Storm Front Read Online Free PDF

Virgil observed.
    “Thank you.”
    “And you know about Tinker Bell?”
    “Of course. My parents have had a condo on South Beach, in Miami Beach, for forty years,” she said. “I was born there. I’ve been to Disney World eight or nine times.”
    “Ah. So you’re actually an American?” Virgil asked.
    “No. I could have been, but I chose Israel,” she said.
    —
    O N THE WAY OVER to Jones’s house, Virgil went back to Jones’s departure from Israel. “Are you telling me that he stole the car, drove to this city on the coast . . .”
    “Haifa.”
    “Yeah, Haifa. Then he drops the car at the Avis agency, which he just happens to know where it is, catches a cab before dawn, gets a ride to a specific marina, where he finds two Germans willing to smuggle him out of Israel, no questions asked . . . and he didn’t prearrange it? And, of course, he couldn’t prearrange it, because he didn’t know the stele would be found.”
    “The diggers left the
tel
at noon and locked the stele up at midnight. He could have easily taken a
sherut
to Haifa, and back, in that time.”
    “A
sherut
?”
    “Like a minibus,” she said. “Or he could have taken a taxi.”
    “So Haifa’s not far?”
    “Maybe an hour and a half,” Yael said.
    “You checked to see that he was gone for at least, say, five hours in that period? Time enough to catch a bus, get there, make arrangements, and get back?”
    “There seems to be some controversy about that, but I don’t care,” she said.
    “And you don’t care, because he stole the stele, and that’s what you care about.”
    “Correct,” she said.
    —
    A T J ONES ’ S HOUSE , Virgil’s note was gone from the door. He rang the doorbell again, and a second time, then reached out to the doorknob . . . and it turned in his hand. Hell, this was Minnesota. He pushed the door open and called, “Hello? Anybody home?”
    He heard the creak of a floorboard from the back of the house. “Hello? This is the police. Anybody there?”
    He heard two quick steps and then the back door banged open and Virgil was running through the house. It occurred to him, as he cleared a china cabinet full of blue-and-white Spode dishes and cups, that usually, in this situation, the cop had a gun. His was in the truck, and not for the first time, he thought,
Jeez
.
    He went through the kitchen and took a wrong turn, into a dead end that led to stairs down into a basement. He reversed field, and through a back window saw a tall, dark-complected young man with long hair, in a T-shirt and jeans, hop a back fence and dash between the two houses that backed up to Jones’s house.
    Virgil ran back through the kitchen and through the mudroom, out the back door and across the backyard. There was a four-foot fence separating Jones’s yard from the house it backed up to. He clambered over the fence and ran to the front of the house; but none of that was as fast as the runner had done it, because Virgil was wearing cowboy boots and the runner was wearing running shoes.
    He was in time to see a champagne-colored Camry pull away from the curb a hundred yards farther on, and accelerate down the block and then around the corner. The car was too far away to get the tag, but it was from Minnesota, and he noted a basketball-sized dent in the left rear bumper.
    “Shoot.” He felt for his phone, and remembered it was on the charger in the car.
    He jogged back around the block, got the cell phone, and called 911 and identified himself and asked the Mankato dispatcher to have her patrolmen take the tag numbers on any champagne-colored Camrys they saw in the area. “The driver is tall, with long dark hair. He looked sort of like an Apache. Or, because of what I’m doing, he could have been Middle Eastern.”
    The dispatcher said she would do that, but, “There are probably two hundred champagne-colored Camrys in town. That’s probably the most common car in the world.”
    “Yeah, but . . . do it anyway,”