Snoops in the City (A Romantic Comedy) Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed to look in her direction as he walked to the black SUV parked in his driveway. She sank lower behind the steering wheel.
    "A call from who?" Tori asked.
    "The client. She's going to call you for an update."
    “But I told her I’d call her,” Tori protested.
    Grady — no, Palmer — had disappeared inside the SUV. She heard the engine turn over and the vehicle roar to life.
    “She says she can’t wait," Eddie claimed.
    The SUV pulled away from the curb. Tori cradled the phone against her shoulder and started her car. “I can’t—”
    “Gotta go. Busy, busy, busy,” Eddie said.
    “Eddie, don’t you dare hang up on me!” she shouted into the phone, but he'd already rung off.
    No sooner had she disconnected than the phone rang again. Tori answered while being careful not to follow too closely behind Palmer’s SUV. Her paperback advocated keeping two car lengths behind the subject at all times.
    Tori answered the call. “Hello.”
    “Hello, Jane. Ms. M here,” the caller announced.
    "Who's Jane?" Tori asked.
    "You are. You told me I could call you that," Ms. M said, and Tori remembered with an internal groan the older woman comparing her to Jane Bond. “What have you found out?”
    She’d discovered quite a lot. She knew that Grady Palmer was twenty-eight years old and that he’d never been married. He'd grown up in Seahaven the son of Paul and Beth Ann Palmer and had a 21-year-old sister Lorelei.
    He’d gotten a traffic ticket for going sixty in a 45 mile-per-hour zone five years ago and purchased his home for nearly two hundred thousand dollars three years ago. As far as Tori could determine, he lived alone in that home.
    But she didn’t know anything pertinent except that Grady Palmer's life centered on work. He’d gone back to the office today after the golf tournament even though it was Friday. In the five days she’d followed him, this marked the first time he’d stepped out for the evening.
    “This isn’t the best time for me to talk,” she said as Palmer took a left turn down another residential street that featured more swaying palmetto trees and unpretentious but well-kept homes.
    She turned too, trying to keep her distance.
    “Why not?” Ms. M asked.
    An ambulance siren blared in the distance, growing louder, then fainter.
    “You’re following him, aren’t you?” Ms. M asked excitedly. “You’re following him right now!”
    Palmer turned left and so did Tori. Where was the man headed? They’d probably traveled a mile and he’d yet to leave the neighborhood.
    “That ambulance you heard, that was the television,” Tori fibbed. “I’m watching. . . an ER re-run.”
    “You are not,” Ms. M said indignantly. “ ER isn’t on Friday nights.”
    “Okay. You’re right." Tori followed suit as her subject made another right turn. “I didn’t want to tell you I was following him because the investigation is in the preliminary stages. It’s better if I wait until I can give you a full report."
    Ms. M ignored her rational plea to be left alone. “What’s he doing?”
    He was stopping his SUV and getting out. Tori slammed on her brakes, which squeaked in protest. Only then did she realize the last road they'd turned down ended at a seawall.
    “I’ve gotta go,” she told Ms. M.
    “But—”
    Tori rang off, desperately trying to figure out what to do. Leave. Yes, she should hightail it out of there. She was about to put the car in reverse when Grady Palmer tapped on the glass of the driver's-side window.
    For a man who looked like he never hurried, he sure moved fast.
    Her hand gripped the automatic gear shift, and she positioned her foot to stomp down on the gas pedal. What should she do? Stay and face the subject of her surveillance or make like the wind? She simply couldn't decide.
    When he settled one hand on the roof of the car and tapped more insistently on the window, he made the decision for her. If she pulled away now, she might run over his foot.
    Swallowing her