The Way We Die Now Read Free

speed bumps soon needed new shocks for their vehicles.
    Hoke, with the windows of his car rolled down (although he had air-conditioning), observed the speed limit, easing his car over the bumps at an angle, and tried to open garage doors with the door opener whenever he passed a garage with a closed door. Not every garage had an electric dooropener; but many of them did, he knew, and he was trying to see if the late Dr. Russell's door opener would work on any of them. He tried it on at least a dozen garages before he pulled into his own driveway, but it didn't open any of them. Apparently each garage door opener had its own frequency.
    Hoke's house had an open-sided carport but no garage. Ellita's Honda Civic was in the carport, and Sue Ellen's Yamaha motorcycle was chained and padlocked to the left steel roof support. Hoke parked behind the Civic and entered the house.
    Pepe, Ellita's one-year-old, was crying and shrieking as Hoke came through the front door, and Hoke's two daughters, Sue Ellen, seventeen, and Aileen, fifteen, were setting the table in the dining room.
    "What's the matter with Pepe?"
    "He needs changing," Aileen said.
    "Why don't you change him then?"
    "We're setting the table now, and Ellita's in the kitchen."
    Hoke lifted Pepe out of his crib in the living room and carried the screaming, writhing body into the bathroom. He removed the soiled Pamper and tossed it into the black plastic Hefty bag that was kept in the bathroom for this purpose. The bag was half-filled with dirtied Pampers, and the fetid odor permeated the small bathroom. Hoke turned on the water in the shower, adjusted the taps one-handed until it was warm, and then, holding the boy by his wrists, hosed him down with the hand-held shower head. He dried Pepe with Ellita's face towel, sprinkled the boy's bottom with Johnson's baby powder, and put on a clean Pamper.
    Pepe had stopped crying now, and Hoke returned him to his crib in the living room.
    Hoke went down the hall to his own small bedroom at the far end of the house and changed from his leisure suit into a pair of khaki shorts and an old gray gym T-shirt that had the arms cut off at the shoulders. He lay on his cot and looked at the cracked ceiling, holding the garage door opener in his right hand. The device was simple enough. It worked on radio waves, or something, and each garage mechanism was set a little differently. You pressed the button, aiming at the radio box in the garage ceiling through the closed door, and the door opened. If you pressed the button again, still aiming, although you didn't even have to get close to the box in the garage ceiling, the door closed. There was also a button inside the garage, usually by the door to the kitchen. If you pressed that, it also opened the door. When the door was closed, no one could open it manually from the outside, although it could be raised manually from inside the garage. An opener like this was not supposed to assist in a murder--and yet it had. Of that much, he was positive.
    But he wasn't certain; he merely had an intuition, and that meant that he was getting anxious again, pressing too hard. When he was first assigned to the cold cases, together with Bill Henderson and Ellita Sanchez, they had been lucky, solving three three-year-old cases during the first ten days. Then Henderson had been promoted to commander, and Hoke and Ellita had worked alone. He had pushed, trying too hard and putting in too many hours, and had come very close to suffering a breakdown. A month's leave without pay had given him enough distance to realize that this was just a job, not a mission. After Ellita had been shot and retired on disability, he had worked alone until they gave him Gonzalez, a young investigator too inexperienced to provide much help. Hoke hadn't come close to solving a cold case since he had returned from his month's leave, and now, what with the shortage of detectives in the Homicide Division, this was an assignment Major Brownley