Deep Breath Read Online Free PDF

telling her not to worry.
    His key ring and cell phone and wallet ended up in the tub with Phil’s stuff. When the steak knife was discovered, the man searching him shoved him into the table, cursing rudely, and she bit at the lip that threatened to tremble.
    The woman came next. She had nothing in her jeans pockets but a business card holder with her driver’s license and her cash money. She grumbled under her breath while being searched, glaring at the man who still stood near the door.
    He had to be the boss, what with the way he lifted a finger and signaled for his men to move onto the last man, the customer who’d been sitting with the woman and ordered the cheeseburger basket and Coke.
    He tried to chat up the thug searching his pockets, asking how the guy’s day was going, wondering if a bag of chips wouldn’t be too much trouble since he was starving.
    She wanted to laugh—she wanted to get him the chips— and ended up fighting both tears and a smile. How could he make her laugh when she was so scared her stomach felt like she’d swallowed half of the rocks from her flower garden?
    Once his pockets were empty and his belongings piled in with the rest, he was ordered into the booth with Phil and the other customer, and she was ordered to carry the tub to the table at the diner’s far end, then to sit on a stool at the counter out of the way.
    She didn’t mind so much, and hoped they all forgot about her. Maybe when they weren’t looking, when they were busy taking all the money from the register—wasn’t that why they were here? what else could they want?—she could slip off unnoticed and call the cops.
    But no one went for the register at all. The two bullies stood guarding their prisoners like they were waiting for a bomb to drop or something.
    It was then that the quiet man moved, picking the two-person booth nearest the door. He was of average height and rather thin, sleazy looking in one way, and nice looking, like a fashion model, in another. As she looked on, he motioned one of the big thugs to bring over the woman from the booth.
    The woman looked even more miserable and mad than earlier, but one thing she didn’t look was scared. She slid into the other side of the single booth, slouched down, and glared. She didn’t say a word.
    Finally the man shook his head, laughed, the sound soft and spooky, and said, “Hello, Georgia.”

 
     
    12:20 P.M.
     
    “Charlie.” Crap. Just…crap. First, the arrest. Second, no dossier. And now Charlie Castro. Could her day, no, her week, no, her life , slide any further downhill? “What do you want?”
    “Is that any way to greet an old friend?” he asked, the bored look on his face telling the truth of their nonexistent relationship.
    Still, she took pleasure in reminding him. “You’re not a friend. You’re barely an acquaintance.”
    But he was a threat. And that reality was one not scraped away as easily as slime from the bottom of a shoe.
    The comparison was apt. If she got wind of Charlie Castro chasing down the same lead she was, she backed off. The stench of his ruthlessness clung like sewer waste.
    Tangling with him was a no-win situation. And she’d grown attached to having all her fingers and ear parts and kneecaps in working order.
    “And here I thought being in the same business made us colleagues,” he said, his mouth smiling, his eyes not.
    “Think again.” She crossed her arms over her middle.
    Time was ticking. This weekend was her best and possibly last chance to get her hands on the TotalSky dossier. She was not about to share with Charlie Castro that she had it on her radar. The fact that she was on his was bad enough.
    “Whatever you want, I don’t have it. You’ve searched me. You’ve searched”—she started to say my brother , held back the ammunition just in time, and said instead—“Finn. Have one of your thugs search our truck. My backpack and duffel are in the cab. If you think I’ve found anything of value,