The Deadline Read Online Free Page B

spirit once, but he soon found out it never really happened that way.  Cons had too much time to think up new ways to manipulate honest people.
    Gilmartin was lying, too.  Morgan didn’t know why, but it didn’t matter.
    Except the cancer.
    Only that part seemed true.  Gilmartin’s body was decaying in front of his eyes.  Morgan recognized the surrender that follows every jolt of pain.  He’d seen how it consumed the flesh, then snuffed out the light inside.
    Bridger’s face flickered across Morgan’s memory.  His only child was just eight years old when he died of leukemia, two years before.  Morgan found no comfort in death except that his little boy’s pain had finally ended.
    The old man tossed his cigarette on the grass and smothered it with a cheap shoe.  Then Gilmartin turned to Morgan and looked deep into him.  The severe old man, rough as a cob, had tears in his eyes.
    “The state docs said I only got another few weeks, a month maybe, before I die.  They just opened the gate and turned me out like a sick animal they didn’t have no guts to shoot.  That was a couple weeks ago.  I’ll be feedin’ worms long before the first snow, but ... you’re the only guy what can save my name.  You gotta believe me.”
    But Morgan didn’t.

    The high Wyoming sky was the color of worn denim, rendering Gilmartin’s pale features more sickly, more desperate.  Morgan said nothing, but the old man must have seen misgiving in his eyes.
    Children giggled as they teetered and tottered, and Gilmartin’s gaze drifted toward them.  A pain from somewhere deep inside him crawled across his brow like a poisonous black bug.  His jaw tightened and his bottom lip quavered.
    When he finally spoke, the old man’s voice had softened, the words almost stuck in his raspy craw.
    “I never done killed that little girl ...”

CHAPTER TWO

    T he sun was almost down.
    Claire Morgan gracefully balanced an open bottle of sauvignon blanc, a bowl of fresh strawberries and an empty glass as she glided across the back lawn.
    Her husband, still in his button-down shirt and work tie, loosened at the collar, lay in an Adirondack chair beside the immense lilac hedge, one bare foot in the cool grass.  His eyes were closed.
    Through the screen door behind her bounded T.J., their new dog.  He was a border collie, just eight months old, a housewarming gift from Morgan’s mother.  She still lived in his childhood home outside Winchester’s town limits, where good sheep dogs are prized more than blue ribbons at the county fair.  Upon making her gift, she’d told them a border collie was the smartest breed of dog.  So after a few glasses of wine, they named the pup “T.J.” because Thomas Jefferson was the thinker most admired by Jefferson Morgan, a tired, journeyman newspaper reporter who had been named after the great man, too.
    T.J. nudged Morgan’s hand, begging with his deep brown eyes to be scratched under his furry jowls, where woolly puppy hair grew like sideburns.  Morgan obliged.
    Claire stood over them, reading the wine label.  A white tank top set off her tanned skin.
    “This is what we should call our little estate,” she said, handing him the bottle and glass.  He sat up and read the label, too.
    “Annie Green Springs?”
    Claire cocked her head and gave him that look, the one that she gave him at cocktail parties when he wasn’t being as funny as he thought he was.
    “Stone Creek,” she corrected him, sitting down on the lawn beside his chair.  Ever the artist, she drew pictures in the air for him.  “It has a romantic feel, doesn’t it?  A little brook murmuring beside a big house made of gray fieldstone, a meadow of blue lupine, some statuesque pine trees and maybe a mountainside where you see deer in the evening.  Don’t you think?”
    Claire’s eyes were closed as she imagined it, painted it across the canvas of her mind.
    Morgan smiled and sipped his wine.  Sauvignon blanc had been Claire’s