Read Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery for Free Online

hideous old gas range.
    That was all, and the power was off. But he wouldn’t have dared use appliances or lights anyway. Things like that could get him caught.
    In the ruined room with the dust motes swirling slowly in the air he’d disturbed, he crouched by the backpack he’d left leaning against a half-collapsed wall. From it he took a box of crackers, a can of green peas, and a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Placing these on a paper napkin, he sat on the plastic drop cloth he’d spread earlier over the linoleum least affected by the roof leak.
    There was a hole in the wall from a woodstove’s vent pipe, and healso tried to get as far as possible from that. You never could tell what might scurry in and out of such a thing.
    Unseen things, gleefully creeping … 
No
. Grimly, he focused on the good, clean food items before him: Wrapped. Sealed.
    You are what you eat
, his mother used to tell him. And
Don’t put that dirty stuff in your mouth
.
    Sometimes it was only a street vendor’s hot dog that he’d bought on a class field trip, trying to be like the rest of the kids, that aroused her wrath. Sometimes it was worse.
    But he didn’t want to think about any of that anymore. It had taken him a long time to understand how right she was, how a boy had to be careful, sometimes excruciatingly so.
    Because people would try corrupting him. They would succeed, even, sometimes. And what a fellow had to do then was …
    Stop
. There was no point to any of those thoughts, either. And anyway, he would never have to do any of those things again.
    Because now … Now he was doing
this
thing, and not only would it avenge his father’s death—his
murder
, his mind made sure to correct him viciously—it would also go a long way toward redeeming Steven himself, wouldn’t it?
    Not that he hadn’t already begun taking care of his own problems. And ironically, in the end the help he’d needed in that area had come from the same source as the problems themselves: being a mama’s boy. He knew she had made him … strange. Clean food, meticulously cared-for clothing … These, he had been given forcefully to understand by the other youngsters in his school, were not the concerns of a normal young American male.
    And girls or women were of course out of the question. Having one; being … intimate. The thought made him shiver with revulsion and something else that he did not want to identify.
    But fortunately, being his mother’s son had also given him plenty of time to pursue indoor interests: reading, fiddling with computers—he smiled, thinking about how useful this talent had become lately—and watching TV.
    By chance, one of his TV shows had featured a detective’s obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Portrayed negatively, but for Steven they had turned out instead to be immensely useful.
    He couldn’t figure out why people wanted to get rid of these symptoms. Didn’t their sufferers understand that without them, they might not be able to function at all?
    The minute he’d seen the TV detective engaged in a bout of hand-washing, then wiping down a chair with an antiseptic towelette, Steven had known that as far as his everyday anxieties went, his troubles were over.
    Well, maybe not
over
over. But at least now he had a way of tuning them out, sometimes long enough to get a few things done. Things like obtaining an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. A drop of blood for a …
    Stop
. No sense going on about that, either. He was here, on the brink of a great deed, so he had to keep his strength up.
    With his hands trembling from hunger, he opened the soup, the vegetables, and the crackers. Slowly, not letting himself hurry—
    Without warning, a flashbulb of memory went off: his mother’s face twisted in a grimace, her wild, furious voice—
    Greedy boy!
    —but with the ease of long practice he brushed it aside, went on preparing his meal.
    Crackers here. Open soup can here. Peas, counted carefully, lined up