Jack Daniels Six Pack by J. A. Konrath Read Free Book Online Page B

news.”
    He shrugged. A line of drool was running down his chin; Herb was still too numb to feel it. I made the universal wiping motion on my own face, and he got the hint and cleaned himself off.
    “Do you want to keep our appointment with Dr. Booster’s daughter, or call it a day?”
    “Bootherth daubder.”
    I nodded, glancing to the right as Benedict’s doctor approached. In one gloved hand was the bag of candy bars. In the other was a manila folder.
    “This may sound callous,” he said, handing us the folder, “but you got very lucky. Not only could it have been much worse, but it might have been fatal. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
    I opened the folder, taking a look at an X ray of the twenty-one remaining candy bars, including the one I’d almost bitten into.
    “Jethuth,” Herb said.
    “We counted over forty needles, thirty fishhooks, and ten X-Acto blades.” The doctor shook his head. “Only one candy out of the bunch was untampered with. If a hook or a blade got lodged in the throat, it might have easily severed an artery.”
    I stared mutely at the X ray, feeling myself grow very cold. Someone had spent a long time doctoring up this candy. Hours. I tried to imagine that person, hunched over a table, inserting fishhooks into chocolate bars. All this trouble, hoping I’d eat just one. Or maybe hoping I’d pass them out to people. I thought about Herb, almost dropping off the candy at the children’s ward. Both my hands clenched.
    “So, Doctor”––I tried to keep a lid on my rage—“if we find the person who did this, in your professional opinion, could we charge him or her with attempted murder?”
    “Lieutenant, there’s no question in my mind. I would say that you’d have a better chance of surviving a gunshot than one of these candy bars.”
    I thanked him, making sure I got his card in case we needed to talk again. Herb and I walked out to the parking lot in silence, leaving Mercy Hospital for the second time that day.
    “Lunch?” I asked.
    Benedict nodded. Eleven stitches in the mouth weren’t nearly enough to stop him from eating.
    Before we ate, we stopped at Herb’s house so he could get cleaned up. I waited in the car. I liked Bernice, his wife, but her idea of small talk was asking dozens of personal questions, none of which I felt like answering at the moment.
    When Herb came out, his bloody shirt had been replaced and he wore a new tie, this one too thin by at least twenty years.
    We went to a sub place, where I got a meatball sandwich and Herb got a hoagie with double meat and cheese.
    “How is it?” I asked.
    Benedict shrugged. “I can’t tathte anything. But it smellth great.”
    After feeding ourselves, we headed for Reginald Booster’s house in Northwest suburban Palatine. To do that we had to get on Interstate 90 going west. It was also called the Kennedy. The other big expressways in Chicago were the Edens, the Eisenhower, and the Dan Ryan. Naming them after politicians didn’t make them any more endearing.
    The Kennedy had been under construction for the last two years, so the normally awful traffic was twice as bad. But then there has never been a time when at least one expressway wasn’t being repaired. “Expressway” was a misnomer.
    Even with my cherry on the roof and the siren wailing, I couldn’t get past the single-lane traffic. Driving up on the median was another perk of being a cop, but the medians were swarming with construction workers and yellow machines. I beared it, but I didn’t grin.
    Benedict went over the file with me as we drove, his lisp improving as he practiced his enunciation. On August 9, a person or persons unknown broke into Dr. Reginald Booster’s house at 175 Elm Avenue in Palatine. Booster lived there alone, his wife having passed away three years earlier in a car accident. The perp tied up Dr. Booster and slit his throat. Before death, he was stabbed in the chest and abdomen area twelve times, not deeply enough to