Read Color Him Dead for Free Online

start her day in the lean-to kitchen. She’d gotten up before dawn to ride eight miles by bus, three miles by rowboat across a turbulent channel, just to have his coffee ready when he woke up.
    Through the window Drew saw the sun lying like a flattened orange on top of Point du Cap; he heard the fishing fleet dragging the net across from Petty-lay. Their paddles slapped the water like distant, listless applause.
    He sat up on the coconut straw mattress, groped for an Anchor Special, and put it in his mouth. No matches. He considered having Leta bring them.
No, that’s thinking like a cripple. Get ‘em yourself.
He weighed that in his mind. The crutch rested against the foot of the bed; he would have to crawl down there, get out of bed and onto the crutch, hobble into the other room, retrieve the matches, hobble back….
    “Screw it,” he mumbled, and lay back. He watched a cottony cloud pass over the island, squeezed dry of rain. Another day of changeless West Indian weather, one day melting into the other like a box of chocolates in the sun. He yawned and closed his eyes; he saw his poster hanging in the Billings post office, a clean white sheet glaring from a yellowed gallery of wanted men. His eyes had glowered and his lips had turned down in sullen trapped hate. The scar had pulled his dark brows into a permanent scowl, lending conviction to the chilling italics below his picture:
This man is a killer, armed and dangerous.
    He’d changed since that mug shot; the sun had burned away his pallor, and the beard covered most of the scar. He rubbed his palm over his stomach and felt three hard ridges of muscle. Those five starving months in the mountains had trimmed away the spongy prison flesh, bringing him nearer one-eighty than the two-twenty shown on his poster. He looked down at his hands. The left was bigger than the right and thickly callused where his palm gripped the crutch. He kicked off the sheet and looked at his leg. The calf muscle looked shriveled, and there was a long red scar where he’d opened it up with a pocketknife to release a river of yellow pus and white bone fragments. He tried to wriggle his left foot, but the nerve impulse fizzled out somewhere between the knee and the ankle. The foot lay like the foot of a puppet whose strings had been cut.
    Oh well, he couldn’t kick. He had a new identity, purchased for twenty bucks in a Denver tattoo parlor. He had 200 dollars left of the thousand he’d gotten from Barr Massu.
“Don’t be a dead hero,”
he’d told the sweating PR man,
“you owe me five hundred in back salary. Call the rest of it severance pay.”
Apparently the scare had stuck, for there’d been no alarm. And now, after following a cold trail from Jamaica to the Bahamas to Barbados, he had tracked Edith to her final resting place. Even if the leg fell off at the knee and he never left this island alive, at least he’d see to that.
    “Leta,” he called.
    A moment later her bare feet whispered on the concrete floor. She set a steaming cup of coffee on the hand-hewn chair beside his bed; she’d been changing from her town clothes, and wore only a silk half-slip and gold earrings. Traces of rice powder clung to her cheeks. In her eyes he saw the light which always greeted him in the morning: love, lust, mother affection—he didn’t know, he’d lost the art of gauging a woman’s emotion. She straightened, stirring the air with a smell of sun-warmed flesh and the tang of the sea. She stood with her arms behind her back, breasts lifted high and pointing at sharp angles to each other. “The world is coming short,
Dudu,
“ she said.
    He frowned, trying to plumb the semantic depths of her patois. Though she pronounced English perfectly, an occasional jumbling of sentence structure and a too-careful movement of her lips betrayed the fact that the language had not been born with her.
The world is coming short?
That had an ominous sound, a hint of impending doom.
    “What the hell does