Read Online Gone in a Flash by Susan Rogers Cooper - Free Book Online Page A

smart developer/tree killer, he opted to keep enough trees to make the homes costly. And not only homes: churches and grammar schools, and retail. Lots and lots of retail. From the beginning we had a fire substation, manned by two firemen from the Codderville station and one junior fire truck. The real fire truck would come over the river and through the former woods if needed. Which would only take like twenty minutes or so. Not enough time for the entire subdivision to burn down, but close. Luckily, the few fires the substation dealt with were small. They mostly tended boo-boos, rescued the occasional loose-riding lawnmower, and drove people to the emergency room at the Codder Memorial Hospital.
    That was at the beginning. We now had a middle and a high school, a full fire station that employed four full-time firefighters and a list of eighteen volunteer firefighters (of which, I’m proud to say, Willis and I are two), and a full-time police department with a police chief and five police officers, backed up, when necessary, by the Codder County sheriff’s department. And the fire station has an ambulance and two ENTs to drive people to the emergency room at Codder Memorial Hospital. We don’t have our own hospital. Yet.
    I perked up when Willis perked up. I told him to put his iPhone on speaker and he did. He said, ‘Barry? Hey, got a problem here and I’m hoping you can help out.’
    ‘Yeah, you backing out of tomorrow’s scrimmage? I wouldn’t be surprised the way we beat your asses last week.’
    ‘Yeah, good game. But tomorrow’s gonna be a totally different story, my friend.’
    ‘Ah, you fire guys got no balls,’ the police chief said.
    ‘Hey, drive by sometime – you can hear our balls clanging all the way out in the street.’
    ‘Sheee-it!’ Barry said. ‘You calling just to harass me, or you wanna gloat about taking the food out of my daughter’s mouth?’
    ‘Sorry, Barry. I’m just a better engineer, what can I say?’ Willis said.
    ‘No, son, you’re a better negotiator. Dave’s an asshole when it comes to bidding. Ah, hell, let’s face it: Dave’s an asshole all the time.’
    ‘True,’ Willis said, and I gave him the move it along signal. ‘Reason I’m calling, Barry, is that we got a problem here.’ And he went on to explain about Luna seeing the guys parked across the street two days straight and them coming up the driveway to our back door on the second day. And how, today, the same two guys were seen by our daughters in a different car following them to the movies and then following them home.
    ‘What the fuck’d you do, Pugh?’ Barry said.
    ‘Me? I didn’t do squat!’ Willis said, his voice rising in tenor as well as volume.
    ‘You get the license number on the new car? I know Luna got the one on the blue car.’
    I handed Willis the slip of paper I’d written the plate number down on. He read it off to Barry.
    ‘OK, great,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna call Luna, see what she says, just to confirm everything, then I’m gonna come out and talk to the girls. That OK?’
    ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’
    And they rang off.
    ‘He doesn’t trust you?’ I asked my husband.
    ‘What?’ he said.
    ‘He has to call Luna to verify?’
    ‘Let it go, babe,’ he said.
    ‘What? He thinks we’d lie about this?’ Now my voice was rising in tenor as well as volume.
    ‘Of course not,’ Willis said in that condescending tone he gets when he thinks I’m being unreasonable. God, I hate that. Then he put his arm on my shoulder, which is condescending squared. ‘I think he just wants to get it all first hand, that’s all.’
    ‘First hand this!’ I said, removing his hand from my shoulder and showing him a well-known hand gesture most of us learn as kids.

FOUR
TUESDAY
    ‘O h, shit!’ Megan said, coming in to Bess’s room. Bess and Alicia were sitting on the bed playing liar’s poker.
    ‘Ummmmm?’ Bess inquired, not looking up from her game.
    ‘Listen!’ Megan demanded. When