Out of Control Read Online Free PDF Page B

carrots and flopped down next to Mikey’s basket, curling up tight around the cold, sick ache in her belly. Sometimes curling up helped. A little bit, anyway.
    She ran a carrot around the rim of the jar and crunched it with grim determination. She needed a new brillant scheme, but Snakey was hogging all the RAM in her brain. There wasn’t enough room left on the hard drive to run the kapow! knock-your-socks-off creative solutions program. She’d just started to drag herself out of this tar pit a few weeks ago, when she’d landed a job in a new graphics design firm in Belltown. The fake references she’d bought for her new identity had eaten up months of meager savings, but it had seemed well worth it at the time.
    It had lasted exactly ten glorious days before the studio had burned to the ground. It was like she was cursed.
    Screw this. She was going to hunt down this joker who was playing tricks on her, and rip his limbs and any other loose appendages off his body. Then she would spring Mikey from the joint, clear her name, and get her act definitively together. The details were fuzzy, but that was the plan. Having a plan was a good first step, right? Right.
    She stared at the phone, tempted for the gazillionth time to call Jenny, or Christine or Pia, her best girlfriends from her old life. Just to let them know she was alive, and that she missed them.
    Fear and guilt squelched the impulse. She couldn’t put her friends in danger, after what had happened to Craig and Mandi. Loneliness was not a good enough excuse. No matter how awful it got.
    She wished she could talk to Mom. Mom had been gone for eight years now, almost nine, carried off by lung cancer. Maybe she was floating around in the ether somewhere, keeping an eye on her luckless, clueless daughter. A vaguely comforting thought. If a wistful one.
    She must have been insane to go over to McCloud’s gym today. Desperate to unload at least a highly edited chunk of her tale of woe onto someone who wasn’t a dog. Mikey was a good listener, but not much for feedback. The kickboxing teacher, Sean—she could hardly believe that laughing, dimpled clown of a guy was the scarily gorgeous Davy McCloud’s brother—had waved aside the no-money issue like it was no big deal. Besides, she’d been trolling for an excuse to get a good long look at Davy McCloud up close. Food for fantasy. She needed it bad. The nights were long when a girl was scared to go to sleep.
    It was a damn shame he was so big. Couple of cans short of a six-pack, too. The bizarre things he said. Dragon spirit, her big ol’ butt.
    Mikey lifted his head to growl. Every hair on Margot’s body stood up. Then she heard the sharp, commanding raprap-rap , and the terror that had spiked inside her eased down, leaving her wobbly.
    Snakey would never knock like that. In fact, Snakey wouldn’t knock at all. He would slither through a sewer pipe like a foul vapor. Slide out the bathroom drain with a wet-sounding pop.
    Oh, ick. Nice job, lame brain. Now she’d grossed herself out.
    Rat-tat-tat , there it came again, crisp and businesslike. Mikey clambered out of his basket, barking. Margot looked down at herself as she followed him towards the front door. Boobs flying wild and free under the Superman T-shirt. Hair damp and snarled and all over the place. Her face, naked of all cosmetic enhancers or concealers, left to fend bravely for itself in the unforgiving urban blight light.
    She couldn’t be more at a disadvantage if she’d deliberately tried.
    Mikey’s toenails skittered on the linoleum, his limp forgotten. Margot lunged for her comb in the bedroom and dragged it through her hair as she peeked through the peephole. Yep. Him. Her heart went ka-thud. She peered out again, studying the sculpted lines of his jaw, that grim but incredibly sexy mouth. The grooves around it were evidence that he knew how to smile. Maybe he only did it in the dark when