The Prophet by Michael Koryta Read Free Book Online Page A

the way he’d looked at her and thought that he was getting old fast, because college girls were beginning to look impossibly young.
    “That may be what she said,” Salter told him, “but that’s not what she was. And she’s dead now, Adam, and we need to talk about it. We need to talk
tonight.
I’ll ask you again—can you make the drive or do I need to send someone?”
    “I can make the drive,” Adam said, thinking that she’d brought the letters in one of those plastic-covered folders that students carried. Not college students. And the nail polish. Red with silver sparkles. She’d painted her nails for the Cardinals.
    “Then get down here. I’ll be waiting on you.”
    Salter hung up, and Adam set the phone onto the bar and stared into the mirror in front of him. With all those rows of bottles, all he could make out of the reflection were his eyes and receding hairline.
    “Fuck me,” he whispered.
    He didn’t remember the address, to the great frustration of the men in the room with too-bright lighting and the smell of new plastic, a digital recorder running on the table.
    “It was out in the country,” he said. “On a lake. It was… Shadow Lane. No, Shadow Wood Lane. I don’t remember the number.”
    “You’re sure of the road?”
    “Shadow Wood. Yes.”
    One of the detectives left then, and it was just Stan Salter and Adam.
    “Do you think she was killed there?” Adam said.
    “We’re going to find out. Did you see the place?”
    “No.”
    “Just gave her the address?”
    Adam wasn’t sure if Salter’s tone was really loaded with contempt or if he was imagining it. He couldn’t have blamed the man either way. He was remembering that while the girl had teeth that were straight and white, she’d smiled in an odd, careful way, lips-only most of the time, as if she’d worn braces until recently and was still trained by muscle memory and teenage insecurity to hide those now-perfect teeth…
    No, she didn’t. She didn’t have that smile at all. That was a different girl. You cannot think of them together, Adam, you cannot do that.
    “Yes. I gave her the address in a phone message. Said she could let me know if it didn’t pan out, and then we’d try again. I never heard back. She told me her name was April Harper. She told me she was a college student.”
    “You make no habit of checking identification?” Salter asked, and Adam had to make an effort to focus on the question. He kept losing himself to that nail polish, that plastic folder, that smell of coconut that told him she’d been to a tanning bed.
    “On my clients?” he said. “No. Who does? I wasn’t letting her board a plane or even drink a beer, I was agreeing to do a job. Checking her age, that’s not my responsibility.”
    But he was thinking—
seventeen, seventeen, seven-fucking-teen—
and the liquor was stirring in his belly like acid.
    She’d looked it, too. He couldn’t pretend otherwise, couldn’t even grasp at the pathetic shield of claiming she’d been one of those girls who looked older than her age. If anything, she maybe looked a little younger. Would’ve been carded for cigarettes by any gas station clerk. Went out of her way to tell him she was a senior at Baldwin-Wallace, and while his eyes had said
No,
his brain had said
Who gives a shit
and her money had said
Just do the job, Adam.
    “You didn’t think,” Salter asked, “that she might be lying to you?”
    “Everyone lies to me, Salter. All the time. Did I think she might be lying? Sure. But caring about
why
she was lying, that’s just… look, she said what she wanted me to do and she had a reason for it and she had the letters.”
    “And the cash,” Salter said.
    Adam felt like breaking the smug prick’s nose, Salter sitting there with his bristling military crew cut and hooded eyes and his badge, looking at Adam as if he were one of the dancers back at Haslem’s, empty of dignity and hungry for a dollar.
    “You don’t need a