Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set) Blake Banner (read out loud books txt) 📖

the last surgeon he tried to set me up with, I think he’s given me up as a lost cause.” She sipped and sighed again. “You ever miss it? Family life?”

I hesitated, not sure what the answer was. “I miss the idea of it. The idea of the companionship. The idea of being able to share a thought, an idea, a feeling, without having to say anything.” I shrugged. “But I never had that. How can you miss something you never had?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Her expression was serious. Eventually she said, “I don’t know. But I miss it too, and I never had it either.” She drained her glass and leaned forward to slap my leg. “C’mon, big guy. Let’s get some sleep.” She stood. “If you snore, I’ll gut you and leave your body in Lefthand Canyon for the coyotes.”

“Snore?” I said, as we tramped up the stairs. “The way you hawk and stridulate, I’ll be lucky to get to sleep at all.”

“Hawk and stridulate…?”

“Yup.”

The next day was pretty uneventful. I was not allowed to shave when I got up, and after I showered, Dehan spent almost fifteen minutes jabbing her fingers through my hair to make it look as though I hadn’t combed it. Apparently, if I simply didn’t comb it, it looked as though I had combed it. That’s forty-six wasted years right there.

Then after breakfast, we went and spent three hundred bucks on buying clothes to make me look disreputable: some torn jeans that were more expensive than the ones that hadn’t got torn yet, a black sweatshirt with a large cannabis leaf on it and the legend, ‘High, how’ya doin?’ in faded letters, and a pair of Timberland boots that cost almost as much as my car.

This all made Dehan smile a lot. “Yeah, man. You look cool. You should dress down a bit, you know that?”

“What is this, Dehan? Is this method? Are you getting into your role for tonight?”

She raised an eyebrow at me, which made the manager of the general store simper and move away to his till. “Hey, dude, I don’t know where you were raised, Stone. But I was raised on the mean streets of the Bronx. I don’t need no method. I am the streets!”

I rolled my eyes and paid, and we took my new image to trudge through the woods in Lefthand Canyon for a few hours till the sun started to slip. We found nothing, but that was pretty much what we expected to find. Five years of snow, rain, wind, large and small animals and a million bugs had removed any trace of Kathleen’s murder and her killer. Nature is ruthless about life and death. They are to her as breathing in and out are to us. It’s only human beings who make a big deal out it.

As the sun began to slide off the big blue dome of the sky and into the western hills, we began to trudge, slide and stumble down the steep bank toward my car. Then Dehan stuck her hands in her back pockets and asked, “So, Stone, I’m a working-class girl from the Bronx, Mexican Catholic mom, Jewish dad. You know all this about me. What about you? You’re pretty secretive, you know. Stone...” She savored the name. “What is that? English? German? You working-class? Middle class?” She spread her hands. “You drive a classic Jaguar. You know your wines. You use words like stridulate. What’s the deal with you?”

We got to the bottom of the hill and came out of the woods and I unlocked the car. We climbed in and I sat for a while staring at the road as dusk slowly encroached. Finally, I shrugged.

“No deal. I’m not secretive, there’s just not much to tell. Your family is more interesting than mine. Dad traced his family back to the war of independence. They were Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Brooklyn. Strict, strong. Fought for the king.” I laughed without much feeling. “Always defending the losing side, that’s us. Mom was a small, pretty, weak woman. They were unhappy, but never enough to talk about it, and never enough to do anything to fix it.” I smiled at her. “They did their duty, and then they died.”

“Wow…”

“Not really. No big deal.”

I turned the key, felt the satisfying rumble of the big four-liter engine and pulled away, back toward Gold Hill. Dehan shifted in her seat so she could face me.

“I remember something I read once about Chagall.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Chagall, the painter?”

“Yeah. I told you. You’re not the only guy who uses Google, remember? It said that the important thing about Chagall was not what he put into his paintings, but everything that he left out.”

“Huh.”

“I didn’t get it at the time, but now I understand what they meant. It’s what you just did.”

“Is it?”

“You know it is. You just told me exactly nothing about your childhood and your family. But when you did that, you told me everything.”

We ground and bumped our way up Lickskillet Road and then headed east back toward Seven Hills. Eventually, as we were approaching the Wagon Wheel, I said, “So, we going for another bison steak tonight, before the Shack, or something lighter?”

She looked at me a long time before answering. Finally, she said, “I don’t do light, Stone. I do heavy, and intense. It’s part of the stereotype. Like you with your WASP stiff upper lip.”

Eleven

We arrived at the Shack at ten. The shutters were open and the windows were glowing with a warm, amber light that turned the building and the hillside behind it into a black mass against the translucent night sky. It reflected off the chassis of a handful of trucks and bikes, and occasionally flickered as a body moved past inside. You could make