Mann 01 - Where Angels Rest Read Online Free PDF Page A

door. Mrs. Piltzecker, whom Nick had always thought was aesthetically challenged, had put a pair of plastic fawns in her dead garden every winter since Nick was old enough to remember. He and his brothers had gotten caught once trying to hoist them onto her roof on Christmas Eve.
    He rolled past the timeworn deer and hooked into hisdriveway, the thought passing that life here could be a Kodak commercial: festooned yards, affable neighbors, thriving businesses. Hopewell had a respected private college, an active community theater, an historic bed-and-breakfast, and even a sculptor who was a little bit famous. In Hopewell, youth groups caroled door-to-door at Christmas and kids set up lemonade stands for the Fourth of July. In Hopewell, the local rodent population—marsupial—posed the greatest challenge a sheriff would ever face.
    Nick forced himself to stop grinding his jaw. This was what he’d wanted: no gangs, no drug warfare, no organized crime. None of the day-in, day-out crises of urban detective work, and except for the likes of Leslie Roach, no relentless buzz of media. All that had been a high for Nick when he was a young, hungry cop in L.A., but now what he wanted was peace and calm. A sanctuary where he could keep the people he cared about safe.
    Like Hannah.
    He got out of the Tahoe and popped open the back, the urge to get to the cabin gnawing at his bones. Frost hung in the air—not the picturesque kind that would shimmer in a winter calendar photo, but the wet kind that went up your nostrils and opened your sinuses, and clung to your skin like a cold rubber sheet. He zipped his bomber jacket and started loading the truck.
    The long guns went in first: a 12-gauge shotgun and scoped Remington rifle. A pair of 45-caliber Hechler & Koch machine pistols followed, guns that made his county-issue 9mm Glock feel like a toy. Three bottles of tequila were next—the good kind from Mexico, illegal and complete with the worm. Then a Styrofoam cooler with beer and cold cuts. Ten boxes of ammunition.
    Ready.
    A sickly sun edged over the horizon as he drove out of town, the radio weatherman euphemistically pronouncing the morning “brisk” and promising a break in the sleet and rain. It would turn into a classic November weekend in the Midwest, the voice promised, perfect for playing tag football or raking leaves or roasting marshmallows at a bonfire.
    Nick would spend it shooting demons.
    He was thinking about that when he pushed the Tahoe to seventy-five, crossed the county line, and ran over a woman.

CHAPTER
4
    D LMMP.
    The Tahoe pitched, riding up on two left tires. It bounced to four wheels again and Nick stood on the brakes, fishtailed to a stop. His heart thrashed in his chest.
    Jesus Christ, he’d just hit a woman. The sound echoed in his ears—
dlmmp
—like when he’d run over a raccoon once, only the coon hadn’t bumped his truck nearly off the road. He wrenched the gear shift into PARK and threw open the truck door, grabbed a flashlight and ran back up the road, squinting through the dawn. Hoping, praying he was wrong.
    He froze when he saw her.
    Ah, God, it
was
a woman, and horror seized him by the throat. She lay partway across the gravel shoulder, twisted half onto her side, stretching up onto the pavement. She looked dead.
    Nick tried to think past the terrible drumming in his chest, then said that to himself again:
She looked dead.
Not dead from having just been hit, but an old dead—the stiff, gray dead of having been dead a while. He squatted and touched her neck. She was cold and he nudged one of her fingers.
Rigor mortis
already coming on.
    Okay. Dead, but not from him. His lungs started working again.
    He scanned the road for any other traffic then aimed the flashlight on her body. Her front was coated with mud while her back and one side of her face appeared to have been drizzled on during the night and washed mostly clean. She was young, maybe even a teenager. Her lips had a bluish tint and