Racing the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes bulging and my mouth twisted in what was almost certainly a curse. I looked like a man with murder on his mind. In truth, I’d just dropped a hammer on my thumb.
    A real Kodak moment.
    I could imagine how Ashleigh must have salivated when she realized she had photos of a bona fide fugitive in her own personal archives.
    “Aw, shit,” Billy said. “Not that bitch.”
    “I have an idea,” I said.
    “A bad idea. I can tell. You don’t even have to tell me what it is.”
    “She can help me.”
    He snorted. “Yeah, when Hell freezes over. Didn’t she help you enough already?”
    “Billy . . .” I sighed. He was right. It was stupid. Of all the people in the world I shouldn’t trust, Ashleigh was at the top of the list. But she was also one of the few people in a position to help me out of the mess Heather had gotten me into.
    Besides . . .
    I punched the off button on the remote and said, “She owes me one.”

A SHLEIGH ARNEAU AND I met in high school. She was Ashley Arnold then. Head cheerleader, vice president of the student body (“president of student body vices,” was the joke), drama queen, and star reporter for the Golden Bear Claw student newspaper. We didn’t date back then, although we did a few shows together. In The Crucible , she played Abigail to my John Proctor, which might have been an omen of things to come.
    But she was seeing a guy from MTSU, and I was dating a cute little junior who played clarinet in the band. The junior, Belinda Honeyman, was playing Goody Proctor, so there was little opportunity for conquest, even if either of us had been so inclined. By the time I ran into Ashleigh again, she was working as a reporter for a local TV station. She’d nose around the precinct house looking for a story, and I would spout whatever we’d been told to tell the press—usually “no comment.”
    I swear on my mother’s heart, I never slept with Ashleigh. Not while I was married, anyway. Maria has her doubts, but this is the God’s honest truth. Until six months after my divorce—by which time Maria was already seeing D.W.—my relationship with Ashleigh Arneau was strictly professional. But after my wife—my ex-wife—got serious about the man who would in time become my replacement, I took the plunge and asked Ashleigh to a live performance of Johnny Guitar at a local dinner theatre.
    We lasted for four months. Four months of drama, four months of her pleading with me for info on ongoing cases, four months of stimulating conversations and fantastic sex. And in the end, when I was called into the Commissioner’s office and relieved of duty for divulging sensitive information, it turned out to be four months of nothing.
    I called Ashleigh from a pay phone and told her I’d been fired. She made all the right noises, sympathetic and concerned, and I got home just in time to catch her removing the recording device she had placed in the receiver of my phone.
    There was an awkward silence. Then she asked, “Are you going to have me arrested?” Only the slightest tremor in her voice told me she was genuinely frightened of the prospect.
    I thought about it. Thought about what would happen to that exquisite body and that gorgeous face in prison. And I decided that, whatever she had done to me, I couldn’t put her through it.
    I looked squarely into those wisteria-colored eyes and said, “Get out.”
    She laid a cool hand on my forearm. “I’m sorry, Jared. I didn’t mean to get you fired. Only, you have no idea how fierce the competition is out there. If I don’t get these stories . . .”
    “Get out,” I repeated, and I guess she finally figured I meant it, because she left.
    I mailed her the rest of her belongings. There wasn’t much. Some lingerie, a few toiletries, and a couple of changes of clothes.
    I didn’t pee in her shampoo, but I thought about it.
    I hadn’t seen her since, except on TV, and even then I always tried to change the channel before she came on.
    Now,