Read Online Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty - Free Book Online Page B

you tried to go back to the cabin in the middle of the night. Why don’t we start with what you were looking for. It certainly wasn’t your computer.”
    â€œOh, that. I thought I’d left some blow in the drawer of the table. But it was in my duffel, stuffed in a sock. I’d forgotten.” He dismissed the matter with a flick of his hand. “You could say I was understandably confused.”
    â€œSo, false alarm.”
    He nodded. “Scared the shit out of me at the time, though.”
    Stranahan smiled unsympathetically.
    â€œIt’s just a damned coincidence, the girl dying like that.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œDo you have time for a story about how bad a man can fuck himself?”
    â€œIt’s what pays the rent.”
    â€œGood line. Don’t sue me if I steal it.”
    â€œI won’t.”
    â€œOkay. You know I used to be a reporter? Well, it’s been back a few years, but I wrote a story about a professor at UC Santa Cruz who tried to break into her former lover’s house. He had a restraining order against her and she wanted to confront him about why he’d left. So guess what she did?”
    â€œShe crawled down his chimney.”
    â€œHow did you know that?”
    â€œWhy else would you be telling me?”
    â€œYeah, okay. Well, it gets better, I mean worse. The boyfriend was part of a farming co-op and had signed up to harvest artichokes in Castroville, see what it’s like to fill immigrant shoes. When he returned home two days later, the ex was dripping body fluids into thefireplace. They had to jackhammer a hole in the chimney to get her out.”
    â€œDid she live?”
    â€œShe not only lived. She married him.”
    â€œTrue love,” Stranahan suggested.
    â€œTrue story. So you see my predicament? I had knowledge of a particularly unusual circumstance, and now the same scenario is repeated. It stinks of coincidence, or I guess the opposite.”
    â€œEvery newspaper in the state must have carried that story.”
    â€œWell, yes, but that isn’t the end of it. My last relationship was a literature professor at San Jose State. Barbara Louganis. The night she broke up with me—mind you I’d told her that story—I said she was going to change her mind and come back to me. She said, ‘Like hell I will,’ and then she started throwing books. My books. I have all the editions in this wall case and she was picking them out and throwing them at me one after another. I sort of tackled her to get her to stop and she called the police. We were standing at crossed swords when they arrived.
    â€œAnd”—he laughed mirthlessly—“this you gotta love. I told her I wouldn’t take her back even if she wrapped herself in cellophane and came down the chimney with a red ribbon around her neck. I told her that
in front of officers of the law
. When I saw the Santa hat and climbed up on the roof, guess what was crawling around the back of my mind? I mean, Barbara’s certifiable. For all I know she followed me here and that was her in the chimney.”
    Gallagher had elbowed forward on the desk as he talked, his whiskey breath heavy in Stranahan’s nostrils. “Now is that fucking yourself, or is that fucking yourself?” He nodded, looking straight into Sean’s eyes. Then he sat back in his chair.
    Sean shook his head. “The body in the chimney’s a teenage girl who went missing last fall. How old is Barbara Louganis?”
    â€œBarbara’s thirty-five, but she looks younger. That thing I was looking at in the chimney had a round face. Barbara has a round face. I don’t know how the hell she could have followed me out here, Ididn’t know I was coming myself until I did. But it scares the hell out of me.”
    â€œThe CSI says the person in the chimney was dead two or three weeks, so that scenario is impossible.”
    Gallagher shook his