4 Arch Enemy of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

about the citizens of this town, they decided a detective needs to investigate each sighting. Did I mention it was the middle of the night? Turned out to be a chow with a bad haircut. Arroyo has deferred all sightings to him to pick up some of the slack, thankfully, or I would never get any sleep.”
     
    “Poor Jason,” she said. She hated the thought of him being hazed by his coworkers.
     
    “It’s not that big of a deal; they’ll adjust and get over it,” he said.
     
    Absently, she pulled her foot up and began to rub it.
     
    He pulled off the road and parked. “Give me your foot,” he demanded.
     
    “What?” she asked.
     
    “Your foot.”
     
    “Why?”
     
    “Maybe I can fix it,” he said.
     
    “With voodoo? Because last time I looked you weren’t a podiatrist.”
     
    “I paid attention when the trainers used to work on me in high school. Gimme.” He held out his hand.
     
    “I’m supposed to hand over my foot to someone who got his medical know-how from a high schooler whose knowledge is limited to the proper way to wind an Ace bandage?”
     
    He nodded and pointed to his palm as if to show her where to place her foot.
     
    “No,” she said. “You can’t have my foot.” You can’t drop out of my life for three whole weeks, drop in, demand my foot, and expect me to give it to you.
     
    “That’s the problem. You don’t trust me.”
     
    “I trust you,” she said.
     
    “Then prove it, and start with your foot.”
     
    “You’re in a very fixing mood today.” Reluctantly, she removed her shoe and raised her foot so it was level with his hand. He took it and pressed his thumb in the middle of her sole. A little bit of the tension eased out of her, along with some of the pain. “This is the first time I’ve ever had a foot massage in a cop car,” she said.
     
    “Really? If I had a nickel,” he began, and then changed his mind when she started to pull her foot away. “Geez, kidding. You’re wound tighter than I’ve ever seen you.”
     
    “Riley,” she said, and he nodded. He worked on her foot in silence for a few minutes while Lacy tried not to melt into a puddle on his seat. He had magic fingers, but there was no way to say that to someone and not have it sound weird. “So the job’s been rough lately?” she asked at last.
     
    “It has its ups and downs,” he said. He finished with her foot and moved on to her ankle. She felt there was a lot he wasn’t saying, but there was distance between them that she didn’t know how to cross. Not a physical distance—he was rubbing her ankle and working toward her calf, after all—but the emotional distance was intense. After coming so close, they were back to square one. Now they were touching on Lacy’s greatest fear that they soon wouldn’t be anything at all. It was her fault, and they both knew it, and that made everything worse because it added guilt into the mix.
     
    “You’re a mess, Red,” he said.
     
    Lacy gave her bedraggled hair a self-conscious pat. “Thanks for that.”
     
    “I’m serious. You need a keeper, someone to run interference with your sister, to make sure you don’t hurt yourself when you walk, to keep the bugs away, to stop you from using a straw to suck the filling of any more Ding Dongs.”
     
    She grimaced and pressed her hand to her stomach. “We promised to never mention that, and I haven’t done it again since you took my straw away.”
     
    “I’m just saying that it doesn’t seem like I’ve left you in capable hands,” Jason said.
     
    “No, you just left,” she said.
     
    “That was your choice, not mine.”
     
    “Jason,” she began when suddenly he dropped her foot and picked up the radio.
     
    “Go ahead,” he said. For a second, she thought he was talking to her, and then the dispatcher on the other end of his scanner spoke more gibberish. Jason’s eyes narrowed on her a second before he answered. “You’re clear. I’m on that side of town, and I’ll