Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave Read Free Book Online

didn’t understand it.
    What he did understand was Dwight Smith wasn’t going to spend his life indoors staring at a goddamn spider in the corner of the room. Dwight Smith was a ticking time bomb who was going to cause a lot of pain.
    Why should.
    He was evolving. Why should Dwight Smith get to live a better life than him? Or that of the woman he had attacked?
    Why should?
    The answer was simple—he shouldn’t.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Our trip out to the railway line is reversed. Everything we saw on our way out we see on our way back, only from the other side of the road and heading the other way. There are some differences. The flow of traffic has increased a little, but not a lot. The sun has climbed a little, but not a lot. The temperature has raised another degree. There are more guys out in the fields raising sheep and cattle and turning seeds into vegetables. I couldn’t do it. I figure I could work on a farm for five days at the most before catching the same train Smith caught.
    Neither of us talk. We’re both thinking our own things. Kent is motionless, staring straight ahead, her hands barely doing any work as we cruise at seventy miles an hour in a straight line.
    Are we on the same page here?
    Hutton’s words keep coming back to me. Yes, I’m a cop again, yes I’m back on the force, yes I’m one of the team. But for the last three years, after killing the man who took my daughter away from me, I’ve been off the team. In that time I’ve developed some habits as a private investigator that don’t mesh well with being on the same page. That’s what Hutton is questioning. He’s asking if my loyalty is to the job, or to doing the right thing. Or at least what I think the right thing is.
    The service station Dwight Smith worked at is on the corner of a busy intersection with two separate entrances and two separate exits, one of each on a separate road, the intersection on this side of town, right where the farms end and the houses begin. There are a dozen pumps and half a dozen staff and a building in the middle of the forecourt that’s like a small air-traffic tower overlooking it all, the building and signage painted the same yellows and bluesDwight Smith was wearing, only the yellows and blues here aren’t splashed with red and streaked with black. We park next to the building and lock the car because recently two police cars have been stolen, which caused a memo to go around at work reminding us to use some of that common sense we were all raised with.
    The forecourt feels a few degrees hotter than the rest of the city. There are bags of charcoal for barbecues stacked up against one of the walls of the traffic tower, twenty-four packs of soft drink stacked next to them, and next to those are blackboards with special prices written on them, offering drink and chocolate bars for what I imagine is twice the price of a supermarket. We go inside. The guy behind the counter is between customers and is wiping up a coffee cup that’s been knocked over. His hands are full of paper towels. We ask him for the manager. He picks up the phone and a minute later the manager comes out and we all shake hands. His name badge tells the world his name is Andrew Andrews, which suggests his parents were lazy. Andrew Andrews is clean-shaven but has missed a patch beneath his chin, and has busy eyebrows that would look more appropriate on a Muppet.
    “Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here about Dwight Smith. That’s why he’s not at work, right? He’s in custody for something, right?”
    “You don’t seem surprised,” I tell him.
    “Hey,” he says, sounding cheerful, “every year we take on a couple of parolees, and every year they stop showing up for work, and every year somebody like you will come here and tell me why. But somebody has to hire these guys, right?” he says, still sounding cheerful, like hiring these guys can save the world. “What else you gonna do, just throw them into the streets and hope for