15 Seconds Read Online Free PDF Page B

I screamed to myself.
    I floored the accelerator, the Caddie screeching into the oncoming lane, as another shot crashed through the side window, shattering it, narrowly missing my head.
    “How the hell is this happening?” I screamed in the car. “It’s not me!”
    I spun a U-ey, jolting up onto the pavement and hitting a street sign, ducking my head as low as I could, and sped off in the opposite direction on Lakeview as two more shots slammed into my chassis, clanging off the rear.
    I didn’t know if I was making the biggest mistake of my life, but I was sure that if I didn’t get out of there, I’d be dead.
    I cut a sharp right onto the first cross street I encountered, and then an even quicker left onto a residential lane. I floored it again and for the first time checked behind me.
    No one was there.

Chapter Four
    A t the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, on Adams Street downtown, it was Carrie Holmes’s first day back on the job.
    She knew it wasn’t going to be an easy one. It had been four months, the four toughest months of her life, since that day. The day her world had fallen apart. But she knew she had to get back into the world. Back to the person she was before . . . Before “the day my heart died too,” as she always referred to it.
    Take a deep breath, she told herself, stepping off the elevator onto the detectives’ floor.
    Life starts over—now.
    Carrie worked for the JSO. Community Outreach Director, her business card read. A glorified way of saying she took care of matters in which the department’s duty interacted with the public, building goodwill in the parts of town where the department didn’t have much. Softening the outrage after an incident in which excessive force was used, or worse, an officer-involved shooting. Overseeing police-sponsored community events. A new chief had been appointed since she’d been gone. Erman Hall. More of a numbers guy who was given a mandate on issues like the tough immigration law and budget control. She’d heard that everyone was trying to curry favor with him.
    Truth was, Carrie was kind of surprised she hadn’t already received her “pink slip” in the mail. Let’s just say “community outreach” wasn’t exactly a priority in a time when cops were being pulled off the street and station houses closed. She’d always expected she’d become a detective herself—her dad had been a chief in New Hampshire for twenty-four years and her older brother, Jack, was a supervisor with the FBI in Atlanta. With a master’s in criminology from the University of Florida, she’d always thought that was the path she would take, but with Rick on duty overseas, and then starting up his law practice, and then Raef, she took the job that opened—in Administration—and it just kind of stuck. The brains of the family, her dad always said, and the looks!
    Not that any of that really mattered now. Brains, looks, but nothing had prepared her for what had hit her. Nothing could.
    To lose your husband and your son . . . Well, almost your son . . .
    And on the very same day.
    Now it was time to start over.
    Carrie hugged a few people hello as she made her way back to her office. This was harder than she’d thought. Everyone was tiptoeing around on eggshells, not wanting to say the wrong thing: “How are you doing?” “So great to have you back!” And, of course, “How’s Raef?”
    “He’s doing really well,” she replied, as upbeat as she could. “He’s at my folks’.” It seemed the best thing for a while that he remain with her parents in Atlantic Beach, which was closer to the hospital. “We hope to have him back in school soon.”
    Of course, no one mentioned Rick—except just to shake their heads, eyes glossing over a little, and to say how sorry they were.
    “Well, you give that boy a big hug from me!”
    She ran the gauntlet of well-wishers back to her desk. She found a card there—signed by most of the office, detectives and