Last Call - A Thriller (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Mysteries Book 10) Read Online Free PDF Page A

dirt-covered beer bottle with its label obliterated by the seasons. No one came back there.
    She stood beneath a large elm, removed a foldable pruning saw from her pack, and spent an hour clearing a line of sight to Jack’s front yard. Then she set up her scope on a small tripod, settled in, and waited for the retired cop to come home.

DECADES AGO



 
Detroit
    T he voices outside the door had been raised for several minutes now, and the argument was escalating.
    Standing by the window, she stared through the iron bars as snow fell onto the street six stories below. For a moment, she touched her fingers to the freezing glass, the closest she could come to experiencing the world outside. Right now, it was cold. In the summer, it would be hot. Because of the orientation of the building she occupied, she hadn’t actually seen the sun in over two years.
    This room was her world.
    She ate here.
    Slept here.
    Lived in a heroin-laced fog here.
    And in between all the forced horror, she escaped into the worlds of her paperbacks and old magazines whenever she had a moment to herself. That was the best thing about her life by leaps and bounds. Once a week, a green-eyed man named Winston would come bearing an armful of tattered, yellow-paged paperbacks from a nearby thrift store.
    If business had been good, he’d bring her five, plus a magazine or two.
    If it had been a slow week, two or three.
    If she’d broken a single rule: none.
    But she hadn’t broken any rules. Not in a long time. No escape attempts. No suicide attempts. And they didn’t even have to beat her anymore. The worst thing they could do was deny her reading material. Deny her that escape. As far as punishments went, she’d have opted for a ruthless beating over no new books or magazines, any day. Pain went away. Pain could be forgotten. But without the escape of her stories, her thoughts inevitably drifted back to all that had been taken from her.
    Those thoughts were unbearable.
    But the printed word took away the pain, even more than the drug needle.
    Ann Rule, Joel McGinniss, Vincent Bugliosi, F. Paul Wilson, John D. MacDonald, Agatha Christie: these writers were her saviors. Without them, she’d have surely wasted away to nothing.
    She turned from the window, from the snowy city whose name she did not know, and moved across the one-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much. A gas stove. An ancient refrigerator that hummed constantly like a diesel engine. A couch that had clearly been pulled off the side of some disgusting curb and still smelled like someone else’s trash.
    Stopping at the door, she put her ear to the wood.
    When she’d heard the footsteps coming down the corridor, she’d assumed it was time to go to work.
    But something else was happening out there that sounded like trouble.
    Two of the voices she immediately recognized.
    She couldn’t forget them if she’d wanted to. They would haunt her always.
    The third…
    Sounded familiar.
    Low, gravely, with a touch of psychotic mirth.
    Yes, she knew that voice. He’d been here many times to see her.
    Donaldson.
    A heavyset man who wore a paper-thin veneer of good ‘ol boy conviviality over something ugly. Even uglier than the men who kept her here.
    It was his voice she heard bleeding through the door: “I don’t know! File it in your
shit happens
folder. It ain’t my problem, gentlemen.”
    “It is actually,” one of her captors said—the short one with massive thighs she knew as Ben. “You were supposed to use a rubber. House rules.”
    “Really?” Donaldson snorted. “You two want to lecture me about rules?”
    “You come here, we have an agreement on how to do things. You can slap the girls around, use them however you want. But you gotta use a rubber.”
    “Not my problem,” Donaldson said. “She’s not my property. She’s yours. I just rent her. How do I even know I’m to blame?”
    “Because everyone else,” Winston said, “uses a goddamn rubber.”
    “I don’t even