Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter Read Free Book Online Page B

initiated it, in part because she wanted to distract herself, to fall away, to lose herself in the tumble and flow.
    The other part was that she didn’t want to talk to him about the things that had happened that day. Anyway, the sex had been nice, tender and slow, and she hadn’t felt caged, the way she sometimes felt when his thick arms surrounded her.
    In the doorway, he shuffled his feet. “I’m going to bed.”
    She smiled. “Go ahead. I just need to sit here a minute.”
    He hesitated. “You never told me, how was your mom today?”
    “Fine.”
    “She doing any better?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Great,” he said and edged along the wall to the bedroom. Caroline turned back to the window and hugged her knees as the car outside shifted into gear.
    Dupree looked over his shoulder once more at the house, then at the photograph in his hand. The man with the tattoos was still smirking, still staring out at Dupree as if he were unafraid and knew the secrets that Dupree knew about the capricious nature of death, about the vulnerability of women, about how easy it was to kill someone. He imagined the guy coming face-to-face with Caroline on the footbridge over the falls, and it made Dupree want to kill him.
    Spivey leaned over to look at the picture in Dupree’s hand. “So is that the guy we’re lookin’ for?”
    Dupree set the photo on the dashboard, shifted into gear, and spoke quietly to the smirking man looking out from the picture in front of him. “Hmm? That you? You the guy we’re lookin’ for?”

6
     
    Lenny was sitting in his uncle’s car across the street from the pawnshop when the fat pawnbroker pulled up in his pickup, unlocked the gate, and pushed it back. The guy was wearing Sea-hawks sweatpants and a filthy white T-shirt with a shiny frog on it. Lenny couldn’t understand why people wore dirty clothes like that. Drove him nuts. Shelly used to do that, when she wasn’t hooking, used to lounge around in whatever clothes happened to be close. Lenny even did her laundry sometimes and still she’d grab some tiny pair of shorts that she’d worn the day before rather than put on clean clothes. It was one of the things Lenny counted on never understanding about her.
    The shop was called Nickel Plate Pawn, but Lenny had been disappointed in the selection of handguns. He’d pick one up anyway, though that wasn’t why he was here. He was here because the thing in the park had changed everything, cut short his time.
    Lenny climbed out of the Pontiac and crossed the street, hands deep in the pockets of his khaki pants. The pawnshop owner had pulled the cyclone fence back and unlocked the door and was entering when Lenny came up behind him, grabbing the door before the shop owner could close it.
    The man jumped, turned, and looked at Lenny, his hand on his chest.
    “Jesus, man! I almost shit my pants. You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”
    “Sorry,” Lenny said, moving past him into the shop.
    “You’ll have to come back,” the man said, “I don’t open till eight-thirty.”
    Lenny ignored him and walked up and down the glass cases, looking at hunting knives. Maybe that would be better.
    The pawnshop owner looked at his watch. “Eight-thirty. That’s not for another twenty minutes.”
    “Oh,” Lenny said. “Right.”
    The pawnshop owner cocked his head and grinned a little bit as Lenny leaned over a glass case, peering in at an elaborate hunting knife with a bone-white handle.
    “What are you, some kinda retard?”
    “No,” Lenny said, and like a flash, he raised his left arm and brought his elbow down on the glass case, sending a deep crack along the length of it. Before the pawnshop owner could say anything, Lenny brought his elbow down again, this time shattering the glass in a circle around where his elbow had gone in. As the pawnshop owner stood there, dumbstruck, Lenny pushed the broken glass from the frame, reached in, and grabbed the hunting knife.
    When he turned, the man recognized