Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

in my chest start to loosen up. As I pulled out onto the road, I saw a flash of headlights behind me, a car pulling out from the same place the earlier one had—David’s driveway.
    “Is it Hurley’s?” Izzy asked.
    I looked over at him with a bemused expression. “How could it be? He’s not even in town.” I was approaching the stop sign at the end of our road, so I slowed and signaled for a left turn. I stopped and waited longer than necessary given that no traffic was coming along the intersecting road, and I stared into my rearview mirror, trying to make out the face of the driver in the car behind me. The car stopped several feet back, its headlights shining into my window, so I couldn’t make out a face. But in the light reflecting off the car’s surface from my taillights, I could tell the edges of the vehicle were boxier than Hurley’s sedan. “Even if Hurley was in town, I’m certain it isn’t his,” I concluded. “I think it’s my father’s.”
    I turned left onto the main road and watched as the car behind us turned right. As I turned my focus back to the road in front of me, I slowly became aware of Izzy staring at me with a befuddled, slightly frightened expression.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked him.
    “You think it’s your father’s?” he said, swallowing hard.
    “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I told him. “I think he wants to try to start up a new relationship with me.”
    Izzy looked away for a few seconds, shook his head, then looked back at me. “What are we talking about?”
    “The car,” I said, enunciating slowly and casting a worried sidelong glance at Izzy. Was he having a stroke or something? How could he have forgotten what we were talking about just seconds before?
    “What car?” Izzy asked, looking even more confused.
    “The one behind us . . . or at least the one that was behind us. When we turned left, it turned right. I’ve seen what I think is the same dark car behind me fairly often lately, and twice now it has emerged from David’s driveway at a time of day when no one should be there. At first I thought it might be following me, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”
    Izzy twisted around and tried to look out the rear window, but the seat back was too high for him to see. “You were talking about a car,” he said, with a tone of sudden comprehension. He chuckled and shook his head. “Thank goodness. Now your answers make much more sense.”
    I replayed our conversation in my mind and came out puzzled. “You asked me if it was Hurley’s car. What else could we have been talking about?”
    “I didn’t say car.”
    “You lost me,” I said, shaking my head. “What else could belong to Hurley?” In the millisecond before he answered, I got it.
    “Your baby, of course,” Izzy said, and that’s when the world began to spin.

Chapter 4
    “W atch out!” Izzy yelled.
    I’d been staring gape-jawed at Izzy instead of at the road ahead of me. When I glanced back at the road, I saw that I was in the left lane and instinctively jerked the wheel to the right and slammed on the brakes, triggering a frightening fishtail. Had I been going any faster, we would have likely been the cause of a great deal of scrambling and chaos as someone tried to figure out who was going to do the autopsies for the accident that took the lives of the medical examiner and his assistant. But I was able to get the hearse under control, and in the wake of an angry blare from a passing motorist’s horn, I pulled the car off onto the shoulder and parked.
    After a few seconds of near-death silence in which the only sound was the quiet hum of the engine and the settling of the dust I’d kicked up, I looked over at Izzy. “You know? Who told you? Was it Gunther? Because if it was, I’m going to chain his legs into that exercise machine he keeps putting me on and spread that sucker until he splits like the wishbone on a turkey.”
    “Nobody told me.