Confessions of a Small-Town Girl. Christine Flynn
Читать онлайн книгу.
lever on the window by the table saw had been missing.
Two stories up, desperately hoping she wouldn’t do what her mom had done and slip off the ladder, she balanced on the third rung from the top and tried to lever open the window.
It didn’t want to give up without a struggle. The frame had rotted in places and layers of old paint made the wood stick. There was also no handle or lever on the outside to lift with. It was only by laying her palms flat against the glass and pressing in and up that she was able to get any leverage and move it enough to get her fingers between the frame and the sill. Once she’d managed that, she was able to work it open the rest of the way.
She’d never make it as a thief, she decided, wiping bits of old paint onto her pants while clinging to the ladder for balance. She had just left impressions of her palms on the glass, and all ten of her fingerprints.
The inside of the house was dark. Poking her head in, she raised one leg and stuck it through. Hugely relieved that she hadn’t fallen, she pulled in the other behind her and cautiously eased her feet to the floor. The moonlight penetrated only far enough for her to see the outline of the lumber she’d nearly stepped on.
She couldn’t go any farther without her flashlight.
It had taken her forever to find one. Her mom, who, thankfully, still slept like the dead, had always kept one in their tiny upstairs kitchen. She’d kept another in the utility room for the inevitable power failures that came with winter storms. The one in the kitchen had a dead battery. The one in the utility room had been replaced with something the size of her car’s headlamp. It would have lit up the entire house and drawn far too much attention to anyone who might have noticed the light moving inside. Not that there was anyone around. No one other than Sam, anyway. The nearest neighbor lived a half a mile away, and the road itself rarely saw any traffic at all past ten at night.
She’d found the eight-inch long yellow flashlight she now pulled from the waistband of her jeans in the diner’s storage room. Clicking it on, she trained the beam on the floor to see where she was going and headed for the sawhorses. That was where she’d seen Sam’s toolbox and tool belt.
Her plan was simple. She would pry away the piece of paneling concealing the diary with one of his hammers or screwdrivers, get what she’d come for, then wedge the panel back in place as best she could. She wasn’t about to risk waking Sam by nailing it. The board would be loose, but if he thought anything about it when he went to tear it out, he’d have no idea it was loose because of her.
She made it halfway across the creaking floor before she turned the beam toward the wall separating the room she was in from Michelle’s—and found the beam illuminating a spot at the end of the house.
The wall wasn’t there.
Her heart gave a sick little jerk as she swept the circle of light everywhere the wall should have been. The paneling had been ripped away. All that remained of the wall and her hiding place were the upright studs that ran ceiling to floor a foot and a half apart, and a few horizontal pieces of a two-by-four that had been hammered between them for stability. The one in the center was undoubtedly the little ledge Michelle had told her was there. The one her diary had slid straight past.
Feeling a nightmare coming on, she started toward where it would have landed, only to stop at the squeak of wood behind her. The sound stopped when she did. Infinitely more concerned with where her diary might be, she ignored what she assumed where only the creaks and groans typical of old houses settling in at night and raised the flashlight to see more clearly into the room beyond the studs.
The instant she did, the hairs at the back of her neck rose. The sensation had barely registered before something hard clamped around her wrist. A gasp caught in her chest as her cap was yanked from her head. The sting of her hair being yanked with it hadn’t even registered before she was spun like a rag doll, her back slammed into the stud behind her and her air cut off by what felt like a bar of steel across her throat.
Somewhere in that startling split second, the flashlight had been snatched from her hand. Its beam was aimed straight at her face, leaving her totally blinded—and so frightened as she struggled for oxygen that she couldn’t even scream.
Chapter Three
Sam didn’t know what had wakened him. After spending fourteen months sleeping with one ear open because he never knew when his identity would be discovered and he’d find himself seconds from being dead, it could have been anything. He still woke a dozen times a night. Every night. And when he did, his first thought was that he’d blown his cover and that someone had identified him as an undercover cop.
Logic would eventually remind him that he was no longer playing the role of a down on his luck bartender and working nights in a dive in the seediest area of the city. Members of the gang he’d sought to bust were either no longer among the living, or in jail awaiting trial and a trip to prison. He was in Maple Mountain. Quiet, peaceful, boringly uneventful Maple Mountain. Yet, the thought that he was as safe here as he could be anywhere failed to form.
Logic tonight told him someone was out there.
In the dark, trusting nothing, pure instinct took over. That instinct had him easing open a window of his trailer. The faint sound of metal bumping wood had been all he’d needed to hear before he’d jerked on his pants, shoved the gun he’d kept under his pillow into the back of his jeans and slipped as quiet as a breath into the night.
Years of living on a blade-thin edge, of knowing how desperate and vengeful people could be, allowed his mind to work only one way. He always assumed the worst. To do anything less left him open and vulnerable to whatever mayhem he might face. If a threat proved minimal, he could always back down. It was infinitely more difficult, and more dangerous, to walk into a scenario expecting minimal conflict and have to gear up under assault. It was how every cop he knew survived.
He’d been locked in that mindset when he’d crept around the house to see a dark figure slip through the second-story window. In his mind, the intruder could only want one of two things. Tools to fence for drugs, or payback. He never discounted the possibility that he had been ID’d by a suspect who’d escaped a bust, and that someone he’d helped put in jail might look to get even by having a buddy nail him.
Now, primed for survival, his only thought as the intruder’s identity registered in the beam of the blinding light was that he was crushing Kelsey’s windpipe.
She looked terrified.
He was hurting her. The knowledge that he was a hair-breadth from hurting her more shot a sharp, totally unfamiliar pang of fear through his rigid, adrenaline-charged body.
He swore even as he jerked away his arm. The gun in his hand glinted dully as it passed through the beam.
He swore again, adrenaline still surging as he swung the light from her eyes.
“God Almighty, Kelsey.” His voice held fury, his words as close to a prayer as he’d been in years. He could have snapped her neck. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
Blinking to clear her vision, she sagged in relief against the post when she recognized Sam’s voice. She couldn’t see him. All she could see were spots as she lifted her shaking hand to her throat. “I’m…”
“Do you have any idea what I could have done to you?” He was nowhere near ready to hear from her just yet. Furious with her for jerking around with his adrenaline, equally upset with the thought of the force he’d used on her, he slammed the end of the flashlight down on the sawhorse beside him. As it rocked on its base, its light formed a wavering circle on the ceiling. “You should never sneak around a cop. Ever. Do you understand me? What in the hell were you thinking?”
Kelsey’s heart beat furiously against her ribs. She wished he’d stop swearing at her. She wished he’d stop yelling. Mostly she wished he’d move. He’d only backed up a couple of feet. As near as he stood, it seemed she could actually feel the tension radiating from his body. That tension roped around her, making it hard to breathe even without his arm jammed against