Exposure Read Online Free PDF Page A

together as long as her daughter was awake to command all her attention. It was in the quiet hours when Gracie slept that she invariably fell apart.
    She stood at the second-story window, arms wrapped around herself as she stared down at the dimly lighted square. Like most small towns, Port Flannery seemed to roll up its sidewalks shortly after nightfall. Oh, she imagined the tavern she'd seen down on the harbor was probably still doing a booming business, but up here it was quiet and still. The only sign of movement down on the shadowy grass common was a mongrel dog sniffing around the gazebo. As she watched he lifted his leg and anointed a patch of flowers that fronted the latticework. Emma pulled the shade and turned away from the window.
    She was trying so hard to ignore the stack of videos in the bag on the shelf in the closet that it was self-defeating. The videos drew her, just as they'd done that day in Grant's library while she'd waited for him to arrive home. The day they had turned her entire life inside out.
    She hadn't set out to invade his privacy that day. Ah, Dieu, Emma thought, trying to control a little bubble of hysteria, his privacy. Exhaling a bitter little breath, she hugged herself against a pervasive chill. There was an irony for you.
    The fact remained, however, that she had merely been killing time that afternoon, not looking to pry into areas she had no business intruding upon. She'd seen Grant retrieve and replace the key to the cabinet a dozen times; but she had always assumed the tapes were records of business transactions and had respected the fact that they were kept behind lock and key for a purpose. That afternoon she had simply been passing the time by reading the dates on the video box spines. March 14, 1982 had naturally drawn her attention.
    That was the day she had met the man who would become the closest thing she'd ever known to a father. The day she'd tried to steal Grant Woodard's Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce.
    * * * * *
    She wasn't supposed to have been involved. Big Eddy let her hang around the shop pestering him, the other mechanic, and the two auto-body men, but he was adamant about keeping her on the sidelines when it came to actually stealing the cars they chopped. He always said he might be nothing but a car thief, but he was damned if she was going to become one as well.
    Eddy was funny that way. He made her go to school, made her brush her teeth morning and night, didn't let the other men in the shop talk too dirty around her. He taught her to drive a car before she was twelve, showed her how to break down an engine, pound out dents, and paint an automobile. But he kept her apart from the real meat and potatoes of the operation. He wouldn't let her do any of the fun stuff at all.
    So she decided to heist this one on her own.
    They'd seen the car often on the fringes of the Garden District, and because her brother and the men who worked with him raved about it every time they saw it, Emma just naturally assumed it would be a car they'd chose to steal. She wanted to beat them to the punch, to present it to them as a fait accompli, an acquisition she could point to as proof positive that she could handle this aspect of the job as well as any guy could.
    Carefully obeying all speed limits, she was driving it back to Big Eddy's shop when a large black sedan forced her to the side of the road. She hadn't been in the car five minutes.
    Before she had time to react, two very large men with thick necks and flat, cold eyes climbed out of the sedan and crossed over to rip open the driver's door. One of them stood to one side, his back to the car, his eyes scanning the area while the other leaned into the automobile. He stared at her without expression for a moment, then reached in and removed the keys from the ignition. "Get outta the car, sister."
    They bundled her into the sedan and drove without speaking for several miles, eventually parking in the underground garage of a modern downtown