To Trust a Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

was eight years ago. A lot of water had gone under the bridge since then, including his own firing from the Charleston PD, which Sid, the corrupt bastard, had almost certainly orchestrated. But that was just a tiny part of his beef with Sid. The major part, the part that Mac could never forget, concerned his brother. Daniel, who had been eight years his senior, had vanished some fifteen years before. And Mac had grown increasingly convinced that Sid, Daniel's friend from childhood, at the very least knew what had happened to him. At first, they-his mother, his grandmother, and himself, Daniel's family-thought Daniel had simply taken off somewhere. He'd been twenty-five years old at the time, after all, and a free spirit if there ever was one. Then, when months passed without a word, they began to wonder if perhaps he'd gotten in some kind of a jam and was lying low. As months turned into years, they had entertained theories ranging from a foreign prison to amnesia. Mac's mother had died ten years ago, still uncertain about her older son's fate and grieving at his absence. Mac had promised her on her deathbed that he would find his brother. So far he hadn't been able to make good on that promise. The last time he had talked to Daniel had been during a hurried telephone call. His brother had begged out of a basketball game he'd promised to take then seventeen-year-old Mac to because of a job he had to do for Richie. Richie-as in Richie Rich-was their private nickname for Sid, because Sid lived a life that seemed dazzlingly opulent to two working-class sons of a dead-in-the-line-of-duty cop. Something in Daniel's tone had made Mac think that whatever the “job” was, it was not the nine-to-five variety, but Mac hadn't asked and Daniel hadn't been any more specific than that. Once he'd become a cop himself, Mac had, quietly and on his own time, started searching for his brother, and checking Sid out had been right there at the top of his to-do list. He hadn't really expected to find much on Richie Rich, but what he'd turned up had surprised him. Sid's first wife, for example, had walked out on their marriage at about the same time that Daniel had disappeared. Interestingly enough, she couldn't be found. And word on the street was that Sid was involved in the drug trade. Given Daniel's apparently comfortable finances, his lack of a steady job after leaving the military, and his renewed involvement with childhood friend Sid, Mac had come to suspect that Daniel's “job” for Sid and his subsequent disappearance could both be linked to a drug operation Sid was running. But he couldn't prove it. Nobody in authority seemed at all interested in taking up the investigation. The Carlsons were VIPs in
South Carolina
, after all, with friends in high places, and nobody wanted to call the wrath of the powers that be down upon his own head. The consensus had been shut up, get over your brother, and find something else to do. It didn't help that Daniel had spent years flirting with the wrong side of the law. It also didn't help that the ex-wife was from
California
, that home of all things degenerate, where she'd presumably returned before dropping out of sight. In the end, as was none too gently pointed out to him, all he had on Sid was basically gossip. When he'd persevered, trying to get proof of illegal activity, he'd ended up getting his ass kicked off the force. Now, through the kind of twist of fate that Mac had almost quit believing in, he was being given a second chance to get at some answers: Sid's beauty-queen bride was sitting in his car with him, looking sexy as hell in an itty-bitty pink satin getup that played up all her best points, in a jam and scared of her husband and turning to him for help. Suddenly the gods were smiling on him. He fished his cell phone out of his cleavage-it was lodged in there right along with the wad of athletic socks that served as his right tit, while his Glock nestled securely under the wad on the