War Lord Read Online Free PDF Page A

online and liked what I saw. Blue water and white bikinis.
    I was on the edge of jumping in, the onscreen arrow poised over an orange button that pulsed ‘Book now, Book now’, when I heard a knock on the front door. I checked the time. Arlen wasn’t due over for at least another half hour, unless he’d clocked off early. I got up, opened the door, and went into shock, paralyzed from the eyeballs down.
    The person standing in front of me could not be real. Was I hallucinating? My heart thumped loudly from an unusual place, like it had taken up residence somewhere between my ears. This could not be possible, could it? I spent a bunch of pregnant seconds standing in the doorway questioning my memory – the Mexican standoff, the shootout, the funeral, the grief – because the woman framed in the doorway, with her dark chocolate hair, green eyes, the lips, I knew her. ‘Anna?’ I tried to get the word out but it got stuck somewhere in my throat like a cork pushed down into the neck of a wine bottle.
    ‘You going to ask me in or should I just stand here for another minute looking at your open mouth?’ she asked.
    I let the door swing open. The apparition came in pulling a bright red overnight case behind her, a family-size bucket of KFC in her other hand. She was an inch shorter than I remembered and her scent . . . there were only echoes of familiarity with it.
    ‘Jesus . . .’ She turned, looking around the room. ‘You honestly live here?’
    A few things weren’t marrying up as they should have, like her height and the perfume she used and that last comment. This Anna had never been to my place before. And then the clouds parted and I snapped out of it. ‘Nice of you to call ahead, Marnie,’ I managed to extract from my larynx.
    ‘Well, we didn’t part on the best of terms and I thought you’d tell me to get lost if I gave you advance warning.’
    Actually, the language I’d have used for the terms we parted on might have been a little stronger than that. ‘You look different’ I said, changing the subject.
    She took a length of hair and examined it up close, which made her briefly cross-eyed. ‘I got sick of all the blonde jokes, so I went back to my normal color. Sorry if I startled you. Everyone’s been telling me how much I look like . . . you know.’
    Yeah, I knew. Marnie Masters was fifteen months younger than her sister, Anna. I wasn’t in Marnie’s good books. She blamed me for Anna’s death, so that made two of us. When I last saw her, which was at the wake, she was crying, yelling at me to get lost while throwing plates, wine glasses and pastrami sandwiches in my direction – whatever came to hand. I’d slunk away and we hadn’t spoken since.
    ‘You look different too,’ she said. ‘Still got those rugged good looks, but . . .’
    ‘Only they’re getting more rugged.’
    ‘You look – I don’t know . . .’
    I rubbed the bridge of my nose and felt the swelling beneath my fingertips. ‘I’ve had a nose job since I last saw you.’ I didn’t think it worth mentioning that it had been performed by a truck’s steering wheel in the Congo.
    ‘I’d ask for a refund.’ Marnie smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ve had time to think through what happened. I came to realize that I owe you an apology.’
    ‘Forget about it,’ I said.
    ‘No, hear me out. Anna wanted to be a cop. That was her dream, her choice. She knew it came with risks, and the risks added to the job satisfaction. I’m saying I know you didn’t kill her, Vin. It just happened , just one of those things. I don’t hold you responsible. I did, but now I don’t. I shouldn’t have said those things to you at the funeral.’
    ‘I haven’t eaten pastrami since.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I was in shock. I loved my sister and she was gone and you were the only person I could blame. There was no one else closer to her than you.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I could have put all that in an email, but I thought I owed it to you