The Girls He Adored: A Novel by Jonathan Nasaw Page A

word—“Oh!”— then silence.
    Kinch thought at first he'd pulled it off—there were no other cops in sight when the cop brought her face within knife range— but she grabbed onto him as he hurried out of the car to finish her off, and hung on with a death grip, despite the enormous knife skewering her from cheek to cheek.
    When the second patrol car arrived, Kinch ceded control to Max, who quickly realized there was no hope of immediate escape. Instead he'd turned his energies to facilitating a getaway at a later date—before they were on him, he'd managed to disengage the deputy's key ring and scatter the other keys as widely as possible to disguise the fact that he'd swallowed her inch-long, hollow, singleflanged handcuff key.
    Afterward, back at the jail, three deputies beat the crap out of poor Max for half an hour. Two would hold him while the third walloped him in the gut with a riot stick. Whack —“This is for Terry.” Whack —“This is for Terry.” Whack —“This is for Terry.”
    “Who the hell is Terry?” he asked, when they took the rubber gag out of his mouth.
    Turned out she was the nosy deputy who'd been the cause of all the trouble in the first place. When they told him she was still alive, he said it was a damn shame, and an oversight he'd be taking care of some day. It wasn't just bravado, either—more like a promise.
    It had taken the body two days to shit out the key—fortunately Max was already in isolation, or it would have been mighty embarrassing, pawing through his own turds. Now all he needed was an opportunity to use it. He suspected that chance would come tomorrow, on the way to or from his court appearance.
    And as he lay back with his arms laced behind his head, staring up at the bottom of the unoccupied overhead bunk, it occurred to Max for the first time that there would be no need for him to put himself at further risk searching for another strawberry blond to bring back to Scorned Ridge with him.
    He had, he realized, already found Donna's replacement—one who would serve not only Miss Miller's rather specialized needs, but also the system's. Sometimes a fella just gets lucky.

10

    I RENE C OGAN OFTEN BROUGHT her work to bed with her. There was plenty of room: the other side of her king-size BeautyRest had been unoccupied—screamingly unoccupied—since Frank had passed away three years ago. Finding a warm male body to fill it wouldn't have been difficult—at forty-one Irene was an attractive woman—but finding a man was by now beginning to seem darn near impossible. A man like Frank Cogan, anyway.
    She and Frank had both been scholarship students at Stanford. He was a big guy—six-four, with gorgeous wavy blond hair and an athletic physique. They'd married in college; he'd given up his own dream of becoming a painter and dropped out of school a year shy of his degree to support them. He'd gone into construction, and worked his way up from hod carrier to owning his own construction company in Sand City. Neither his hair nor his physique had lasted—Frank was too fond of beer and pizza—but his good humor had never failed him, and though untrained by Irene's standards, his was a first-rate intelligence.
    Even three years after his death it was still possible for Irene to pretend that Frank was only in the bathroom, washing up, that any minute the bathroom door would open and there he'd stand in those ridiculous pajamas she'd bought him as a joke one—
    She stopped herself. Thinking about Frank and falling asleep were mutually exclusive activities. Irene felt a quick flash of anger—at Frank, for dying; at herself, for still missing him; at God, for the whole mess of existence. Then it passed; she picked up the prisoner's file and went through it again from the first page, a copyof the arrest report, to the last, a copy of the sheriff's department incident report on the Cortes assault.
    Irene tried to picture the slight, boyish man she'd interviewed performing the