Lone Hunter: Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 3
Page 24
Then I drive round like a bug that just found some dead squirrel. Don’t know where to go. Just take all the green lights and whenever there’s a red one turn right and keep going. After a while I sort of come to, come right out of this automatic driving and realize how useless it is. Following the lights is crazy cause no one ever took the time to organize it so the lights’ll take you somewhere. They don’t lead nowhere. Just around.
Then I figure, okay, let’s drive back to the building and see what’s going on. It’s an hour later and I’ll just be a guy driving by on his own time. A guy who couldn’t sleep specially well and is out for a simple drive. Even at two in the morning that’s not so suspicious.
But it’s like pulling the plug in a washtub that’s full to the top with dirty water. At first, nobody knows the drain’s free. Then a minute later the water starts sucking down and the surface rolls back and forth until the whirlpool starts. That’s when you know it’ll never stop and you can see the tiniest speck caught on the edge, right on the lip of the whirlpool at the one point just after any possible escape. There you are. On the lip. Right on the lip. Then one, two quick swirls and down into the guts of some black animal with no eyes. That’s how it is driving back there — a dizzy hell.
When I’m a block away I can see the place has gone crazy with cops. There’s at least six squad cars with their lights flashing all blue-red, like the Devil’s still with Renee.
I slip the car into neutral and pull up at a coast. They’ve got a roadblock set up, and two cars ahead of me a cop has his nose poked through the window, yapping at the driver. I take a good clean breath.
After a minute the cop motions for me to unroll my window.
“Evenin’,” he says.
“What’s the trouble, officer?" I crane my neck and make sure I look surprised to see a roadblock set up so late at night.
“Routine.” Then he turns more serious. “What brings you by here tonight?”
“Just out for a drive. Changed my shift today and I couldn’t sleep so good.”
“Let’s see your license and registration,” he says.
I lean over to the glovebox to get the papers and he sticks his head in all the way and starts sniffing the air. You hear him do it twice. Sniff-sniff, just like Porky Pig.
He holds the papers and license in one hand and checks my face against the picture, asks my name and address and checks my answers against the card. Then he goes to a squad car and makes some notes and radios into headquarters and lingers around his car a while.
If they had the brains for it they might’ve read my thoughts while I was waiting in the car lineup. But that’s not too likely. Usually cops aren’t good enough to read your thoughts. Not like the shrinks and special doctors. With a little training some of them could maybe handle it, but on the whole the cops are useless buggers. They’re much better at reading how you sweat or how your eyes twitch if there’s any little pressure inside you. And that’s what I’m doing my best to control. My face is smooth as ice. It’s just now that the sweat’s starting to come into my palms.
“Okay, on your way.”
“Thanks.”
He passes the papers to me. I roll the window back up and take a deep breath. With the window up it’s like sealing him off and turning him into something stupid and ignorant. Like a cartoon.
Then I drive off slow, obeying all the traffic rules as though I just took my driver’s test. When I get close to it I look up the sidewalk to see Renee. But the funny thing is that there’s hardly any sign of the bomb. They put a few barriers around the crater, but apart from that there’s nothing. Even the building lights are lit up like nothing ever happened. You almost wonder why the cops bothered to show up.
But it’s probably another trick of theirs to lure me out of what’s really happened. It’s the kind of trick that might work on anybody else. It might work on me, too, except that my memory’s near perfect and I remember every little detail. Up to a point, anyhow.
Make room for Billy Deerborn
Step into the world of psychological thrillers.
Billy Deerborn talks to the voices in his head and the dogs that roam his psyche. When he was a baby, he was found by the side of a road in a brown paper bag. Yesterday he blew up a power station.
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Read the Complete Will Finch Trilogy
Bone Maker — A death in the wilderness. A woman mourns alone. A reporter works a single lead. Can Will Finch break the story of murder and massive financial fraud? Or will he become the Bone Maker’s next victim?
Stone Eater — A reporter on the rebound. An ex-cop with nothing to lose. A murder they can only solve together. Sparks fly when Will Finch agrees to work with Eve Noon to uncover a murder plot. But can they unmask the Stone Eater before he destroys them both?
Lone Hunter — One billion dollars. Two killers. Three ways to die. Will Finch and Eve Noon bait the trap. But could their clever ploy trigger catastrophe when two killers battle for a billion dollar prize? Or can Will and Eve defeat their most cunning adversary yet?
Enjoy These Other Novels by D. F. Bailey
Fire Eyes — a W.H. Smith First Novel Award finalist
“Fire Eyes is a taut psychological thriller with literary overtones, a very contemporary terrorist romance.”
— Globe and Mail
Healing the Dead
“You start reading Healing the Dead with a gasp and never get a proper chance to exhale.”
— Globe and Mail
The Good Lie
“A tale that looks at a universal theme…that readers are going to love.”
— Boulevard Magazine
Exit from America
“Another great story of moral revelation, despair and redemption by a contemporary master.”
— Lawrence Russell, culturecourt.com
Lone Hunter
Copyright © D. F. Bailey 2015: Registration #1125433
ISBN: 978-0-9687283-9-0
Published by CatchwordPublishing.com
Edited by Rick Gibbs
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Lone Hunter is a work of fiction. The resemblance of any characters to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Names, characters, places, brands, media, situations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Acknowledgements — I am extremely grateful to Lawrence Russell and Rick Gibbs for reading the early versions of Lone Hunter. Their insights, wisdom and advice were invaluable to me as I worked through the final draft of the novel. — DFB
For more information about D. F. Bailey and to subscribe to his free newsletter, “Digital Words,” visit dfbailey.com.