Dead Over Heels Read Online Free PDF Page A

as they weren’t interested in me,” Martin said.
    “You’re out of all that now. Jack’s death couldn’t have anything to do with you, no matter who’s investigating it.”
    Discovering Martin’s secret life had been the most terrible blow I’d ever sustained. Martin was born to be a buccaneer. For a while his love of danger had been satisfied by a brief stint working for a shadowy CIA- funded company following the war. After he’d begun working for Pan-Am Agra, he’d been approached again, and had resumed his clandestine activities. Only his complete withdrawal from the gun smuggling he’d been facilitating on his legitimate business trips to Central America had made our marriage workable.
    I had just about recovered from the fact that he hadn’t told me anything about it before we married; but it had taken a while. For a couple of months, separation had been a real possibility.
    I didn’t like remembering that time. Angel and Shelby dated from those days also, but I’d managed to regard them as friends and employees rather than body-guards, for the most part. Martin had made some enemies along the way in his clandestine trade, and he was out of town a lot; installing Shelby and Angel had seemed like a wise precaution to him. Though Shelby had at first worked at Pan-Am Agra as cover for his real job—guarding me—it looked as if he actually had a career there now. He’d risen to crew leader and another promotion was looming on the horizon. That seemed the oddest by-product of the whole thing.
    As I was sitting in our king-size bed with my crossword puzzle book on a lap desk resting on my knees, the thought occurred to me that, like Martin, Jack Burns was a tough man with a few enemies.
    Jack, who must have been in his early fifties, had spent most of his working career on the Lawrenceton police force, though I remembered he’d tried the Atlanta police for a four-year stint. Jack had hated Atlanta ever after, and more than just about any other resident of Lawrenceton, he had resented our town’s ever-nearing inclusion in the sprawling Atlanta metroplex. Jack had hated change, and loved justice, which couldn’t come pure enough to suit him. He’d had an almost total disregard for his personal appearance, beyond getting his hair cut and shaving every morning; he’d always looked as though he’d reached in his closet blindfolded and pulled on whatever came out, pieces that often seemed totally unrelated to each other.
    “I wonder how he came to be in the plane,” I murmured, putting aside the lap desk and book. “Seems like to me he took flying lessons at one time. I think I remember Bess saying he thought it might come in handy on the job.”
    Martin was brushing his teeth, but he heard me. He appeared in the bathroom door to make gestures. He’d tell me in a minute.
    I heard gargling noises, and Martin emerged blotting his mouth with a towel, which he tossed back in the bathroom as an afterthought. It landed sort of in the vicinity of the towel rack.
    He’s not good about hanging up towels.
    “While you were out tonight,” he said, “Sally called.”
    I raised my eyebrows interrogatively. Sally Allison was the kingpin reporter for the Lawrenceton Sentinel .
    “She wanted you to know, for some reason, that Jack Burns had rented the plane himself, from the Starry Night Airport ten miles away on the interstate.”
    “He rented it himself ?”
    Martin nodded.
    Good friend that Sally was, she knew I’d be intrigued by that little fact. I clipped my pencil to the puzzle book and tried to imagine how someone had gotten Jack into the plane and then killed him and thrown him out; could one person do that? Could little planes be set on autopilot? Wouldn’t someone be at the airfield to monitor arrivals and departures?
    “From the very little Burns’s wife said to you, he knew the identity of someone here in Lawrenceton who’d been hidden by the Federal Witness Protection Program,” Martin