Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
He hoped she was warmer.
Goddamn it, he wished she weren’t with him—
“We need Route Twenty-six,” Lydia shouted in his ear over the din. “Toward the bay.”
“Roger that.” He turned his head to the side. “You okay?”
She gave him a squeeze. “Yes.”
As he looked ahead of them again, all he could think was, Don’t do it. Don’t ask back.
She didn’t.
Lydia was a master navigator, not that finding the condo development in question was all that hard, and once they were inside the ring-around of fifty or so white-sided, black-shuttered, Lego-like two-stories, the unit they were gunning for was easy to locate on the far side.
Pulling into the shallow driveway, he opened his mouth to tell her they had to stick together—
His woman ejected herself off the back of the Harley, landed on a lithe run, and raced up the front walk.
“Wait! Stop—” He tried to catch his breath. “Lydia—”
She all but attacked the door, twisting the knob, jerking, yanking. “Gus!”
Back at the bike, Daniel put his hand on his chest and tried to inflate his lungs, but for some reason, they weren’t responding to the command. It was like he was suddenly breathing water—
“Around back,” he wheezed as she pounded on the panels. “Go ’round…”
While an old guy from the unit next door stopped in the process of checking his mailbox, she took off again, jumping over some short-stack bushes, sprinting past the garage door, and disappearing around the far corner. The idea that she might find some bad news in the rear gave Daniel the energy he needed to dismount, but as he stumbled, he couldn’t feel the asphalt beneath his boots.
“Everything okay?” the neighbor with the envelopes and the flyers in his hand called out.
Daniel coughed into a fist. “Oh, yeah.” He cleared his throat so he could get more volume in his voice. “Cat on the loose.”
“Dr. St. Claire doesn’t have a cat.”
Great. Just what he needed. “He was cat-sitting ours.”
“Then why’d you come on a bike?”
Daniel narrowed his eyes, noting the cardigan, the reading glasses on the end of the nose, the salt-and-pepper gray hair trimmed Father Knows Best fifties style. For a split second, he almost asked whether the guy had seen anything suspicious around Gus’s place. But then he thought of Lydia, and decided the well-preserved grandpa was a gossip grenade best kept with the pin in.
“Thanks for checking on us,” Daniel said. Then in a lower tone, he muttered, “And if we need a hostage, I’m volunteering you.”
Raising his hand in a little wave, he started off in the direction Lydia had gone—and holy fuck, he felt like he was dragging the Harley behind him: He was out of energy, a marathoner who had pushed too hard and was collapsing right before the finish line.
“Why don’t I have a gun,” he mumbled as he shambled his way along, batting away the gnat-like flakes. “Why am I unarmed…”
As he emerged onto the quilt-sized grass patch that passed for the backyard, he answered himself: “Because you’d been about to pop the question. And who brings a—wait for me! Christ!”
Lydia was at the back sliding glass door and in the process of opening things. “This glass door is unlocked—”
No shit. “Hold on.”
As she looked back at him, he grabbed the railing and hauled himself up onto the postage-stamp porch. He wanted to stop for a second to try to breathe again, but he knew her halt had a timer on it—
Bingo. She launched herself into the condo without him.
“Sonofabitch.”
On his own entry, Daniel tripped the tip of his boot on the lip of the slider, and as he pitched forward into thin air, he had a quick impression of a messy, nothing-special kitchen: clutter on the granite counter, trash bin overflowing with crumpled take-out bags, a GE stove with the Home Depot plastic sticker on the front like the oven part had never been used—
He caught himself on an Ikea-like table, and the thing screeched over the tiled floor, his forward momentum transferring to the inanimate object and making it live for a good yard or so. After the bumpy ride, he stayed where he was, draped as a human doily, grunting through his open mouth.
“Be careful…” he said weakly. “Lydia, you gotta… be… careful.”
Out in the front of the condo, she was racing from room to room, and he pictured her, so graceful, so strong, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she went around.
Holy hell, he loved her. With everything that he was, all that he had… and what little time he had left.
“There’s blood here on the carpet…” she said off in the distance. “Here where the mail is. Oh, God…”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Where is he?” More footsteps. “I’m going upstairs.”
He opened his mouth to throw another wait-stop-slow-down onto the bonfire of good advice she was ignoring. But she was already halfway to the second floor—and with the drumbeat of her boots ascending, he followed her vertical example, pushing his chest up off the table. Getting to his full height was a process, and to give himself something to focus on other than how dizzy he was, he assessed the empty take-out containers and packets of sauce over by the refrigerator, and the empty Coke cans that were, well, everywhere.