The Third Coincidence Read Online Free PDF Page A

work.
    While eating, his glances caught her studying his face. Line by line like Sherlock Holmes with a microscope. Jack considered his face to be ordinary, but found himself hoping she thought it was a good face.
    After dinner they discussed the case over a bowl of Jack’s home- made vanilla ice cream studded with Maraschino cherries. Their only clear decision: they should, at least at the start, include the two
    D.C. homicide detectives Jack had been with at the Justice Mont- gomery murder scene. Lieutenant Wade and Sergeant Burke would provide a local element to further the president’s desire for a multi- agency face.
    She ran her tongue across the end of her ice cream spoon before clanking it into the melted white pond at the bottom of the bowl.
    28 David M. Bishop

    “So, Spook—I’m sorry, I need to stop calling you that.”
    Strangely enough, Jack found that he didn’t care whether she did or didn’t. He had come to terms with the quirks in their rela- tionship, if he could yet think of it as a relationship.
    “What were you going to say?” he asked.
    “How do you think you’ll like working out in the open in the real world?”
    “The real world?” Jack said, his eyebrows raised. “Just what do you think I’ve been working in all these years?”
    “Some parallel universe where madmen and patriots engage in large and small evils justified by some definition of the greater good.” “That sounds like something you read on the editorial page of
    the New York Times ,” he told her. “I expected better from you.”
    “I probably expressed that view more profoundly than I hold it.” She shrugged. “Let’s change the subject. You’ve got a nice place here. You needn’t have straightened up on my account.”
    “I pick up after myself as I go along and have a housekeeper in once a week. Next time I can make a mess here and there, if it’ll make you feel more at home.”
    “I can handle neat.” She stood, turned, and bent down to lift her purse off the couch.
    He watched the white material tighten across her butt, then the trim muscular curves of her calves as she moved toward the door. Rachel was obviously a strong woman, yet very shapely and femi- nine. He got up and followed.
    “We made some progress tonight. Thanks for coming over.”
    At the door, she stood close. Jack felt the warmth in her breath. “Maybe we can work together.” She looked up at him without
    tilting her head back. “But don’t underestimate me.”
    He grinned lopsidedly, willing his eyes to avoid her cleavage. “I will never do that.”
    “Yes, you will,” she told him. “To quote V. I. Warshawski, ‘Never underestimate a man’s ability to underestimate a woman.’ ”
    “V.I. who?”
    the third coincidence 29

    “You don’t know V. I. Warshawski? She’s only the world’s great- est fictional female private detective.”
    Rachel’s lips turned up at the corners, her teeth filling the cres- cent of her smile. She opened the door, spilling a corridor of light into the night, and stepped out onto the porch. He held the screen door open, half hoping she would boldly change her mind and stay. But she turned her back and walked down the hall of light that widened as it reached for the curb.
    After she had shut her car door, the headlights sent two piercing beams into the night, spreading until they illuminated the leaves of the trees along the edge of the Potomac river.
    Jack stood there looking into the darkness, wondering what waited out there in the abyss.

    Rachel drove home knowing more about Jack McCall than she had known before, and wondering if perhaps that had been his purpose for the invitation. He liked sea kayaking, Zinfandel wine, stage plays, and in films, mostly film noir, but his favorite movie was True Lies , particularly the scene in which Jamie Lee Curtis did a sexy dance for a man in a hotel room without knowing that man was her husband. She had told him her favorite movie was The Sting , but