Dead on the Delta Read Online Free PDF

her. I did my part. I can put it behind me now. “Found a Breeze house and a Breeze head who tried to drown me.”
    “What?” Dom finally turns, brown eyes wide. He actually looks concerned. I always thought he was more Cane’s friend than mine, but maybe he really cares. “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah.” I shrug, glad the goose egg on the backof my head is hidden by my hair. I don’t want any pressure to get checked out. Hospitals remind me of other things I’d rather put behind me. “I tied her up with her belt, and propped her up against a tree.”
    “You didn’t.”
    “Um … I did,” I say, the shock in his voice making me wonder if maybe this is a bigger deal than I’d thought.
    “You didn’t.”
    “I did. For real.”
    “Annabelle.” He blinks four or five times in rapid succession. “You can’t just tie someone up and leave them in the swamp, what the—”
    “What else was I supposed to do?” I ask. “She tried to
kill
me, Dom. And she’s already been bitten, so … ”
    “Crud. Crud, crud, crud.” Dom doesn’t cuss. He says his mama raised him right. “Crud” is probably the nastiest word I’ve ever heard come out of his mouth. “There’s alligators out there. And crazy people.” He stands with a sigh, hands on his narrow hips. He looks skinnier than usual. With a metabolism like his, even twenty-four hours of increased stress and poor appetite can make a difference. This isn’t a man who should be forced to think about murdered kids.
    But then, what sort of man should?
    “And snakes and all kinds of … ” He runs a frustrated hand through his spikes, making them prickle. “We could have another dead body on our hands, Annabelle! Crud! Fudgin’ crud.”
    Hmmm … fudgin’ crud indeed.
    Maybe I should have asked Dicker, after all. At least he wouldn’t have cared that I left a Breeze head to chill out in the bayou for a few hours. Really, she’ll be okay. I didn’t tie her feet, so she’ll be able to run if she sobers up. Not that she should need to run from anything. The fairies have already had their piece of her and most of the other predators don’t come out until after dark.
She’s
probably the most dangerous thing in the swamp at the moment.
    Still … Dom’s crudding makes me feel guilty.
    “You’re right.” I take a big breath and let it out. “I’ll just … go get her.”
    “No, you can’t go get her.” He shakes his head. “You don’t have the training to handle a violent suspect.”
    Whew. Thank God. What would I have done if he’d taken me up on my offer? Screamed “prank call” and made a run for it on my bike?
    I need to stop saying things I’m not sure I mean.
    I wince as a memory flashes through my mind. Me, Cane, and two Big Gulps full of Jack Daniel’s and Vanilla Coke. It was his night off. We’d walked to the town square to see the summer movie in the park and then back to my house. We were drunk by then, and laughing, and he’d felt so good. Too good. The words had been out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. Those three little words that I didn’t really mean, that I hadn’t meant since I was nineteen and Hitch was … everything. And then Cane said them back.
    It still makes me queasy. I wonder if he remembers?He hasn’t said it again, or mentioned the incident, but today, the way he held me afterward felt … different. Safer and more dangerous at the same time.
    “So you’ll call Munoz?” I ask.
    “Yeah, I’ll call her.” Dom takes another long look at the ground beneath the window. Definitely some footprints in the mud. Huge footprints. If they belong to the guy who took Grace, he wears a size thirteen or fourteen. Maybe even bigger. “Come on, let’s go get the paperwork out of the cruiser. I’ll call while you scribble.”
    He heads off across the lawn and I hurry after, forcing my brain not to start running through every man in town with clown feet. Cane will do that. He’s good at investigative work.