Breach of Duty (9780061739637) by Judith A. Jance Read Free Book Online Page B

“calling the son of a bitch a worm is giving him way too much credit or being far too hard on worms, one or the other.”
    Sue looked across the seat and gave me a rueful smile. “Thanks, Beau,” she said. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks he’s a creep.”
    â€œHardly,” I said. “Now, the best thing for you to do is to go to work and forget about him. Get out the map and figure out how to get where we’re going.”
    Obligingly, Sue hauled out the Thomas Guide . She opened it and leafed through several pages before finally settling on one. “We’re looking for Harrison. From this it looks like we turn off the freeway at the Highway 2 exit. The problem is, it’s confusing. I can’t tell from this map exactly how the freeway exit works there.”
    â€œAt least these days there is a freeway,” I told her. “Back when I was growing up, I-5 was little more than a gleam in the eye of a few far-thinking urban planners. In the fifties Highway 99 was the only way to get from Seattle to Everett—stop and go all the way.”
    â€œSo what’s changed?” she asked. “We’re not setting what you’d call land-speed records here.”
    It was true. The ongoing traffic backup was bad enough that it took another twenty minutes to reach the Highway 2 exit which, it turned out, was the wrong way to go after all. Whoever designed that particular exit is probably the same genius who stuck the city of Seattle with another poor excuse for a freeway exit, a lingering traffic jam-generating jumble that’s commonly referred to as the Mercer Mess.
    Highway 2 was indeed the closest exit to Harrison Avenue, but you can’t get there from there. Instead, we shot out across the Hewitt Avenue Trestle and had to work our way back from somewhere up by Lake Stevens. Our second pass took us back down I-5 with no way to get off until we were well past downtown Everett. The third time was the charm. We went as far north as Marine View Drive and worked our way back south from there.
    The residential area east of I-5 in Everett seems isolated from the rest of the city. And it is. Lopped off from town by freeway on one side and river on the other, that isolation shows in some houses far more than in others. The address Sue read off was in the 2400 block of Harrison Avenue in a group of dingy houses situated on long narrow lots with backyards bordering on the freeway right of way.
    Mildred and Andrew George’s modest little bungalow was covered with puke-green siding that dated from that long-ago time when conventional wisdom still preached that asbestos was our friend. A few of the brittle fireproof, weatherproof shingles had broken off, showing the black layer of tar paper underneath. The asphalt shingles on the roof must not have fared much better since most of the roof was covered by a large blue tarp. On that sunny late-April day having a leaky roof maybe didn’t matter so much, but I knew the rains would be back soon—rains and wind, too. When those came, the tarp wouldn’t do diddly-squat to keep the water out.
    In the unrelenting gloom of that derelict yard, the only antidote was a pair of magnificent rhododendrons standing on either side of the sagging front porch. Their leafy green branches ended in huge magenta blooms the size of dinner plates. Maybe the house and yard had been allowed to languish in neglect, but the rhodies didn’t seem to mind.
    I had barely stopped the car when an elderly man about the same age as Malcolm Lawrence appeared in the side yard, plodding slowly toward the front fence. Initially, I thought he was coming to the gate to greet us. Instead, he jerked to a sudden stop a few feet beyond a metal clothesline pole. He turned around. Then, without even glancing in our direction, he started back the way he had come.
    â€œLook,” Sue murmured. “That poor old man is tethered to a