One Kind Favor I Ask of You (Kit Tolliver #8) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read Free Page B

whatever it is you have in mind?”
    Joanne grabbed her purse, got her car keys in hand, let the screen door slam behind her. Alan was about to say something, but she made him wait until she heard the car start up and pull away. Then she asked him if he’d changed his mind.
    “ No. What got me through the night was knowing it was the last one I had to get through. And you? ”
    “Me?”
    “ Change your mind? ”
    “No. I’ll do it.”
    “ Yeah, what I realized about you. Last night, thinking. You’re steel inside. ”
    She let that go.
    “ Tried to spare you. Last night. Tried to swallow my tongue. Supposed to be a way to kill yourself, shuts off the air flow. Heard of it somewhere. Don’t know if it’s even possible, but I couldn’t do it. ”
    “I said I’d do it.”
    “ I know. There’s a pillow on the sofa. No? What’s wrong with that? ”
    “Pin-point hemorrhages on the eyeballs. First thing anybody’d look for, and then they’d look at Joanne.”
    “ Sis? Anybody who knows her’d know she wouldn’t do it in a million years. ”
    “So then they’d come looking for me. They wouldn’t find me, but they’d come looking, and who needs it? I’m not gonna hold a pillow over your face, okay? It’s not that easy if the person’s conscious, anyway.”
    “ How do you know that? ”
    “Because I’ve done this before, okay? And not as a fucking act of mercy, either. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Like a roadside bomb, comes from out of nowhere and takes you by surprise.”
    “ Jesus Christ. ”
    “I put a pillow over a guy’s face once,” she said, “and then I sat on it, and I have to say it was H-O-T. But I don’t think he liked it much, and it took him a while to die. Which was fine with me, but I like you, and I want this to be easy, so why don’t you just let me do it my way?”
    God, the look in his eye.
    “I have some drugs with me. Should be quick and easy, and if you feel anything you won’t feel it for very long.”
    “ I can’t swallow pills. ”
    “This would be an injection. There’ll be a pinprick, but you won’t feel that, will you?”
    “ No. ”
    She’d prepared the syringe before she left the motel, filled it from one of the vials from the drugstore in Glens Falls. Now she retrieved it from her suitcase and showed it to him.
    “All set,” she said. “Anything you’d like to do first?”
    “ Like what? Eat a sandwich? Take a quick jog around the block? ”
    “I thought you might want to have sex again.”
    “ No. ”
    “Or, I don’t know. Say a prayer?”
    “ Not much for praying. ”
    “Me neither. You figure there’s anything afterward?”
    “ After you die, you mean? ”
    “Maybe you’ll have your body back again. You know, in another dimension. Your arms and legs, and everything healthy.”
    “ Not counting on it. ”
    “Or maybe it’s a kind of existence where there aren’t bodies.”
    “ Just souls floating around? ”
    “Maybe.”
    “ Or maybe it’s nothing, ” he said. “ Maybe it just, you know, stops. ”
    “Maybe. This vein looks good. Are you ready?”
    “ More than ready. ”
    “I don’t suppose I need an alcohol swab. I guess infection’s not a consideration. Sorry, I’m all thumbs all of a sudden. Just as well you can’t feel anything. Okay, I think I’ve got it in the vein. Alan?”
    “What?”
    “Look, if there is something afterward, and somebody up there wants a report, would you tell them I wasn’t bad all the time? That there was one time I did something good?”
    Jesus, was that a tear in the corner of his eye?
    She pressed the plunger, kept looking at his eye, watched the light fade from it.
    One.