Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree Read Online Free PDF

anything else. A bath, a long, luxurious bath in a clean American hotel room! That’s what she most wanted right now. She should be living like a queen, she was going to be so rich!
    The dark-featured man drove very fast. He ran red lights. Neither of the two men spoke. They stared straight ahead as the engine roared.
    Elzbieta had a guidebook with a foldout map. She prided herself on her map-reading skills. The car was going in the wrong direction. She was certain her reservations were at a hotel downtown.
    “We should go that way?” she said, pointing over her shoulder.
    No answer. The blond one turned up the radio. Spunky jazz. Elzbieta would have enjoyed it in other circumstances.
    “You are mistaking,” she said. Fear made her chin quiver. “I am staying in hotel downtown. That way. Here are my papers.” She held up her hotel confirmation for the blond man to see. He didn’t turn around.
    As she looked back in the direction of downtown New Orleans, through the heavily tinted rear window, she understood that there was indeed a mistake, a terrible one. And she had made it.
    Elzbieta frantically yanked the door handles. Both doors were locked solid from the front.
    Praying to the Holy Family and John Paul II, she cried quietly.

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    3
    “N ick,” Una said, after one of those long, observant, nearly telepathic lulls in the conversation that characterize the meetings of longtime friends. They were sitting around a shellacked salvaged cable reel that served as a table at the Folio, a favorite hangout of diverse groups from the adjacent Freret University campus.
    At the Folio there was a boozy truce between highbrow and lowbrow, professors and students, art and science, social dissidents and frat members, aesthetes and athletes.
    Nick’s earlier plan to jog had lost out to an invitation from Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus to meet here.
    “Dion and I have a proposition for you,” Una said and waited. She adjusted her glasses, leaning forward on the table in earnestness, her blue eyes daring him to take the challenge.
    Nick raised an eyebrow in suspicion. He put down his beer mug with a thud. “Hey, I was just sitting here, tending my own psychic garden, enjoying the music, and the whole time you two have been laying a trap for me…oh yeah, I definitely smell a conspiracy. What is it this time? An office job in the geology department? Somebody at the library on maternity leave? Assisting a Ph.D. candidate in his research? Hey, friends, please: you don’t have to throw me scraps anymore. In fact, I like my work. I haven’t been able to say that in a long, long time, have I?”
    They nodded in unison.
    “Look, I know it must be unnerving for pampered, tenured, grant-rich scholars like you to acknowledge that; it does violence to your self-image; but I am actual proof that there is life outside the shaded groves of academe.”
    Always focused on the higher motivations, like one of her long-suffering Victorian literary heroines, Una ignored his self-defensive outburst: “We’ve noticed that you’re overworked. The rat race doesn’t agree with you. You’re too thin…those circles under your eyes.”
    “Just allergies, that’s all,” Nick replied.
    “For a minute there, when I came in, I thought Una was sitting with Keith Richards,” Dion Rambus said. “He’s coming to town for a performance, as the posters stuck all over campus proclaim.”
    “Ouch! That hurt,” said Nick, wincing in feigned discomfort.
    “‘O how full of briers is this working-day world!’” Dion continued.
    “ As You Like It , act 1, scene three,” Nick said between sips.
    “Very good. Listen to Una, Nick. You need our help. I remember the days when you would outpace me, in spite of my longer legs, on our brisk walks across campus. And outtalk me! Now, you’re stooped and brooding like a medieval monk in a scriptorium. What a horrible yoke it must be to have to work twelve months a year.” Dion shook his head and