Death and Taxes by Susan Dunlap Read Free Book Online

projects.”
    “Hardly the same thing.”
    “No, but I understand—”
    I stood up and glared down at him. “No, you don’t, Howard. You’re six foot six, and a cop. All the streets lead outward for you. You don’t know what a roadblock is. Or a prison.”
    “Jill, I can’t believe you—”
    “Believe it!” I stalked to the door, opened it, stepped out, and slammed it. The cold air iced the sweat on my face. I breathed in hungrily till my lungs couldn’t take any more air. It had been as if I’d been breathing through a thick towel before.
    I slid into my VW and backed out of the driveway, feeling the rough fake leather of the steering-wheel cover, inhaling the thin smell of gasoline from the spill on the side of the car. I’d loved that smell as long as I could remember. And when I shifted into first, I could see the road winding endlessly ahead of me. I turned the radio to blare and stepped on the gas.
    I didn’t want to be tied down by the house, or by Howard.
    It was probably less than half an hour later when I realized I had no idea where I was going. It was 2:00 A.M. I was cold and tired, and I felt that queasy mixture of anger and sorrow that I always do when I lose my temper, as if I’d burst free for a few minutes, only to find myself in a bigger cage. The cage of the police department where I was the only woman in Detective Detail, where the rules were made to suit men and I was judged on how well I adapted. Or maybe it was the larger cage of society and its view of women.
    Howard had hit a nerve with the jogger. I felt as I had when I was fourteen years old when my older brother, Mike, drove across country, camping. I’d thought that trip the ultimate adventure. I’d started to plan my own trip to follow my graduation when my mother said, “You can’t do that. You’re a girl.”
    But how much of this was my reaction to Howard and the time he spent on the damned house? I sat, shivering, considering that. I hadn’t been just angry when I was yelling at him; I’d been panicky, caged in that house just like the jogger in the patrol car. Just as I had when I’d been left at my grandmother’s for months while my parents moved. I jolted. I hadn’t made that connection before. Odd, the things about your life that would be so obvious to anyone else. I’d never liked my grandmother, a brittle woman in a house so cluttered, every step was potential disaster. I’d hated being abandoned there when my parents and Mike went off to settle in our new house in Newark, Delaware; Frederick, Maryland; Plainfield, New Jersey. But her tiny house near the sawmill bore no resemblance to Howard’s. Why would it …
    But I was too tired to try to find the answer. The only thing I could think of now was bed—the one place I wasn’t about to go. Instead I dragged a blanket out of the trunk, folded down the backseat, and curled up on the scratchy convex surface.
    I could have driven the car back into Howard’s driveway and been safe. But I was damned if I’d do that. I tucked my purse with my revolver under my head, pulled a blanket over me, and fell asleep, thinking how glad I was to have a car to be in.
    About five-thirty I woke up with the remnants of a dream of an infant in an overflowing tub. It didn’t take an analyst to decipher that one. And now after a bit of dream clarification I knew I wasn’t about to throw the baby Howard out with the dirty bathwater of what he had never had to experience enough to understand.
    It wasn’t till I pulled up in front of the house that I saw the form my own sting would take. The ideal sting would have started with raising Howard’s house onto wheels and carting it off, but in an imperfect world, idealization isn’t always possible. Slightly less satisfying would be the Azalea magnifica sting.
    Gracious woman that I am, I didn’t dig up his Azalea magnifica, not entirely. Just halfway. The roots were still in the ground. But it would take neither a gardener nor a