Lucky Day by Barry Lyga Read Free Book Online

death investigation would be handled by the Upstart from Calverton. And probably bungled. Every time he considered the gun, he tucked it back away, safe and sound.
    He was pretty sure everyone who eventually offed himself did the same thing. Many, many times.

Chapter 6
    With about a week to go before the election, the race was a statistical dead heat. Incumbents of the sheriff’s office traditionally did not campaign, which was good for G. William—he’d added even more weight to his bulk. His color was sallow, except for strained blooms of red on his cheeks and his usual florid nose. He wheezed when he stood, when he sat, when he walked more than thirty feet at a stretch. If the people of the Nod and the surrounding county hadn’t already lost faith in him, they would have if he’d had to attend campaign events. Just the sight of him would have dropped his chances at reelection straight into the toilet.
    The final indignity (well, he reasoned, the penultimate indignity) came exactly one week before the race, when Tommy Shanahan called to give him a heads-up that the morning paper would carry its editorial endorsement. G. William didn’t bother to ask for whom. He’d been expecting this, and thanked Tommy—with genuine gratitude—for the warning.
    “At least Weathers isn’t riding you anymore,” Tommy said weakly.
    In the pages of the paper, sure. But that blog was still out there, and even though he knew he shouldn’t, G. William checked in regularly.
    Failure…!
    Blight on the Sheriff’s Office…!
    Untenable…!
    Violation of the public trust…!
    He read the case files over and over, to the point that he could recite them from memory. They were the only proof he had that his memory was even functioning these days—he’d worn mismatched socks, the wrong tie with his uniform, a pajama top under his shirt. His brain fired at random, it seemed, to the point that he made sure to come to work long before the morning commuters took to the streets and long after the evening drivers were off the roads.
    He didn’t trust himself behind the wheel. His mind drifted. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from coming into the office each day, huddling at his desk behind a closed door, looking for something—anything—that could lead to a break in either case.
    Some days, he believed they were connected. They had to be! Two young, pretty blond girls get killed in a town with a murder rate of zilch? Within two weeks? You’d have to be a blithering idiot not to see the connection!
    And yet…other days, he shied away from this theory, all too aware of the fate that befell cops who tried to fit facts to theory, not the other way around. Other than location and general appearance, there was nothing to tie the cases—or, indeed, the girls—to each other. Blond? Yep, sure. So what? Lots of blonds in the world. Pretty? Damn straight. But in different ways. Calling Samantha Reed pretty was just being honest. Cute girl. Calling Cara Swinton pretty was probably a crime of understatement. She wasn’t model quality, as she seemed to think she was, but she wasn’t deluded, either. She was damn close. Different girls, different kinds of girls.
    Who wanted them dead?
    And why?
    With six days to go before the election, G. William wore one black shoe and one brown shoe to the office. And that turned out to be the break he’d been waiting for.
      
    “Gettin’ your clothes mixed up, Sheriff?” the receptionist asked as he walked into the building. He paused, aware of the hush that fell over the office as she asked it. Loralynn Sweeney was somewhere north of seventy, long overdue for retirement, but G. William had too much heart to let the old bird go. The silence that greeted this latest in Loralynn’s line of off-the-cuff bombs told G. William what he’d already suspected—the office had been aware of his erratic behavior (both sartorial and not) over the past few weeks, and they’d instituted an informal code of silence. Now