The Last Kiss Goodbye Read Online Free PDF Page B

dispatcher, “Hurry! Oh, please, please, hurry!” while giving Charlie another mistrustful look. Taking a shuddering breath, she added to the dispatcher in a wobbly, barely there voice, “There are two other girls—they’re up there—they’re dead!”
    “What?” Charlie and Michael exclaimed in suddenly riveted unison.
    Instinctively shooting Michael a did-you-hear-that-too look, Charlie encountered nothing but barely there shimmer. Was he fainter than before? Oh, God, he definitely was. Panic made her feel cold all over. Remembering something he’d once said to her—about running water drawing him back from wherever he had been at that time—she hastily leaned over the sink and turned the faucet on full blast. Cold water gushed out, splashing into the sink, the whoosh of it adding just one more jarring note to the discordant background symphony of drumming rain and shuffling feet and gasping breaths, plus the rhythmic drone of a distant telephone ringing away in her ear.
    “Good thinking,” said Michael, and Charlie felt a rush of relief as the shimmer seemed to grow brighter and denser.
    “There were three of us.” The girl’s eyes were wide and haunted. She was talking into the phone but looking at Charlie, and besides the rampant wariness that Charlie knew was absolutely aimed at her, there was such fear in the girl’s expression that Charlie felt sweat start to dampen her palms. In response to something the dispatcher must have asked, the girl repeated her words, then added unsteadily, “I’m the only one left. He made me—he made us—”
    Tears filled her eyes, and she broke off with a shaky indrawn breath that turned into a sob. She trembled so violently that Charlie could hear her teeth chattering. Beneath the streaks of blood, her skin had gone beyond paper white to almost gray. If the girl hadn’t been wedged in the corner formed by the wall and the counter, Charlie thought that there was a good chance she would have collapsed.
    “You’re safe now.” Charlie felt a fresh well of fellow feeling: this kind of terror she knew. Safe might not be exactly accurate, but it was close enough: as long as there was breath in Charlie’s body, nobody was getting to that girl again. She would have put a comforting arm around her guest, but the girl shrank away from her—clearly, doctor or not, she wasn’t coming across as all that reassuring, for which she knew she had Michael to thank—and with some chagrin Charlie let her arm drop. She was doing her best to project steady strength, to ignore the rushing adrenaline that caused her nerves to jump and her heart to jackhammer. But the situation—Michael, the girl, the possibility that some kind of murderous lunatic was right outside—was making it difficult. Way difficult. As she processed the possibility that whoever was out there had killed two other girls, she felt a wave of fear threaten. What she had first thought was likely a case of domestic violence was starting to sound like something even worse.
    Something horrifyingly familiar.
    “At least get the hell away from the windows.” Michael’s voice held a note of barely controlled ferocity that made her breath catch. He, too, was clearly afraid—for her. “Unless you like the idea of giving some looney tune the chance to put a bullet in your brain, that is.”
    Oh, God, he had a point. Darting another fearful look at the black blankness of the windows, Charlie touched the girl’s arm, saying, “Probably we should try to get below the counter.”
    The girl jerked her arm away, and moved as far from Charlie as she could get, which wasn’t very far.
    “I don’t know,” she sobbed into the phone while fixing wary, tear-filled eyes on Charlie. “He was chasing me. Oh, I need them to hurry. ”
    “See, that’s normal survival instinct. Teen-queen there spots trouble, at least she has the sense to try to get away from it,” Michael said. Charlie’s response was an aggravated thinning of