
    “Oh yeah? How so?”
    Reader stared at his partner and smiled.
    “Because he’s dead.”

 
    JACK FOGARTY WASN’T DEAD however. He was lying in a hospital bed with needles in his arms and tubes inserted into every possible orifice.
    His brother Grady was at his store, which was located in what Dayton residents called the Oregon Historical District. It should have been called the “Oregon Deteriorated District,” Grady thought. It was a neighborhood where the local liquor store wouldn’t be apt to advertise “Free wine samples,” as he’d seen a store out in the suburbs do one time. Jack’s store was on Fifth Street, off Patterson and not far from the Great Miami River. Grady was familiar with the Miami. He’d seen more than a few floaters fished from its depths. When he was a kid he swam in it, took home stringers of smallmouth bass from its waters. The Miami still had fish in it, but you didn’t eat them. Not unless your body was low on its lead quotient for the day.
    It was a day and a half removed from his brother’s attack and Jack had passed the crisis during the previous night. Chances were fifty-fifty he’d live, but the doctor still didn’t know the extent of his brain injury and how it would manifest. They were running test after test and the bill was mounting. Grady tried to keep his mind off that.
    There was one positive about all this. After all the misfortune piled on him and his brother, once again there was a direction to his life. This sounded terrible when Grady considered it, but it was true. He had a mission once again. To find Jack’s attacker. A negative positive, if such a thing even existed, but Grady couldn’t deny the heightened state he had been in ever since he’d discovered his brother’s bloody body. He realized how much he’d missed the surge of adrenaline that came when you were on a case. Especially this case. Doing something useful. That was it. He realized how purposeless he’d come to feel in the past few years since he’d been forced out to pasture. Oh sure, he helped Jack out a lot at the store and he hustled security jobs when they became available, but jobs weren’t plentiful for a man with only one good eye, even if the vision in it was still 20-20. He had too many days when all he did was go fishing.
    Or drinking. A lot of that lately. Booze and women. You hang around the one, you get the other. He’d go into a bar thinking he’d have one quick beer and it seemed like there’d always be an attractive and willing woman in the joint and two hours later he would know more about his new friend than he wanted to. There were times when Grady wasn’t sure whether good looks was a blessing or a curse. It was a toss-up. In a bar, with a beautiful woman sitting next to him, it seemed like a good thing, but the next morning staring out a bleary eye at the disheveled form lying next to him made him think otherwise. He suspected many of the women that ended up in his bed felt the same and he couldn’t much blame them. What he hated most was the morning cup of coffee they both felt obliged to share and which he felt they took with the same sense of sober awkwardness as he did. Rarely did he go out with any of