Dust to Dust by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online

knew. People sometimes did. As if a shock wave had somehow rippled out from the death scene, reaching them faster than the speed of sound, or the speed of the messenger.
    He’s dead to me.
    He doubted Mike Fallon would remember saying those words, but they still rang in Kovac’s ears as he sat alone in the car. He had dropped Liska at the station to get a running start on the investigation. She would contact Andy Fallon’s IA supervisor to find out what he’d been working on, what his attitude had been lately. She would get his jacket sent up from personnel, find out if he’d been making any use of the department shrink.
    Kovac would’ve traded places with her in a heartbeat, except the sense of obligation was too strong. He cursed himself for a sap and got out of the car. Some days life just sucked when you were a decent human being.
    He peered into the house through a narrow, rectangular window in the front door. The living room seemed shabbier than it had the night before. The walls needed paint. The sofa should have seen the back door of Goodwill years ago. A strange contrast to the massage chair and big-screen TV.
    He rang the doorbell and knocked for good measure, then waited, impatient, trying not to wonder what a stranger would think of
his
living room with the empty fish tank. Someday he’d have to get around to getting a life outside the job.
    His hands fidgeted at his coat pockets. He dug out a stick of Juicy Fruit, his nerves quivering at the base of his neck like ants just beneath his skin. He knocked again. Flashes of last night popped in his memory—Mike Fallon, the old cop, broken, discarded, depressed, drunk. . . . There was no sign of life within the house. No motion. No sound.
    Sinking in snow halfway up his shins, he went around to the side of the house, looking for a bedroom window. Wouldn’t that be a story for the six o’clock news? Father-son cop suicides. Paul Harvey would probably pick that one up to depress all of America over lunch tomorrow. Pointless death over chicken salad and Big Macs.
    He found a ladder in the tiny garage that was bursting at the seams with the usual life’s accumulation of barely used junk. A nearly new Subaru Outback tricked out for a handicapped driver took up most of the space. Some other cop must have returned it from Patrick’s back lot after the party, or someone else had taken Mike to the bar, then melted into the woodwork when the trouble started. Someone who didn’t want a drunk puking in his backseat.
    The shade was up on Mike Fallon’s bedroom window. Mike lay on his back on the bed, arms flung out, head turned to one side, mouth hanging open like a busted gate. Kovac held his breath and looked for some sign of Fallon’s heart beating beneath his thin T-shirt.
    “Hey, Mikey!” he shouted, knocking on the window.
    Fallon didn’t flinch.
    “Mike Fallon!”
    The old man jolted on the second round of pounding, eyes slitting open, resentful of the light. He made a raw sound of fear at the sight of the face pressed to his window.
    “Mike, it’s Sam Kovac!”
    Fallon rocked himself up in the bed, hawking up a night’s worth of phlegm.
    “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted. “Are you out of your fucking head?”
    Kovac cupped his hands around the sides of his face so he could see better. “You gotta let me in, Mike. We need to talk.” His breath fogged the glass and he wiped the moisture away with his coat sleeve.
    Fallon scowled and waved him off. “Leave me alone. I don’t need to hear it from you.”
    “Hear what?”
    “Last night. Bad enough I did it. I don’t need my nose rubbed in it.”
    He looked pathetic sitting there in his underwear like a derelict Humpty-Dumpty: the barrel body and the twig legs, beard stubble and bloodshot eyes. He brushed over the flattop, wincing, pressing gingerly.
    “Just let me in, will you?” Kovac said. “It’s important.”
    Fallon squinted at him, trying to size it up. No one hated a surprise