Predator by Patricia Cornwell Read Free Book Online

tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can’t believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it’s true and still can’t comprehend it. How could this happen to her?
         How could Johnny be dead?
         She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.
         I’m sorry, she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn’t entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.
         “You’ve got to get up,” she says to Stevie.
         Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang .380 pistol on the table by the bed.
         “Come on, wake up.”
         Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God, no.
         When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there in Gainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.
         Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.
         He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.
         He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.
         That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.
         “I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”
         “What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.
         Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.
         “I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”
         The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and