SIREN'S TEARS (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

bad straits.”
    “I know. We’ve made several trips. Got a truck with generators coming tomorrow morning. Some of them aren’t even stolen.” He turned back to Porgie. “You better stay close. Heard there are some looters. I’ll send men back with Kalugin to keep an eye on your block until the police get a handle on things.”
    We all looked at Kalugin, who may have killed more people in Brooklyn and Staten Island than any hurricane. But at least they might have deserved it. The Rahms were known as prolific, but not indiscriminate, killers.
    “No looters,” Kalugin said.
    And there weren’t any. Arman Rahm was a bad guy, running a Russian mob with an iron fist. The fist being Maks Kalugin. But he spent as much time helping out the victims of Sandy as anyone. And got his hands dirty. By the end of the week he didn’t look so L. L. Beanish. One of us may have to kill the other some day, but I’m sure we won’t be happy about it.
    On my last day, I brought the clothes on my back, and bags more. It was cold, and people needed them. By that time, Alice had been working at my side for several days, sleeping back at my place. Well, mostly sleeping. It’s an ill wind, etc.
    Alice not only approved my decision to donate my clothes but helped me clean out my closets and drawers. A bit too enthusiastically, I thought. She even teased me with the suggestion that the storm victims might reject some of my threads. My trip to the mall was in partial revenge for that comment. Alice wouldn’t be caught dead in a mall.
    ***
    But I thought I might, since I was now positive I was being followed. I wasn’t sure how I knew.  I’d like to say that my instincts were so honed by experience that detecting a tail or an observer was second nature, but that’s wishful thinking.  Yeah, I can spot a tail with the best of them, because I am one.  But this was different.
    It was more an animal thing, that sixth sense thing many people have.  It dates back to prehistory, when the world was a very inhospitable place for hairy, semi-intelligent bipeds not far removed from the comparative safety of trees.  A lot of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon’s were undoubtedly snacked on by saber-toothed tigers or cave bears, but I bet not too many of them were taken by surprise.  Most were outrun, or trapped in a gully, or maybe went down defending the Missus and the little cave brats, but they probably weren’t calmly walking down the trail with some 600-pound carnivore walking behind them.
      At some point, the hair on the back of their neck stood up and they knew – with absolute certainty – their day was about to be ruined unless they stepped lively.  I wonder what it is, this sixth sense a lot of us have.   Do things radiate a force that can be detected by the ultrasensitive? Or is it merely an acute awareness distilled from the input all our other senses are constantly gathering.  A polar bear can smell a seal 20 miles away, and smell is only atoms, or bits of matter.  And matter is energy in a different state, E=MC2 and all that.
    In any event, I had a feeling. I looked around for a men’s room.  If somebody followed me into one, I’d at least narrow the field by 50%, even accounting for transvestites. It was Sunday and the mall was crowded, but I’d already eliminated the senior citizens getting in their exercise, women with strollers or toddlers, the old priest who was standing at a travel agency kiosk looking at guides (for Italy and Rome, what else?) and a million hyperactive teen-agers.
    Of course, the men’s room ploy doesn’t always work.  And it didn’t this time. I wasted 20 minutes in the john before I began to feel foolish. A lot of men came in. Nobody paid me much attention, except a security guard who had been alerted by the cleaning man changing the paper towels that a pervert was watching everyone who came in to take a leak. I decided to leave before I was arrested.
    When I came out, there was nobody suspicious