Cold Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page A

know.”
    â€œWhat about you, Elijah? Are you that good a shot?”
    He didn’t answer. Devin was being a jerk again.
    â€œA lot of people in town think you’re still special ops.”
    â€œPeople can think what they want to think.”
    Nora seemed to go a little pale. “I hate war,” she said. “Sorry. I just do.”
    Elijah picked up several good-size pieces of dried bark that had come off some of the logs and would work well as kindling. “Understood.”
    She blushed. “I didn’t mean—I just…” She dropped whatever she meant to say and turned to Devin. “I’m ready if you are.”
    Elijah paid them in cash, and as they returned to the hillside trail, Devin flipped on the flashlight, directing the beam of light at the ground. “See you, Elijah. We’ll get here on time if you ever have any more work for us.”
    After they left, Elijah walked down to the lake in the dark, the ground familiar to him, the clean, cold air welcome after breathing in wood particles. He heard an owl in the woods off to his left, and to his right, he saw a bat against the starlit sky, beelining for Jo’s cabin. He couldn’t resist a smile. Whether the bat went into the cabin or not, he couldn’t tell.
    So many nights in faraway places, he had imagined himself as he was now, on the edge of the lake on a biting fall night. Sometimes Jo would be there with him. Not always, but when she was, he would see her clearly—the sharp angles of her face, the spray of freckles on her cheeks and nose, the spark of her eyes. He would hear her laugh and be soothed by her smile. He hadn’t considered it a vision or a fantasy. Just Jo being with him out here on the lake.
    He’d often wondered if she ever thought about him and had hoped she didn’t.
    He turned away from the lake. Jo’s cabin was dark now.
    His father had only bought the lakefront property a few years ago, after finally wearing down old Pete Harper, the original owner, an eccentric ninety-year-old cousin of Jo’s grandfather, who had since died.
    Elijah returned to his woodpile. He’d gone out to his father’s grave in his first days back home. Still recuperating in Germany, he’d missed the funeral. As he’d stared at the simple stone marker, he’d understood, at least in his own mind, that whatever had occurred on Cameron Mountain last April still required a reckoning. Answers. Justice, even.
    He knew himself, and he wouldn’t stop until he had a clear picture of everything that had happened in Black Falls that spring.
    His father would expect no less of him.
    But Jo Harper was back in town, and as Elijah reached for another log, he debated which was the bigger problem—that she was as pretty as ever, or that she was a federal agent with a gun and the power of arrest.
    Not that it mattered. Either way, Jo had never been one to break rules.
    Except, of course, with him.

Three
    T homas Asher folded the Washington Post and set it to the side of his table with a chuckle of amusement after reading a rip-roaring, tongue-in-cheek op-ed on the Jo Harper incident. It focused on her and the vice president’s beloved, unruly family—the point being, how could anyone expect the Secret Service to keep track of such incorrigible rascals?
    The furor over Jo’s encounter with Charlie Neal should have abated by now, but it went on because politicians and media hounds wanted it to.
    And because there was that video, of course.
    To Thomas—and to most people, he had no doubt—Jo came across as a competent professional who hadn’t lost control but had simply, finally, done what the vice president or his wife should have done a long time ago: take their one and only son by the ear and read him the riot act.
    Thomas settled back in his upholstered chair. The restaurant was on the first floor of an elegant, historic hotel a few blocks from Lafayette