The Last Day Read Online Free PDF

like a lunatic. It was as though Ward expected Barney might return as long as his room wasn't altered. As often as not Ward didn't remember discussions they had, to the point that often she wondered why she bothered to talk to him at all.
    The one thing she was sure of was that Ward hadn't loved their son any more than she had, and he couldn't possibly miss him any more than she did. If he wanted to think he had a corner on that, fine, but it would never be the truth. If it were possible for her to trade her life to bring Barney back, she'd die in the next second with a smile on her lips. But he couldn't come back, so she was determined to live the rest of her life. If Ward decided to live his, then they could do so together. If not, he'd have to make his own way to its end.
    She went into her bedroom, closed the door, dropped her robe on the floor, flopped down across the bed, and stared up at the ceiling.
    Natasha picked up a small stuffed bear that she'd had made for her son while he was still inside her womb, and still lying on the bed,pressed his hand. The recorder inside the animal said in her voice, “Little guy, Mama loves you so very much.” Her own voice brought tears to her eyes, and she hugged the bear to her chest.
    She reached over to Ward's side of the bed and felt his absence. She put her hand under his pillow and a dreamless sleep overtook her.

SIX
    Watcher sat in his hide in the woods, sipping a sports drink to stay hydrated. When he heard the tone, he opened his pack and saw on his GPS receiver that the black BMW was leaving the airport lot in Charlotte. Thirty- seven minutes later, it pulled into the garage. Two months earlier, Watcher had duct- taped a GPS transmitter to the big car's frame near the gas tanks, and had placed a second unit inside the engine compartment in the Lexus SUV Dr. McCarty drove. He could see at a glance where the pair was at any given time.
    Watcher was a shadow, a bad situation that would grow and grow until Ward and NatashaMcCarty were as doomed as hooked fish cast up onto a grassy, sun- baked slope. Watcher was a reckoning. Watcher's patience was a rapidly emptying hourglass.
    Toy Boy—a fitting, albeit whimsical, nickname he had selected for his quarry—was a man hanging onto his life by a rope that had been fraying steadily since the day his son died. In three days the McCartys would endure the first anniversary of their son's death, and, Watcher would ensure, their last day on earth.

SEVEN
    Alice Palmer had called her boyfriend twenty times and had left five increasingly angry messages from the time she arrived back home from the flight from Las Vegas until eleven that night. Either Earl was high, his phone's battery was dead, he'd left it somewhere, or he was punishing her for visiting her dad. “Fuck you,” was the final message she left, but added, “It's your baby doll. I love you. Call me as soon as you get this…. asshole.”
    She and her mother had argued all the way from the airport. Upon arriving at their home in Dillworth, her mother had come into the house with her, tossed her keys on the kitchen counter, and said, “Put your dirty laundry in the chute, and make your own dinner when you get hungry. I'm going to lie down. I have a splitting headache and I have to show four houses to some damned impossible- to- please Yankee couple in the morning. And clean up your room. The maid's off this week. And brush your teeth. Your breath smells like shit.” After saying that, she'd gone into her bedroom and closed the door. Only the sound of her TV filtering under her door evidenced her presence in the house. Alice knew her mother was never going to be up for Mother of the Year.
    Alice opened her carry bag to take out her Game Boy and saw the blue toy car she'd taken. She studied the portrait the man drew against her mirror. It wasn't at all bad, and she wished she could draw people as well as he did. The name embossed on the card was Ward McCarty RGI, Inc. The