Free The Eighth Day by John Case

brown. The plastic dashboard was cracked, the front seats were sprung, and the rearview mirror was held in place by globs of stickum dispensed by Caleigh’s glue gun. The car got twelve miles to the gallon (on the highway) and required two quarts of oil a week.
    It was, in a word, totally incorrect—environmentally, aesthetically, and automotively. Even so, Danny liked it. A gift from his grandfather (who’d nursed it into its senior years only to be told by Danny’s grandmother that she would no longer ride in it), the car came without any monthly payments. And it had
that sound
. Turn on the key, and it roared—really
roared
—to life.
    Of course, it was about as easy to park as a tractor-trailer, but if he could find a space, he’d gotten pretty good at it. He seemed to have an intuitive grasp of volume and dimension, so that he could whip into tight parking spaces with no obvious effort—sometimes turning Caleigh’s knees to water.
    Swinging into the little lot behind the gallery, Danny left the Bomber next to Ian’s Z-3 Roadster. The effect was similar to parking a double-wide on Rodeo Drive—and Danny had to admit it gave him some pleasure.
    Inside, he found Ian standing next to a fifty-ish woman, his chin propped on the back of his fist, the fist supported by an elbow resting on his other hand. The two of them were gazing at a busy little watercolor of a duck pond streaked with rain. Finally, Ian threw up his hands and muttered something about “circular composition.”
    Time did not fly.
    Danny spent about half an hour in the showroom helping a woman in a white linen suit find a painting that would “pick up” the vermilion in a swatch of upholstery material that she had with her. Ian couldn’t believe it, rolling his eyes as the woman held up the fabric to one artwork after another, including a Rauschenberg lithograph that went for five figures. After that, he spent the remainder of the afternoon crating up recent sales, filling out shipping forms—and feeling conflicted. Here he was, making nine bucks an hour, when he could be making ten times as much sleuthing for Belzer. But he knew better than to quit his “day job.” The PI business was unpredictable, and with him working solo like this, his lone client could put an end to the investigation whenever he pleased. And besides, Danny told himself, he didn’t want to stiff Ian, even if Ian wasn’t his favorite person (or even, for that matter, his favorite gallery owner).
    At five o’clock, Danny helped Ian lock up and joined the commuting masses on a very slow drive out to Fairfax County. It took him an hour and forty-two minutes, but he eventually arrived at Chris Terio’s farmhouse. There, he got out of the car and, feeling like a criminal, went to retrieve the garbage bags from their container. Briefly it occurred to him that there might be a way into the house and, once inside, he could take a long, slow look at the late professor’s files. But no. It was one thing to pick up the guy’s garbage and quite another to go into the man’s house and paw through his files. As long as the bags were out by the curb, anyone who wanted them could take them. They were public property.
    So it wasn’t like he was breaking-and-entering. On the contrary, though Danny himself had never done it before, Dumpster diving wasn’t that unusual. Every investigative firm had someone in its Rolodex who did the work.
    To his dismay, he saw that the bags were lying in a couple of inches of water. Fortunately, neither was torn. He dragged the bags across the lawn to the Bomber, opened the trunk, and tossed them inside. Then he drove back to Adams-Morgan, accompanied by a faint whiff of rotting fruit.

    In the morning, he picked up a jar of Vicks VapoRub at the local CVS, then crossed the street to Martin’s Hardware. There he bought a couple of plastic tarps, a package of rubber gloves, and a “state-of-the-art” air freshener called Ozium. Finally, he carried