Read Online Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation by M. R. Sellars - Free Book Online

the traffic to the corner and then stopped
and waited for the traffic signal to turn.
    “You okay?” I finally asked.
    “Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered tersely.
“Why?”
    “I really couldn’t help but overhear…” I let
my voice trail off, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken.
    “Sorry about that,” he replied. “Forget about
it. It’s nothing.”
    “It didn’t sound like nothing, Ben.”
    “I said forget it,” he snarled.
    We made the rest of the trip to police
headquarters in complete silence.
     
    * * * * *
     
    “Where are you?” My wife’s voice issued from
the speaker on my cell phone.
    It was rapidly approaching six P.M., and I
was still downtown though fortunately, not sitting on the concrete
stairs in the parking garage. I had finally lost count of how many
times I had given my accounting of the events and to how many cops
I had given it. They eventually concluded that with the exception
of a few adjectives and conjunctions, the story was always the
same. No more or less information than the previous recitation.
    I don’t guess I could blame them for trying.
I was as aware as anyone else of what can be seen but not
consciously remembered.
    “What, no hello?” I asked.
    “I said hello when I answered the phone,” she
replied. “Now, where are you?”
    “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
    “Try me” came her guarded response.
    “Downtown with Ben.”
    “Tell me you’re at a bar, Rowan,” she half
asked, half instructed, but the tone of her voice told me that she
knew that wasn’t true.
    “Sure,” I answered. “It’s called Police
Headquarters.”
    “Oh Gods, Rowan,” she moaned, then asked,
“The seizure?”
    “No… Yes… Maybe… I don’t know yet” was my
response, confusing as it was to us both. “Have you heard about
Brittany Larson?”
    “How could I not? It’s been all over…” she
started then stopped herself mid-sentence. “Oh, Rowan, no… What?
What happened?”
    “Kidnapped as far as anyone can tell right
now,” I answered. “Although I don’t think whoever did it has any
qualms about hurting her.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Well… I kind of had the bad fortune of being
a witness to the abduction, and it was a bit violent.”
    “You what? How?”
    I gave her a rundown of the day’s events
since we had last spoken; all of which had finally culminated in me
using my backside to warm a molded plastic chair next to Ben’s desk
for the past few hours.
    The promised lunch had eventually happened
sometime around three in the afternoon. Unfortunately, it had taken
the form of a stale jelly doughnut and a cup of what the officers
of the homicide division referred to as coffee. My personal jury
was still deliberating on that point.
    I told her about that too.
    “So anyway,” I continued. “Ben is going to be
tied up down here for a bit longer, but they’ve given me the okay
to leave.”
    “Give me twenty minutes,” she replied to the
unasked question.
    “I’ll be waiting outside.”
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER 7:
     
     
    “B ar food?” I said to my
wife. “I’ve been stuck down here all day with nothing but a stale
doughnut and bad coffee, and you want me to eat BAR
food?”
    “It’s not ‘bar food’,” she replied as she
dropped the Jeep into third gear and veered onto the Kingshighway
exit from westbound Interstate 64. “It’s PUB food.”
    The top was down, and the warm wind was
whipping through the open cab of the vehicle. There was still
better than an hour of sunlight left in the day, so it was still
hot and humid. Fortunately, the temperature had dropped off by a
few degrees, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been earlier in
the day; if you liked steam baths, that is. Although, I had to
admit the artificial breeze generated by the motion of the Jeep
went a long way toward making it tolerable.
    “There’s a difference?” I asked with a
chuckle.
    “Aye, and you’ll be finding out soon enough,
then,” she