Rogue Island Read Online Free

twenty-four-hour cable news channels are killing us, and we’ve got to do everything we can to fight back. Folks want to read about something besides organized crime, political corruption, and burned-up babies. You’re overspecialized, Mulligan. I’m trying to help you out here.”
    â€œPeople are dying, boss.”
    â€œAnd you think you can stop it? You’ve got an inflated opinion of yourself. Investigating fires is the arson squad’s job. After they solve this thing, you can write about it.”
    â€œLet me tell you about the arson squad,” I said, and gave Lomax a quick rundown on the Polecki-Roselli vaudeville act.
    â€œJesus Christ!” he said. “Why the hell don’t you write that story?”
    â€œYeah. Okay. How about for Sunday?”
    â€œFirst the dog story. Today, Mulligan. Don’t make me talk to you about this again.”
    He dropped his hands to his keyboard, a signal that our talk was over. I’d never heard Lomax put so many words together. Maybe nobody had. I figured I better do as I was told.
    *  *  *
    Maybe the star of the dog story would turn out to be a Portuguese water dog, I thought as I headed for the Bronco. Dorcas had custody of ours, a six-year-old psycho named Rewrite. I missed that dog. I would have paid the pooch a visit, but that would have meant running into Dorcas. I’d rather run headfirst into a train.
    Dorcas didn’t like the dog, but she kept him for the same reason she wouldn’t let me have my turntable, my blues LPs, my collection of Dime Detective and The Black Mask pulp magazines, and the hundreds of tattered Richard S. Prather, Carter Brown, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, Brett Halliday, and Mickey Spillane paperbacks I’d been picking up at flea markets since I was a kid. Anything to punish me.
    Dorcas had seemed to be a perfectly decent human being until she woke up married to me. Once the rice was tossed and she figured she’d hooked me for life, she grew a pretty impressive set of horns. Suddenly, I spent too many hours at work. I didn’t make enough money. I never touched her. I groped her nonstop. I didn’t love her. I smothered her with love. She accused me of bedding every female from Westerly to Woonsocket, and those I hadn’t conquered were on my list: the dental hygienist, the supermarket bagger, her friends, her sisters, the Channel 10 weather girl, the mayor’s daughter, the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I had boinked or was planning to boink them all.
    After a year of it, I dragged her to a marriage counselor, who wasted several sessions listening to her tales of my rampant infidelity. When he finally caught on and suggested she might have jealousy issues, she branded him an idiot and refused to go anymore. The last six months of our marriage settled into a familiar pattern: Dorcas would say I thought she was an unattractive shrew and must be cheating on her, and I would tell her she was wrong.
    Until she wasn’t wrong anymore.
    I had just turned onto Pocasset Avenue when the police scanner crackled. Someone had pulled a fire alarm in Mount Hope. I slowed, ignoring the honking behind me on the two-lane street, and waited for the first engine on the scene to broadcast the code. “Code Yellow” would mean false alarm. “Code Red” would mean no dog story this morning.
    It came in four minutes, by the digital clock on the dash.

6
    I made an illegal U-turn in front of a boarded-up Del’s Lemonade stand and headed back at forty, a reckless speed on a frigid day that had turned yesterday’s slush into icy ruts. I held the wheel tight as Secretariat, his suspension beaten to mush by too many Rhode Island pothole seasons, bounced hard enough to loosen my fillings. At the intersection of Dyer and Farmington, I blasted my horn at a stooped old man painting a snowbank yellow with his dachshund.
    Turning onto Doyle Avenue in Mount