The Sniper's Wife Read Online Free

self-interested. He didn’t want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he’d been enjoying out front.
    “Yeah.” Kunkle joined him almost halfway down the row of cold cubicles.
    The attendant consulted the clipboard in his hand one last time and pulled open the drawer directly before him with one powerful, practiced gesture.
    Like a ghost appearing through a solid barrier, the white-draped shape of a supine woman suddenly materialized between them, hovering as if suspended in midair.
    The attendant flipped back the sheet from the body’s face. “This is her?”
    Willy watched the other man’s face for a moment, looking for anything besides boredom. He thought he might be Indian, but in truth, he had no idea. He’d recently heard that forty percent of New York’s population was foreign-born, now as in 1910.
    The man scowled at him, suspicious of Willy’s expression. “You see?”
    Willy dropped his eyes to the woman floating by his waist, looking down at her as if she were asleep on the berth of a spaceship and they were about to share a voyage to eternity.
    He studied her features, feeling as cold as she seemed, his heart as still as hers. A numbness filled him from his feet to his head, as if he were a vessel into which ice water had been poured.
    Romantics would have the dead appear as marble or snow sculptures. The reality was far less remote and pleasant. Whatever blemishes the deceased once had were enhanced by death’s yellow cast, and the tiny amount of shapeliness the musculature had maintained even in sleep was lacking, allowing the cheeks to pull back the smallest bit and the entire face to strain against the boniness of the skull beneath. This was truly a corpse, and little else.
    He reached out slowly, but stopped short of touching her, struck by the vitality of his large, powerful right hand next to her drained, thin, mottled face, the same face he’d reduced to tears a dozen times over. She looked tired, as if the sleep she was engaged in now were of no use to her whatsoever. For some reason, that made him saddest of all. Surely she’d wished for some peace and quiet when she’d opted for this state. It almost broke his heart to think she hadn’t been successful.
    The attendant sighed. “It is Mary Kunkle?”
    He’d butchered the last name. Willy glanced down the length of her shrouded body and noticed a toe tag ludicrously sticking out from under the far end of the sheet. It made her seem as if she were for sale.
    He moved down to read the tag. It had her name and an address in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge.
    That small detail triggered the dormant analytical part of his brain and made him lift the sheet off her left arm. The detective on the phone had said she’d died of an overdose, and there, as stark evidence, was not only the single fresh wound of a needle mark in the pale, skinny crook of her arm, but ancient signs of similar abuse clustered about it like memories refusing to disappear.
    “Yes, that’s her,” he finally answered, stepping back, allowing the attendant to flip the sheet back over Mary’s face with all the detached flair of a custodian covering a sofa.
    Willy stepped out into the city at night—huge, enveloping, teeming with life, extending for miles beyond reason. He looked around at the vaulting, gloomy, light-studded buildings looming over him like haphazardly placed monoliths, their black profiles outlined against a sky whose stars had been blotted out by the dull ocher stain of the city’s reflected glow. He knew it was a cliché, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of being just one of a million insects lost in an enormous ant farm, each a part of something whole, and yet, perhaps precisely because of that, utterly isolated. Mary had been one of them, and now lay dead, unnoticed and unmourned, for all he knew. He’d been one of them, too, and was feeling the