Carolina Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

collection of Hall and Oates CDs. Maybe she got off on muscle-bound guys in wife-beater T-shirts. So he told her what she expected to hear.
    “I worked a township just south of the city. Three generations of Rossis all living in ten square blocks, most of them cops, all of them baptized, married, and buried at Our Lady of Your Grandmother’s Gravy.”
    It was kind of like a police interview. You disclosed a little truth to get a bigger truth in return. The only difference was there wasn’t anything he wanted from her.
    Was there?
    “Gravy?” she asked.
    “Old school red sauce with meatballs,” he explained. “Cooked low and slow and served every Sunday.”
    “Very nice.”
    “Yeah.”
    It had been. After he hit bottom, his family had stuck by him. But it got so he couldn’t stand the talk around the station house, the looks around the dining room table, his father’s silence, his mother’s sighs. The way conversations broke off when he walked into the kitchen.
    “So what made you decide to exchange family and red sauce for North Carolina barbecue, Chief Rossi?”
    He rolled his shoulders, uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation. He preferred being the one asking the questions. “It was time for a change.”
    “I can understand that.” Her voice was soft. “Everybody has somewhere they’re going. Or something they’re running away from.”
    Their eyes met.
    Right on the button
. Maybe she did understand.
    And maybe he needed another session with his shrink. Or the punching bag. This was not the kind of girl he should get involved with.
    What is it you want, Jack?
That was the shrink’s favorite question.
Is this the behavior that will get you what you want?
    Fuck, no.
    But he couldn’t deny that he was interested. Turned on. By Lauren Patterson. Jack frowned.
Where
had he heard that name before?
    Meg pushed through the back door, the trap bumping against her legs. “Sorry. That took longer than I expected.”
    He smoothed his expression. “No problem.” He took the heavy wire cage from her. “Thanks for taking the time.”
    Lauren smiled wryly. “I was just telling the chief the story of my life.”
    Meg glanced from one to the other. “Swapping hostage stories?”
    Lauren froze. “No. God, no.”
    “What?” Jack said.
    Meg grimaced. “Oops. Sorry,” she said to Lauren. “I thought he knew.”
    Jack narrowed his eyes. “Knew what?”
    Meg shrugged apologetically at her client before answering. “Lauren was involved in a bank robbery last year. She was taken hostage. She wrote a book about it.”
    Hostage. Last year.
    Shit.
Lauren Patterson
. He remembered the story now. Right about the time his personal life went down the crapper. It had been on the news and later the talk shows—the pretty psych student who’d talked the would-be robbers into releasing her fellow hostages, one spot of bright news in a dreary reporting cycle. Even as he sat alone in his rathole apartment, ripe with whiskey and resentment, the story had compelled his attention.
    He couldn’t recall all the details through the fog of Jack Daniels. But he remembered her, a pixie-faced blonde smiling out of an inset photo on his TV screen.
    Before his suspension, Jack had been a sniper on the county emergency response team, the guy you could count on in a crisis when negotiations went sour. In his experience, a hostage’s best chance of survival lay in staying calm and staking out a middle position—not too passive, not too assertive—while the professionals did their jobs. But Lauren Patterson had defied expectations and the odds. She’d actually taken an active role, befriending the bad guys and persuading them to surrender.
    Even mired on his couch, Jack had found her courage foolhardy. Admirable. Dangerous.
    Her hair was darker now and she’d let it grow in the intervening months, scooping the slippery strands into a messy bundle on top of her head. Her face was older and thinner than in her photograph. But he