Read Online The Sleeping and the Dead by Jeff Crook - Free Book Online

nothing but dust and my own empty suitcases under the bed.
    I tried to remember what I had been dreaming before I woke up. The woman reminded me of someone. I thought maybe one of the neighbors, maybe the Korean lady I had seen downstairs in the mercado. I always had nightmares when I slept in a new bed. I told myself this was no different. It had to be something reasonable. I was used to my special friends hanging around, haunting dark corners and stairwells and old elevators, but when they sat on the end of the bed, that was different. Seeing three in one day was also a bad sign. All the really horrible parts of my life had started this way. Or maybe when I was counting down to self-destruct, I started seeing ghosts. That’s what the police counselor told me.
    I rolled over facing away from the window. I could almost feel her weight still there on the end of the bed, pressing down the sheets. I didn’t think I would gonk because I was shaking with the cold, but I did, with the baseball bat beside me in the bed.
    The next morning, the bedroom door stood wide open. My sneakers were sprawled like a dead animal on the floor, tied together by their shoestrings.

 
    Tuesday

 
    7
    I T WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK BEFORE I made it to Marks Camera. As usual, the door was locked so I knocked. On my way over, I bought a sausage biscuit at Mrs. Winner’s. A light rain pattered on the hood of my jacket. While I waited, I ate my brunch. Sometimes it took a while for Deiter to answer his door. Sometimes you had to call and tell him you were outside because he would be out back dismantling some three-hundred-thousand-dollar lens for NASA and wouldn’t hear it if a SWAT team kicked down his door. Finally, he opened it a crack and squinted out like he was afraid to get wet. I don’t think he recognized me at first.
    I shoved the uneaten half of my biscuit in his face. “Oh, you got the Leica!” He accepted my food offering and opened the door.
    Deiter’s place was a ranch-style house built around 1960 and converted, like all the other houses on his street, into retail or office space sometime in the late seventies. The front room of his shop looked like it had been recently burglarized, but it always looked like that, just as Deiter always looked like he had just crawled out of a hayloft. You half expected to see straw in his hair and sheep shit down the front of his paisley pajamas. He wore no pajama top and had tits bigger than mine, though his sagged like something out of a National Geographic magazine. He sported greasy blond hair and a bushy hay-colored Viking beard littered with enough yellow crumbs to reconstruct a whole Twinkie.
    Once upon a time, his shop had been a dentist’s office. Even with all the cameras and other equipment, I could still smell burning teeth and hear the whine of the drill. No other place in the world smells like a dentist’s office.
    Deiter lived in a single room off the back. The rest of the shop was given over to photography equipment, storage, computers and offices for his myriad other ventures. Sometimes you’d see police cars parked in front of his place, and sometimes you’d see other types of cars, mostly rentals, with men in dark suits and sunglasses sitting behind the wheel, whispering into their coat sleeves.
    I followed him back to his workshop, which looked like a lawyer’s office, except instead of stacks of filings and depositions and folders, there were piles of laundry and empty Doritos bags, as well as technical manuals and photography magazines. He was regularly published in most of the best ones. I noticed several had most of their pages ripped out. “I use them for toilet paper,” he said.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThey are so full of shit. Sit down.”
    â€œWhere?” Other than the chair behind his desk and a loveseat buried in garbage, there was nowhere to sit.
    â€œOK, stand up. See if I care.”
    I passed the