The Long Wait Read Free Page A

know.” I let the smoke stream out through my nose and decided to make it short and sweet. “If you’re holding me on a charge, name it or shut your face. I don’t like being hauled into a crummy police station and talked to.”
    Lindsey must have been saving that one sneer up for a long time. “I don’t know what kind of an angle you think you’re playing, McBride, and I don’t give a damn. The charge is murder. It’s murder five years old and it’s the murder of the best friend a guy ever had. It’s a murder you’ll swing for and when you come down through the trap I’m going to be right there m the front row so I can see every goddamn twitch you make and there in the autopsy room when they carve the guts out of you and if nobody claims the body I’ll do it myself and feed you to the pigs at the county farm. That’s what the charge is. Now do you understand it?”
    Now I was understanding a lot of things including the way Pop’s voice cracked over the phone. They weren’t so pretty. This game was dirtier than I thought and I didn’t know whether I was going to like it so much.
    Murder. I was expected to shake in my shoes.
    Like I said, I didn’t scare easy. They saw it on my face again and were wondering why. This time I leaned on Lindsey’s desk and gave him a mouthful of smoke to let him know how I felt about it. “Prove it,” I said.
    His face was cold as ice. “That’s a crappy angle. That’s real crappy, McBride. The last time you didn’t stay around long enough to know what we had, did you? Don’t mind my laugh. I’m getting a charge out of this. I love every bit of it. I want to see you go right through all the stages until there’s nothing left but jelly. You didn’t know we found the gun and got the best sets of prints you ever saw, did you? Sure, Johnny, I’ll prove it. Right now. I want to watch your face change.”
    He pushed himself away from the desk and nodded for Tucker to get behind me. We went down the hall where the reporter was screaming to be let in on the deal and into another room with a lot of tricky gadgets and a sign over the door that said LABORATORY. Lindsey must have looked at the card so often that he knew exactly where it was. He pulled it out of the file, stuck it in the slide of a projector and switched on the light.
    They were the prettiest set of fingerprints I’d ever seen in my life. Nice and clear with some real tricky swirls in the middle. Tucker tapped me on the shoulder. “Over here, tough boy.”
    Lindsey was waiting at the desk with a brand-new index card in front of him. He squeezed a quarter-inch of printer’s ink out of a tube into a glass plate and began spreading it out with a rubber roller. When it covered the plate the way he wanted it he picked up my hand and pushed the tip of my forefinger in the mess.
    Maybe he thought I messed up the card purposely. He grabbed my finger and did it carefully this time.
    The same thing happened again like I knew it would and he said something foul.
    Instead of a print there was a solid black smudge because I didn’t have any fingerprints.
    I shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t help it. The back of his hand smashed into my mouth and before he could do it again I hooked him under the chin and he and the desk and the junk slammed the floor. Tucker had time to get the billy unlimbered but not enough time to place it right. The thing ripped my coat open all the way up my sleeve and went back for another try. I had him then. I had him so goddamn good I nearly took his gut off. He folded up and never felt his face get turned into a squashed ripe tomato. I had time to see him vomit all over himself before my own head burst open in a blaze of fiery streaks that sent a curse of ungodly pain down into every single little nerve fiber throughout my body and I knew that this was what it was