Read Online The Best Victim (Kindle Serial) by Colleen Thompson - Free Book Online

a reminder that he was the one with all the power. “It seems to me that the Good Lord might’ve put you in my path for a reason. Maybe it’s a sign I need to see that you get through all this safely.”
    She felt the sting of perspiration dampening her back beneath the jacket as her instincts told her the shift into the territory of God’s will was a bad sign. “That’s very kind of you, Mel. I can tell you’re a good man, and I want you to know I appreciate what you’ve done for me so far. But any more’s too much of an imposition on a stranger.”
    “Don’t think of me as a stranger, Celia. I’m a new friend, that’s all. A friend who wants to help.” There was something brittle in his voice, so brittle that she half-expected his clenched, yellow smile to shatter.
    “Right now, I need to be alone, Mel,” she insisted, the few words hammered thin and flat as foil. Ice cold, Phillip would’ve called them, another example of a “deficiency” he’d used to excuse his own.
    She might be wrong about the man next to her, as she so often was when it came to people, but having just escaped one stranger who’d wanted to manipulate her, she wasn’t about to fall prey to someone even worse.
    “But Celia, honey—” Big Mel started, creeping her out more with every second.
    “You might want to take my word for it on this one,” she said, grabbing the dachshund as she opened the door, “unless you want to see a brand of batshit crazy you’d never come up with in a hundred years.”
#
    One thing about wrecker drivers: they could sniff out a disabled car from miles away, like vultures on the scent of a fresh kill. Within minutes from the time Durant popped the big sedan’s hood, he had several noisily vying for his business.
    Brent gave it to a driver standing behind the others, a dark-skinned man with a shot of silver through his springy hair and his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his stained coveralls as if he had neither the time nor the inclination to fight the young pups for a tow.
    Once the others had hurried off, responding to an emergency call on somebody’s scanner for an additional ambulance, he used his smartphone’s flashlight app to show the driver the fried filaments in the ignition fuse. “Instead of a tow,” he asked, “how ’bout I pay you for a lift to pick up another one of these?”
    “S’posed to tow you to the boss’s shop with no ’ceptions,” the driver said before adding a shrug. “But on a day as cold as this one, cash don’t leave no footprints.”
    They negotiated a price somewhere between high and extortionist, but Brent was in no mood to argue. So it was that he was riding in the cab of a truck that smelled of old coffee, stale sweat, and about a million cigarettes when he spotted a bright red pickup with a familiar dog chained in its bed. The truck had pulled over on the feeder about fifty yards ahead, near where scores of vehicles had backed up, waiting for a wreck to clear.
    “Up there! Up ahead,” he shouted, as the driver prepared to pull into the lot of an auto parts store.
    “We’ll miss our turn and have to go clear ’round, through all that traffic,” the man warned.
    “Fifty extra for your time,” Brent said, as ahead, the passenger side door opened and a slim figure stepped out, lost her balance, and spilled to the ground. As if she had been given a shove as she got out. “That woman—she’s my—She’s a friend.”
    Like the dachshund in her arms, who immediately popped up and started barking, Lauren Miller didn’t stay down. Scrambling, she ran after the red truck before the driver could nose his way back into traffic. Horns blared as the occupants of nearby vehicles honked warnings, but Lauren didn’t give up. Before Brent wondered if he could make it to her faster on foot, she reached in and snatched her bags, which she tossed onto the roadside, shouting a few choice words if her body language was any indication.
    As the pickup pulled away