Read Online Jack Stone - Wild Justice by Vivien Sparx - Free Book Online

straight as an arrow for as far as Stone could see – one continuing two-lane strip of blacktop in a featureless environment. He figured the police station marked the town’s limits, because beyond this line was just another expanse of flat open desert.
    He turned back and stared along the hunched cluster of buildings he had just walked past. Checked his watch. It was still early. He crossed the street, and started walking back the way he had come.
    The shops on this side of the street looked no different to the ones he had just walked past; same collection of big windows, red-brick buildings and closed doors. He noticed the café Lilley Pond had mentioned. The door was open, and a middle-aged man with a scraggly beard and wearing an apron over his clothes was carrying a chair and a big red advertising umbrella out through the door to set up on the sidewalk. Stone stopped at the shop before the café and glanced inside the window. It was some kind of a sewing shop. He could see bolts of colored material in racks against the side wall, a long white-topped counter next to a cash-register, and another long bench set against the opposite wall with three sewing machines. The man came back out of the café with a small square table, and set the post of the umbrella down through a cut hole in the table’s center. Then he pushed the chair in neatly under the table and pulled a laminated menu from a pocket sewn into his apron. The man set the menu on the tabletop and was about to step back into the café. Stone smiled a greeting.
    “Excuse me,” he called out, his tone friendly. “I’m new in town. Just arrived yesterday. I was wondering if you could help me out.”
    The man looked suspicious. Jack Stone was an intimidating figure. He looked him up and down carefully, maybe trying to assess whether he was any kind of threat.
    “What do you need?” the man asked cautiously.
    “Just directions,” Stone said. “I was wondering if there was a library in town.”
    The man nodded, still wary, but a little less so. Stone kept his hands in his pockets, kept well out of the man’s personal space. Just stood back and asked politely.
    “Round the corner,” the man pointed further along Main Street. “When you get to the intersection, turn left. That’s East Street. The library is next to the church.”
    Stone raised an eyebrow, mildly surprised. “I thought all churches were built on hills,” Stone said.
    The man didn’t seem amused. His expression became frosty. “Look around, bud,” the man said. “Do you see any hills?” and then he disappeared back into the café and didn’t come back out.
    Stone shrugged. He started walking again. He reached the intersection and stood on the corner just looking around.
    There was traffic now – a scattering of cars coming from the direction of West Street. Probably locals heading off to work, or wherever they went for the day, he guessed. There were no cars coming into town. No traffic on the turnoff road approaching from the direction of the highway at all, just a light stream of vehicles all heading away from the place. He turned left. East Street was a series of vacant lots, overgrown with weed-like dry grass. It was as though the area might have been set aside for development in years gone past, but the developers had never come. Two of the lots were taken up by the church. A couple of vacant lots beyond it was the Windswept town library.
    Stone went up three low stairs and stood at the library’s front door. It was glass with a wide aluminum brace-bar across the middle of the door to reinforce it and to divide the glass panel into halves. The bottom half of the door was covered with some kind of a community health poster that had been sticky-taped from the inside. The top panel of glass had a small white cardboard sign with the library opening hours, printed neatly but not perfectly, probably by one of the staff using their best handwriting.
    The library wouldn’t open until