The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 by Mark McNease Read Free Book Online

and have his coffee. At home in their apartment he would leave the bedroom, pulling the door almost closed behind him (but never fully, as the cats did not like closed doors and would either scratch at them or cry all night until someone obeyed them and opened the damn door). He would head to their office room with a second cup of coffee and start in at his computer, either uploading pictures to his blog or sifting another two dozen he’d taken recently, or just reading websites and newspapers. He was also a news junkie, having become more so since he got into the business as Imogene’s assistant.
    There was no job to get up and go to when they traveled and Kyle had never been someone who could just lie in bed with his mind racing, so he would usually have a primer cup of coffee in the room, then slip out and head to a coffee shop downstairs or across the street from whatever hotel they were in. Here at Pride Lodge he could sit outside in one of the old wooden chairs that lined the walkway in front of the cabins, or he could head up to the Lodge and help himself to one of the newspapers they kept around and a cup of coffee they put out at 6:00 a.m.
    This Friday he pulled on his khaki slacks and a sweatshirt, slung his camera around his neck, grabbed his smartphone (he could read his emails before Danny saw him and told him to stop) and headed up the road to the Lodge, by way of the pool.
    That was when he saw the commotion. A police cruiser and what looked like an unmarked sedan were parked in the front driveway. Behind them was an ambulance that had made no noise, which struck Kyle as odd until he learned why, and a small crowd had gathered around the deep end of the pool. He hurried up the grass hill to the poolside, having the presence of mind to quickly slip off the lens cap and take several photos as he climbed toward the crowd. Ricki was already there; he may have spent the night at the Lodge, which he did sometimes when they had a busy weekend coming. Sid and Dylan were standing near the edge at the deep end, Dylan with his face buried in Sid’s chest, Sid looking down into the pool. They both appeared to have just gotten up. Dylan’s hair was disheveled and Sid’s eyes looked red from sleep. Both men wore jeans, but Sid wore a pajama top under his black leather jacket. Two women Kyle didn’t recognize were standing off to the side, one of them texting furiously on her phone. Or maybe she was tweeting whatever it was they’d witnessed. Nothing is private anymore, Kyle thought as he reached the top of the hill and headed toward them.
    As the pool came fully into view Kyle looked down into it and stopped, his breath freezing in his chest. There at the bottom of the lonely blue pool, his neck bent so parallel to his shoulders it looked like a stalk that had been broken off, was the body of Teddy Pembroke. He was wearing blue jeans faded nearly white and a blue dress shirt. His tennis shoes were red, his socks black, and his hair had been recently died jet black, no doubt at Happy’s suggestion. No 50-year-old man has jet black hair with a bald spot in back and a rapidly receding hairline in front. His horn-rimmed glasses he’d been so fond of now that they’d come back in fashion lay shattered a few inches from his face. His left arm was bent at the elbow, the hand nearly to his lips as if he had suddenly thought of something the instant he died, and there, just a few inches from it, a broken martini glass.
    Teddy was the general handyman for Pride Lodge and had held different jobs there over the years. At one point he’d run the Karaoke bar, and he had done a year’s stint as the desk manager when Ricki had to go home to Memphis to take care of his ailing mother. For the past two years he had been helping Sid and Dylan upgrade the property, re-carpet the rooms, fix the many little things that had run down over the twenty-five years Pucky and Stu had the place. He had also been Kyle’s friend and reached out