No Safe House Read Online Free PDF Page B

stared at it, tried to will it to stop, which it finally did after a dozen rings.
    But seconds later, a text. “Shit,” she said. “He wants me to call home.”
    “He’s got you on a tight leash. Your mom a control freak, too?”
    If she were home
, Grace thought. If she hadn’t bailed on themtwo weeks ago, after the thing with the pot of boiling water. She’d gotten the bandage off only three days ago.
    She ignored his question and turned things back to the topic at hand. “Okay, so did your dad buy you a Porsche?”
    “God, no. You think he’d be driving around in a shitbox tank like this if he had?”
    “Then what?”
    “I know where I can find one and take it for a spin.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I can get my hands on one in, like, ten minutes, one that we can borrow.”
    “What, like at a car dealership?” Grace asked. “Aren’t they all going to be closed?” Who’d let you take a test drive this time of night?
    Stuart shook his head. “No, at somebody’s house.”
    “Who do you know who’s got a Porsche?” She grinned. “And how dumb would they have to be to let you borrow it?”
    “No, it’s not like that. It’s at a house that’s empty this week. It was on the list.”
    “What list?”
    “A list, okay? That my dad’s got. They try to keep it up-to-date, when people are on vacation, that kind of thing. I check out places where people are away, see what kind of wheels they got. One time I took out a Mercedes, just for, like, twenty minutes, and no one ever knew. Not a scratch on it. Put it back in the garage just the way it was.”
    “Who keeps a list like that?” Grace asked. “What’s your dad do? Does he do, like, security stuff, too?” The thing was, she had an inkling of what this boy’s father did and would have been surprised to learn it had anything to do with making people feel safer in their homes.
    “Yeah,” he said offhandedly. “That’s what he is. Security.”
    Grace kept thinking about the call and the text from herfather. When she’d left the house, she’d told him she was going to a movie with another girl from her class. Her mom was going to drive. It was a seven o’clock show that was supposed to get out around nine, and she’d get a lift home after.
    What would her dad do if he found out she’d lied? Because as lies went, this was a doozy. Grace wasn’t with that girl, and they weren’t at the movies. Stuart—not her friend’s mother—was going to drop her off a block from home. Her father would never have let her go out with a boy who was old enough to drive.
    And certainly not this boy, this onetime pain-in-the-ass know-nothing student in her father’s class. With, as Grace suspected her father knew, a kind of questionable home background.
    “What you’re talking about sounds like stealing,” she said.
    Stuart shook his head. “No way. Stealing is when you take a car and keep it, or sell it to someone who packs it up in a big cargo container and ships it over to some guy in Arabia or something. But we’re only going to
borrow
it. Won’t even try to see what it can do, because the last thing you want when you’re borrowing somebody’s car is get a speeding ticket, you know?”
    Grace waited a long time before she said, “I guess it would be fun.”
    He started up the land yacht and headed west.

FIVE
    DETECTIVE Rona Wedmore was about to collapse into bed when she got the call that they’d found a body.
    Lamont was already under the covers, and asleep, but began to stir when he sensed his wife was putting her clothes back on.
    “Babe?” he said, turning over in bed.
    She never got tired of hearing him talk, even a single word like that. Didn’t matter what he said, not after she’d been through that period when he didn’t speak a word. Traumatized after coming back from Iraq, the things he’d seen, he’d gone kind of catatonic on her. Not speaking for months, until that night three years ago when she got shot in the