The Glass Highway by Loren D. Estleman Page B

and dropped into my swivel-shrieker still wearing my hat and coat.
    This was yeoman labor, not fit for the expensive Scotch in the bottle on the desk. I swapped it for the pint of Hiram Walker’s in the bottom drawer and poured myself a slug. That was my thinking brand. It went down in one easy installment.
    “I’d offer you some,” I said, “but I already did one lecture tonight about drugs and alcohol.”
    She made no response, but she’d heard me right enough. She was sitting on the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together and her hands in her lap like visitor’s day at Miss Fremont’s School for Genteel Young Ladies. Her back was unnaturally straight. I figured Benzedrine from the dilated pupils. Bennies and revolvers. Dr. Nitro, meet Mr. Glycerine.
    I burned one cigarette, chain-lit another, and burned most of that. Not saying anything. Letting her get used to the place. There’s something comfortingly clinical about two people sitting on either side of a desk that chases the dragons away. But not after three on a wet Christmas morning with two guns in the room, one of them fired very recently. Those two empty cartridges kept staring at me like hollow nightmare eyes. The tobacco had no taste. I made a face and mashed out the butt in my glass souvenir ashtray.
    I started slow. “How’d you get in?”
    She stirred, said, “I—I slipped the lock, like they do in the police shows, with my driver’s license. It’s not as easy as they make it look.” Her voice was tight and very small, like a grown woman playing a little girl. The words tumbled out almost without pauses.
    “Why here?”
    “There was no place else. I didn’t know where you lived. I was going to stay here tonight and wait for you to come in tomorrow morning.”
    “It’s tomorrow now. Merry Christmas.”
    “Oh. I forgot.”
    I used the eraser end of a pencil to poke out a live ash in the tray. “I’m going to have to step pretty carefully here,” I said. “There’s a little matter of my license to practice and what I should and should not know to keep the cops happy and me in business. I want you just to answer the questions I ask and not volunteer anything. Am I coming through?” She nodded. “Tell me.”
    “I understand.”
    “Here we go, then. Where’s Bud?”
    “In the house in Iroquois Heights. In the kitchen. He—he’s—”
    “I asked where he is, not what he is. Don’t volunteer. When did you leave?”
    “I don’t know. Eleven or twelve. I don’t know. I didn’t look at the clock. I just left.”
    “Where were you before you went into the kitchen and saw Bud?”
    “In bed. I took some pills to sleep.”
    “That was when?”
    “Around nine.”
    “Bud was in the house when you went to bed?”
    “Yes. He was always in the house. He was afraid to leave me alone for more than an hour.”
    “Anyone else?”
    “No.”
    I phrased the next one slowly, playing Russian roulette with words. “When you went to bed, before you woke up and went into the kitchen and saw Bud—how was he feeling?” Was he breathing, for instance.
    She understood the question. “Very healthy.”
    So much for her role in the ballet. My throat opened up a little. “When you were in the bedroom, did you hear anything?”
    “Maybe. I didn’t think so when I—saw Bud. But I think now I heard a door slam. I thought that’s what it was. I may have dreamed it. I can’t tell you when I heard it; I’d been in bed for a while.”
    “Nothing else.”
    She shook her head quickly. Her eyes glistened. She was coming down from the uppers. Coming down hard enough to overshoot normal by a country mile. I had to work fast before I lost her.
    “Let me bridge here. After you got up and saw Bud, you took something to open your eyes—a lot of somethings—and came straight to me. In what?”
    “Bud’s Jeep. My car was in the garage and his was blocking the driveway. I didn’t want to waste time switching them around.”
    “You parked it