Read Online Bleeding Out by Baxter Clare - Free Book Online

That broke the spell. With a strangled cry, Frank slammed a fist into the mirror. The glass exploded and Frank cursed, slugging with her other fist. Panting like she’d just sprinted a quarter mile, Frank stared at her bloodied knuckles, wincing at the glass splinters stuck under the skin. The pain was clear and clean, and it distracted Frank from her inner anguish. A fat silver shard was imbedded in the back of her gun hand. Frank yanked it loose. Mesmerized, she watched as her blood flowed against the white porcelain. After her heart slowed a little and her breathing evened out, she plucked out the most obvious shards, clamping her teeth down against the pain even as she relished it. Welcomed it.
    “Let’s get you a drink,” she murmured, wrapping the towel around her hand and talking herself into the kitchen.
    “You’re alright,” she whispered steadily. “Everything’s okay. Everything’s alright.”
    She was reassuring herself like she’d done as a kid, when her mom was on a manic high and breaking dishes so they could go out and buy a new set, or when she was in bed for the tenth day in a row and Frank had eaten absolutely everything edible in the house. Carefully taking a glass out of the cupboard, she filled it with Scotch. She drained it. Bleeding, still shaking, she poured more.
    The alarm startled Frank out of a deep sleep. She was stunned by the ache in her head. She threw a hand over the buzzer only to feel worse pain. Then she remembered the dream and its terror, smashing her fist in the mirror, and the blood, and trying to wash it away with Scotch as she’d roamed uneasily through the empty house.
    Frank sat up woozily, reaching for the bedside lamp with her left hand. It was stiff and swollen too, but at least it wasn’t throbbing like the right. The light stabbed through Frank’s eyes and lodged in her brain. When she rolled out of bed her stomach rolled with her. Stepping gingerly into the bathroom, she searched for lurking shards she hadn’t mopped up last night. She groped under the sink for a bottle of Pepto Bismol, chugged a quarter of it, and chased it with four aspirin. She dozed under the hot spray of the shower until the pharmaceutical cocktail took effect.
    The fine cut of her suit couldn’t mask the slump in Frank’s shoulders as she mixed sugar in water over the kitchen sink. The drink would simultaneously fight her dehydration and fatigue. Although the coffee trickling through the percolator smelled noxious, the caffeine would help move the fog out of her brain. Frank had been through this before, she knew the drill.
    Thirty minutes later she was at her desk, still exhausted, her hand on fire, but at least the worst of her physical pain had eased. The other, she couldn’t do anything about. The phone rang in the squad room and she heard Noah answer it, then a second later he whistled. When he draped his lanky frame around her doorway, she squinted at him through the haze of her hangover.
    “We got a 187 at Carver Junior High. Female Caucasian. Looks like a teenager. Naked and beat to shit.”
    Frank was up and swinging into her jacket before Noah had finished talking.
    “Come on,” she said to Gough as she breezed by him. He protested he wasn’t on the clock yet, and Frank whirled on him with more than fury in her eyes. He grumbled but put down his paper and followed. As they clattered into the garage Frank pulled out her cell phone and dialed Foubarelle’s home number, but before it rang, she disconnected and began calling her detectives in instead. The three of them piled into the same car and drove under the low dark clouds that hovered over the city.
    “Maybe we’re getting that damn El Nino after all,” Gough grunted from the backseat.
    “I could live without it,” Noah replied, but Gough, the gardener, insisted the rain would be good.
    “It’ll fill up all the reservoirs so we won’t have to do water rationing. God, I hate that.”
    As usual, Noah drove and