Read Online Red Tide by G. M. Ford - Free Book Online

object, but she kept on. “How I’d sit in court and watch him get sent off to prison. Or even better how I’d take care of him myself. How I’d…” She stopped…shook her head once and clamped her mouth shut.
    Stevie fed the cab some gas. Several cars turned off, disappearing this way and that, reducing the number of vehicles between the cab and the van to five. Stevie closed the gap.
    “What were you gonna do to him?” he asked.
    She shook her head again. Made a wry face. “It all seems so silly now,” she said.
    “And you ain’t no freak,” Stevie said with a mock frown. “That’s no way to be talkin’ about yourself.” He waved a hand and put on a boyish smile. “You keep that kinda talk up and I’m gonna have to ask you to vacate the cab.”
    Before she could reply, the van made a sharp left. The cab hustled up the street and followed suit. By the time they rounded the corner, the van was making another turn, right, downhill again, toward Olive Way. “He used to live on this block,” Dougherty said. “Back when we first met.” Stevie snapped off the headlights.
    A series of images flashed across her mind’s eye. Of parties that ran long into the night, parties where nobody ever had to be anywhere in the morning, where the politics involved ridding the world of corporations, and their long-range plans never ventured further than the following week. She could see him there with his Billy Idol hair and that smug smirk on his lips, as if to say he had no doubt about anything, when if you knew him at all, you could see right away it was just for show, and under all the bullshit was a scared little boy who knew he was never going to live up to his rich parents’ expectations and so had decided not to try, had decided to go the other way so that nobody, not even his worst tormentors, could say he’d failed…only that he’d chosen a different path.
    Stevie pulled to a stop. A block down, the van was backing into a parking space. They sat in the darkness, watching Bohannon take three tries to work the van to the curb.
    “Shitty driver,” Stevie commented as they watched the lights go out and Brian Bohannon’s shadowed form appear on the sidewalk, hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets as he headed down the hill at a loose-jointed shamble.
    Dougherty popped the door handle and stepped out. A car rounded the corner at the head of the street, its ultrabright halogen lights sending Dougherty’s shadow halfway down the block. She shaded her eyes and waited for the car to pass, but apparently the driver was otherwise occupied. The car didn’t move. Just sat there, lights ablaze, throwing a painful purple glare over the entire block.
    Dougherty leaned down and looked into the cab. In the bright artificial light, Stevie looked like he had only half a face. “I’m gonna…” she began.
    He nodded. “I’ll meet you at the Starbucks on Olive,” he whispered.
    And then, without warning, the lights went out and the street faded to black. She jerked her eyes in that direction. Blinked a couple of times. The car was gone. No headlights. No taillights. No nothing.
    She had only a split second to wonder. Brian Bohannon had nearly a full block lead on her. Another short stretch of sidewalk and he’d be down on East Olive, where the lights grew brighter while her chances of going unnoticed grew dimmer.
    She reached down, pulled off her shoes and began to jog down the street with the black pumps bouncing in her hand like a scuffed bouquet.
    The sidewalk was uneven, cracked by time, heaved by tree roots, the concrete slabs tilted this way and that like some funhouse promenade. She kept her eyes on the uneven ground as gravity pulled her into a full run that stretched her long legs until her hip joints began to loosen and she settled into her stride.
    Her bouncing eyes watched him turn right, up the little sliver of street that fronted the Hillcrest Market. She was thirty yards away and closing quickly when he