Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 95080 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95080 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
“No, I’ve got clothes in my truck, and your dad’s gonna lemme crash here tonight so I don’t have to make the drive back to the city.”
I thought of something then. “Is it a bad sign that Alex sleeps with his gun?”
“I sleep with my gun.”
“Oh, that’s comforting,” I said sarcastically.
He grinned widely, and his eyes twinkled. “I’m kidding. I think Alex was strapped to protect you, that’s all.”
“Why did he shoot at the guy?”
“Because he wouldn’t put down his gun. Alex had no choice but to put one in his leg.”
“So this delivery guy, he’ll be all right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good.”
“Why good?”
“’Cause I would’ve felt bad if Alex had to kill someone because of me.”
“He’s had to shoot a few people over the years, Trace, and they didn’t all live, ya know? It’s part of the job. It’s not personal. If you do something bad, you run the risk of getting hurt. Alex is there to enforce the law. Sometimes the law must be carried out with deadly force.”
“I hate guns,” I said flatly. “If nobody had them, it would be better.”
“That’s ridiculous. Guns have nothing to do with anything. It’s the person, not the gun.”
I was going to give him hell, and opened my mouth to do so, but he held a hand up.
“I’m a cop, Trace. Of course I believe in gun control and that no civilian should be allowed to own any kind of assault rifle, ever, and that there should be a firm, enforceable limit on the number of weapons an individual is allowed to have. But you still have to deal with human frailty, error, and idiocy.”
Taking a breath, I said, “Fine.”
“Who in the hell is Celia Hughes?” Evan asked suddenly, clearly annoyed.
I got comfortable on the couch, leaning sideways into the throw pillows as Cord brought Evan up to speed on Breckin’s affair.
I dozed off listening to them talk, and drifted in and out of sleep until all the policemen cleared out and my dad and Alex finally came back into the house. My dad made chamomile tea, and I got reheated soup and saltines. We all sat at the kitchen table and listened to Cord explain about Celia Hughes and the car bomb and how confusing it was to have amateur night being played out alongside the work of an obvious professional. I finished eating, went back to the couch, and curled up in a corner. I fell asleep listening to Cord explain about Tim Stanson.
When I came to again, Cord had gotten around to the intruder. He was, Cord explained, a nobody, a hack compared to whoever had planted the car bomb. The police only found the bomb because Celia had dropped her car keys, and because she was pregnant, one of the officers got down on his hands and knees and retrieved them from under her car. The keys had done the Murphy’s Law slide and wound up way under the car, inaccessible from either side. As he crawled and reached, the officer had seen the bomb and alerted the others. Just plain dumb luck. So much C-4 had been rigged to the ignition key, there would have been nothing left of Celia to identify. I heard the room go silent, but I didn’t say anything, nor did I open my eyes. Moments later, I felt the dip in the couch beside me.
“Sit up and pay attention,” Alex directed me.
“I have a concussion,” I reminded him, opening my eyes to squint at him.
“You have a minor one, and you took a nap, so it’s time to focus.”
Shifting around, I got into a sitting position, shoulder to shoulder with Alex, and realized that Cord was back on the coffee table again, holding court, and all the Brandt men were on the couch in front of him, including my father.
“Cord, be honest now, do you believe that Tracy is in the same danger as Celia Hughes?” Dad asked suddenly, sounding frightened.
“I do,” Cord replied solemnly. “I don’t know what’s going on yet, but I think it has something to do with Breckin and I’m not sure what else. Someone is attacking—and in Tim Stanson’s case, killing—the people Breckin’s been with, but I’m missing the why of it.”
“Because once you eliminated Breckin as a suspect, the case made no sense,” Alex summarized.
“Exactly.”
“You suspected Breckin?” my father asked Cord.
“It made sense, sir.”
“No it didn’t,” he assured him. “Why would Breckin ever want to hurt Tracy?”
“Which was what I kept coming back to,” Cord admitted. “But Breckin is the common denominator, so I had to make sure.”
“And now?”
“Now that I know it’s not Breckin, I have to figure out who would want to hurt your son, Celia Hughes, and why Tim Stanson was killed.”
“Not to be…indelicate,” my father began, “but do you think that whoever this is, they’re after everyone Breckin has ever been with?”