The Third Coincidence Read Online Free PDF

they had both liked Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie . She dug light jazz while he favored traditional pop and show tunes. They had challenged each other to a game of golf, after the case of course. He carried a nine
    handicap, she carried a ten.
    Rachel parked behind her condo building in the Kalorama Heights area of D.C., north of Sheridan Circle, and sat in her car to take a personal call before going inside.
    For the first time she could remember, Jingles was not on the entry table meowing when she slid the key into the lock, thrusting his nose into the crack when it opened. Tonight, her furry friend sat quietly on the entryway floor, his tail wrapped neatly around its own legs.
    “What’s wrong, Jingles?” she said, bending down to stroke the
    30 David M. Bishop

    cat’s ears. “Yes, I know. Every time I come home I need to fill your crunchies.”
    Jingles ignored his freshly filled bowl. Instead, following her into her bedroom, hopping up on the bed and caterwauling while she disrobed.
    “My gosh, you’re certainly a chatterbox tonight.” She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the cat’s head between her cupped hands. “Let me shower and put in a load of clothes. Then we’ll play. Okay? Now settle down.”
    As the shower spray worked its way through her hair, cascading down over her breasts, she relaxed and imagined the water washing away the stress of her day—the stress of again seeing the mysterious Jack McCall.
    She had never forgotten the afternoon the two of them stood to- gether on the forward part of the weather deck on a naval vessel off the coast of Egypt. When he had paid her a compliment, she took it as a comment from a man on the make. But he hadn’t been be- cause he later turned away her advances. In a strange way that had made the compliment seem even more special.
    Fifteen minutes later, wearing a cotton nightie, she dumped the hamper on her bed and began sorting out her underwear for the washer only to discover that her bra, the one she had just taken off and dropped onto the bed, had disappeared.
    Maybe I put it in the hamper.
    Suddenly she had a sense that someone had been there. Which was absurd, of course, and yet that would explain Jingles’s unusual behavior when she first came home. Had he been there while she sat naked on the edge of the bed petting Jingles? While she showered? Was he still here? Her heart slammed back and forth inside her chest like a clapper pounding a bell.
    After tearing the room apart looking for the bra, without finding it, she got her 9-mm Beretta, checked the closet, and the locks on the front door and the windows. Then she slid the gun under her pillow, turned out the light, and went to bed.

    7

    CIA Special Assistant McCall will handpick his own squad and report directly to the president, without interference from the other intelligence agencies.
    —CNN Headline News, 6:30 a.m., June 6

    The skin on his cheeks and neck had been chewed by teen acne in the way aphids disfigured a young rose leaf. He had purchased a ticket to San Francisco using the name John Kimble and dressed as an ordinary traveler with a carry-on bag, just another passenger read- ing a newspaper while awaiting his flight.
    He recalled his father repeatedly fulminating at the breakfast table about the Supreme Court justices and Federal Reserve gover- nors constituting the unelected government that was really the man , strangling the representative government put in place by our forefa- thers.
    His father would have gone ballistic if he had lived long enough to see the Supreme Court set aside the people’s election and anoint their own choice for president of the United States.
    The nobility of his cause excited him. Once aroused he could find calm only through sex. Because he felt more alert afterward, he believed these dalliances should be work-related, tax-deductible ex- penses.
    His mother had left enough money to fund both the completion of his father’s work and the satisfaction of