The Sacrifice by Robert Whitlow Read Free Book Online Page A

melt. Nicky came into the kitchen sniffing the air.
    Scott shook his head. “None for you, my friend. Puppies don’t need pepperoni.”
    Nicky ran to the back door, jumped through a dog door Scott had cut in the bottom panel, and, in a couple of seconds, jumped back inside.
    â€œI’m coming,” Scott said.
    Scott took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and followed Nicky into the backyard. The little dog quickly checked the area around the base of the trees for signs of the squirrels whose many years of peace and quiet had been shattered when Scott introduced his pet to the backyard environment. The enclosure was an ideal size for the little dog that reigned as the biggest, most fearsome creature in his protected world.
    It was still warm in the late afternoon sun. In a few months, the leaves on the two maple trees close to the back wall would explode with red and orange, and the large heart-shaped foliage of an ancient redbud would begin turning a brownish purple. Scott sat on a park bench at the edge of a slate-covered patio and sipped his beer.
    The previous owners had built a small fishpond on one side of the patio and stocked it with two large goldfish. Scott tried to introduce some smaller fish to the tiny pond, but his stocking experiment abruptly ended when a blue heron dropped out of the sky one cloudy day and ate the new arrivals as an afternoon snack. The two remaining fish, hoping for a handout, swam toward Scott.
    Nicky disappeared beneath a bank of azalea bushes that bloomed in early spring like a great white island in a sea of green grass. Scott could hear the dog rustling through the leaves underneath the bushes. In a few seconds, he burst forth and raced around the patio area in a large circle. Scott watched Nicky’s antics until it was time for the pizza to come out of the oven.
    Scott ate at a shiny table in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen. The kitchen in Scott’s house was built before large, live-in kitchens came into vogue, so there wasn’t room to set up the table and chairs his grandmother had given him except in the formal dining room with its tall, narrow windows. The room wasn’t designed with pizza and beer in mind, but nobody was around to report him to Martha Stewart.
    Scott could easily finish off a medium-sized pizza by himself, and after the paltry lunch he’d eaten with Dr. Lassiter, he quickly devoured his food and drained the last drops of his beer. He read the local newspaper while he ate. Nicky lay passively on the wooden floor near his master’s feet.
    After supper Scott took his briefcase into the living room. The only fully carpeted area in the house contained two pieces of furniture: a big, gray recliner that Scott had selected after sitting in fifty different chairs, and a large-screen TV whose chief purpose was to display Atlanta Braves baseball from March to October and ACC basketball from November through March. Scott would be making payments on the TV for another twenty-two months. He turned on a baseball game and for the next several hours divided his attention between the game and the mock trial materials. Nicky jumped into the chair and lay down in the open space beside Scott’s left hip and the armrest. Within a few seconds he was asleep.
    The lawyers who prepared the materials had done a good job. The witness roles were humorous and flexible enough to allow for creativity, and the legal issues weren’t too complex. When his eyes grew heavy, Scott escorted Nicky to the backyard before putting the little dog in a small cage in the laundry room. Scott enjoyed Nicky’s companionship, but he didn’t want a furry bed partner licking his ear in the middle of the night.

    Lester Garrison had memorized the details of every tree that could be seen from the slit of window that gave his narrow room its only glimpse of the outside world. At night, the glare of a bright light positioned on a metal pole outside the