Taking the Fifth by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online Page A

happy.”
    “Happy?”
    “More like smug. Like he’d pulled off a good one on somebody.”
    “But you don’t know what.”
    “No.”
    “And what time did you go back there this morning?”
    “Seven-thirty.”
    “That makes for a pretty long day, from then until eleven at night,” I observed. “Were you Jonathan Thomas’s only nurse?”
    “Yes.”
    “Every day for five months?”
    Tom Riley picked up his glass and drained it. “Every day,” he repeated. “Every single goddamned day.”
    “That many hours?”
    “I didn’t turn them all in. I reported the eight I was supposed to, the five days I was supposed to. The rest was on my own time.”
    “For free?”
    He gave me a sardonic grin. “I didn’t have anything else to do. Besides, it kept me off the streets.”
    A short silence settled between us.
    “Well,” he said at last. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I did it? Why I worked all those hours without pay?”
    “All right. Why did you?”
    He poured one more drink. “Because I have it too,” he replied quietly.
    For a moment or two I didn’t catch on. Finally, I got the message. “AIDS? You mean you have AIDS?”
    “Not the disease, at least not yet. I only test positive for the antibodies so far, but I figure it’s a death sentence just the same. I’ve known for a long time. For years. I found out during that initial panic back in ’82 and ’83 when doctors and nurses were afraid to work with AIDS patients in the hospitals. Remember that?”
    It wasn’t all that long ago, I thought, recalling my conversation with Doc Baker in the medical examiner’s office that very morning. I said, “Yes, I remember.”
    “It’s not so bad now. People are learning that if you take proper precautions, the disease isn’t all that contagious. But it changed my life, you know. I mean I couldn’t hang around in bars anymore, I couldn’t make that scene and not give a shit about what I might be doing to other people. So I moved here and hid out in work. And I asked to work with AIDS patients. Nothing but. I’ve worked with six of them so far.”
    He paused and observed me steadily over the rim of his glass. “They’re all dead,” he added softly. “One hundred percent.”
    Once more silence filled the room. The cat wandered in from the bedroom and jumped unbidden into Tom Riley’s lap. It circled a time or two before settling comfortably into a ball, purring so noisily I could hear it from where I sat.
    Tom Riley glanced from the cat to me. “Any more questions?”
    “None,” I said, getting up. “I can find my way out.”
    I did too. I hurried out the door and back to my car.
    As I barreled through the milling summertime traffic on Alki Avenue, I thought long and hard about Tom Riley.
    From some corner of my random access memory came the words Miss Arnold had drilled into our heads during Senior English at Ballard High School, the words of Rudyard Kipling’s immortal poem. They seemed to apply to Tom Riley.
    “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

CHAPTER 6

    THAT WAS THE SUMMER SOME OF OUR more bright-eyed city fathers decided to rebuild Seattle from the ground up. There was construction everywhere, from aboveground buildings all over the downtown area to the underground transit tunnel beneath Third Avenue.
    The accompanying upheaval caused a couple of undesirable results. Number one: it drove a lot of potential shoppers from the downtown retail core and left a large population of panhandlers to feed on a far smaller number of potential soft touches. Number two: it vastly reduced downtown parking.
    I had to stop by the department long enough to write my report, but the closest parking garage that wasn’t filled to overflowing was five blocks away, five blocks of scrounging, filthy, obnoxious bums. I am not a soft touch, and I didn’t knuckle under. One of them told me to have a nice day anyway.
    It was good to see the day-shift guys again, the ones Peters and I had worked