Superstition Read Online Free PDF Page A

this.”
    Joe thought about telling his Number Two just how, in his opinion, his love life could be better managed, but he remembered in the nick of time that he was not in the doling-out-advice business. He didn’t have the energy, for one thing, and anyway, it was easier just not to get involved. Dave was a big boy. He could figure it out for himself—or not.
    Either way, as long as it didn’t affect Dave’s performance on the job, it was no concern of Joe’s.
    Then he noticed what his second-in-command was still wearing.
    “Take off that damned apron, would you?” Joe growled as he opened his door. “And get in. We’ve got work to do.”
    Casting a quick look down at himself, Dave flushed and fumbled with the lopsided bow behind his back for a minute before finally managing to get the apron off. Crumpling it in one hand, he slid into the car. Joe was already inside. He had the car started and was staring out through the windshield grimly. As soon as Dave’s butt hit the seat, Joe put the car in gear and took off, pulling out into the street and heading west.
    With a quick glance over his shoulder, Dave tossed the apron into the backseat and reached for his seat belt. Clearly, he had no inkling that the despised garment landed right beside Brian, who was grinning broadly as he made himself at home in the backseat.

2
     
     
     
     
    “ B AD NEWS, NICK. Mama says she can’t do it,” Livvy said casually, as though she could conceive of no earthly reason why this should be a problem.
    Having just burst in through the back screen door of her mother’s rambling “cottage” on Pawleys Island, Nicole Sullivan stopped dead and stared at her older sister. Spoon in hand, Livvy was sitting at the rectangular oak table in the typically messy kitchen, digging into a quart of her favorite rocky road ice cream. The old paddle fan turned lazily overhead, adding a rhythmic fwump-fwump to the sounds of the TV show that Livvy was watching. The color scheme, the product of a 1960sera redo, was harvest gold and avocado, with Formica countertops and linoleum flooring. Fluorescent tubes glowing through two frosted panels in the ceiling were designed to illuminate the cooking area, not to flatter. In other words, nobody ever looked like a beauty queen in this particular kitchen, but her sister’s appearance was still enough to make Nicky do a double-take. Livvy’s normally tan and slender face was as pale and round as a full moon. Usually a meticulously kept blond pageboy, her hair was twisted into a haphazard knot on top of her head and—unheard of in Nicky’s experience with her sister—was showing at least two inches of dark roots. Beneath her hot-pink maternity top, Livvy’s previously perky B-cups had engorged until they resembled twin Matterhorns. The table hid the rest of her, but Nicky had seen enough to realize that their mother hadn’t exaggerated when she’d reported that Livvy, now seven months along and in the process of divorcing the scumbag who’d left her for another woman, looked like hell.
    “What do you mean, she says she can’t do it?” Nicky resumed her race toward the master bedroom, which was the only one on the ground floor. Livvy was a problem that could be dealt with later. Her quest for her mother, on the other hand, was urgent. “She has to do it. She’s on live TV in twenty-five minutes .”
    “Nicky, thank God you’re here.” Karen Wise, one of Twenty-four Hours Investigates ’s hapless production assistants, emerged from the adjacent den, where Nicky assumed she’d been holed up making more desperate phone calls of the “what do I do now?” variety, like the one with which she had summoned Nicky, who as a result had made a ninety-mile-per-hour detour on her way to the Old Taylor Place. Karen was twenty-two, with shiny black hair razored into one of those chic nape-length ’dos that required minimal styling, near black eyes, clear olive skin, and a slender, petite build that made