Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

took for a raven holding a circle in its open beak. Wool pants were tucked into her Xtratufs. A waterproof daypack peeked from beneath a damp raincoat on the seat beside her. There was a wobbly, but fiercely determined look in her eyes. Cutter had seen it before – in the mirror. She was someone who’d hit bottom, hard. On the up-bounce, but not quite yet in control of her surroundings. She wore no makeup that Cutter could see. Her eyes were puffy, probably from lack of sleep. Cutter felt her pain there. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick, black hair pulled back over her ears with a pink, no-fuss elastic hair band, like she was going out to play tennis instead of helping Cutter find a missing girl. There was a notebook on the table and a cheap blue Paper Mate pen that looked like a dog had gotten hold of the cap. Judging from her fingernails, Cutter suspected the damage had been done by Maycomb. The notebook was closed and the chewed cap was still on the pen – good signs in Cutter’s book. If anyone took notes, he wanted it to be him.

She tilted her head toward the bar. “He’s bringing coffee in a second.” Her voice was soft, direct, and she looked him in the eye.

“So,” he said, hoping to break the ice with a little small talk. He was far too tired to force anything close to a smile. “Maycomb – like the county in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Culture points to you,” she said. “Arliss Cutter, like Little Arliss in Old Yeller.”

“Touché,” he said.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Maycomb said. “I’m sure Rockie has filled you in with all sorts of horror stories. Sad to say it, but most of them are probably true.”

Cutter waved away the thought – for now.

“We needed to talk,” he said. “You may be the only person we have as far as a lead to Donita Willets.”

“I told the FBI everything I knew yesterday,” she said. “Which wasn’t much of anything, I’m afraid. Whatever got the poor thing killed, she hadn’t had time to tell me about it.”

Cutter let the waiter pour their coffee and take their order. Scrambled eggs and toast for her, eggs over medium, bacon, and pancakes for him. He hoped to get so busy tracking down Donita Willets that he wouldn’t have time for lunch. He stirred a couple of spoonfuls of half-and-half into his coffee to soothe his gut, and then let the waiter go back to the kitchen before he pitched the new theory – off the record, which meant Maycomb couldn’t use it in a story.

“So she isn’t dead?” Maycomb said after he’d given her the bones of it.

Cutter eyed her over the top of his raised coffee, deciding how much to tell her. Some, or she’d clam up. He took a sip and set the cup on the table. “We’re thinking not. But we need to find Fawsey in order to find her.”

“Before whoever did the Tyler-Rogers shooting out at the shrine kills her too.”

“Yep,” Cutter said.

The waiter came back with their order.

Maycomb nudged the syrup toward him.

“No thanks,” he said, lifting his eggs on top of the pancakes with his fork before breaking the yolks. “I’m not in a very sweet mood.”

Maycomb put both hands flat on the table. “I promise, if I had any relevant information, I’d share it with you.”

“Any information,” Cutter said. “Even irrelevant.”

“I don’t have that either.”

Cutter cut a bite of pancake, sodden with egg yolk. “You may have it but not know it.”

“My friend in Anchorage said I should be careful of you,” she said.

Cutter ate another bite. “Good advice.”

“Don’t you want to know what my friend told me?”

“Nope,” Cutter said. “I stopped caring what people think about me a long time ago. I know who I am and what I know. I want to know what you know.”

“Well,” Lori Maycomb said. “I know that you probably saved me from a beating yesterday. That woman on the beach would have pulled my hair out by the roots if you hadn’t shown up. Who knows what the guys would have done to me.”

“Stood and laughed,” Cutter said, serious.

“Maybe,” Maycomb said. “Anyway, I owe you. Most people wouldn’t have stepped in like you did.”

“Don’t know about that,” Cutter said.

Maycomb heaved a heavy sigh, looking around the restaurant. “I’m just saying, not everyone could have handled those people the way you did.”

Cutter kept eating his pancakes.

She prodded. “Are you from Alaska?”

“Florida.” He took a sip of coffee.

“Aren’t you the king of pithy answers.”

Cutter shrugged, fork and knife in hand. “Harder to misquote.”

“I’m not the enemy, you know.”

“That’s the thing,” Cutter said. “You kind of are. Journalists and cops are at cross-purposes ninety-nine percent of the time. I cannot count the number of occasions where ten seconds got taken from some interview with me and put on an endless out-of-context loop that distorted the truth into something ugly and interesting, just so it would get ratings – or clicks or whatever.”

Maycomb gave a slow nod, staring down at her index finger as she drew tiny circles on the table. “I get it, you’d just as soon your work stayed in the shadows, hunting the swamps and dark holes of the world.”

Cutter shrugged. “That’s where the rats and roaches like to hide.”

“Is that what you think they are? The people you hunt? Rats and roaches?”

“Hey, it’s your metaphor,” Cutter said. “But I guess I do. Human rats and roaches, worthy of human rights, but sometimes not so much human kindness.”

“I guess that’s the difference,” she said. “You’d prefer to work in the dark. Journalists want to shine the light on things.”

“And there you go,” Cutter said. “That is exactly what I mean. In my experience, it’s the angle of that light you’re shining that’s the problem. Straight down, hold-nothing-back lighting is just fine, but tilt that light a little up, down, or sideways and the shadows on one side get longer