Read Online The Haunted Bones by PM Weldon - Free Book Online Page A

in Atlanta. Ciao!
    How was it Pink always knew what was
happening? I made a note to take her out for pizza in Little Five
Points soon.
    The next e-mail was from the bank guy,
Menivers. I told him I had the pictures but there had been an
incident at the location and for him to get in touch with Captain
Vale.
    The third email was from some weird address.
Suspecting it was spam or a virus, I deleted it. Next I opened the
image of the mystery woman. Jewels' tablet didn't have the same
software as mine, so all I could do was zoom in and look. I could
do a limited amount of hue and saturation adjustment just to bring
the woman's features into clarity.
    Once I had it where I could see her face
pretty clear, I made a screen cap and saved it. I pulled my phone
out of my back pocket and scrolled through the contacts.
    "Hello?"
    "Danielle?"
    Pause. "Devan? Oh my god, is this you?"
    I was happy she sounded happy to hear from
me. Danielle was an old friend at the Georgia Bureau of
Investigations. She worked in finger printing and face recognition.
When I worked with Jim, he and I depended on her. "Yeah. How are
you?"
    "I'm fine! You know we miss you. When are
you coming back to work?"
    And there it was, the question I always
tried to avoid. Though it wasn't as hard to answer this time. "Oh,
I'm not sure. I'm liking civilian life. But I do I have a favor if
you're up for it?"
    "Anything."
    "I have a picture of a woman's face and I
need find out if it matches anything in your database for missing
persons."
    "You got a jpeg or png?"
    "Yep."
    She gave me the e-mail to send it to, and
after a promise of dinner and catching-up time, I disconnected
before I mailed it off to her.
    That's just about the moment something
crashed through the living room window and exploded on the floor in
front of me.

 
     
    Twelve
     
    Instinct drove me up and over the back of
the couch seconds after the bomb went off. I forgot about my
shoulder in that instant and cried out as I used it to help me land
on the floor. The force of the explosion wasn't enough to do much
damage, but the hissing afterward, along with the acrid smell and
thick black smoke, told me this wasn't a percussive bomb.
    This was a smoke bomb.
    I stayed low to the floor, keeping my nose
down so I wouldn't choke on the smoke. Sometimes these things were
designed to irritate sinuses as well as blind a person and make
them defenseless. If they were blind and coughing, someone wearing
a gas mask could tell where the intended victim was by sound and
either kidnap them or off them.
    And I sure as shit wasn't letting either of
those things happen to me, or to Jewels. I no longer had a gun, but
I knew where Jewels kept hers. Getting to it might prove a bit
problematic because I couldn't see a thing.
    The front door came down with a loud noise
and then I heard someone's shoes on the hard wood. I squinted
through the smog and peeked around the edge of the couch. I could
make out the intruder's boots as they ran into the dining room, and
then came around through the kitchen, past me to the couch. I kept
myself flat and as I eased back—and unfortunately caught a bit of
the smoke in my lungs—I watched those boots move to the front of
the couch, and then over to the desk where Julie's computer
was.
    I pressed my face into the back of the couch
to cough, then put my nose and mouth under the couch to grab a deep
breath before I got on my hands and knees in an attempt to sneak up
on the intruder. From what I could see in the smoke, it looked like
they were going for Julie's computer.
    Unfortunately, they were wearing a mask and
I wasn't. I coughed and he turned in time to ram something long and
very hard into my gut. I lost my breath and footing as I stumbled
backwards and crashed into the curtain and window. The home invader
jumped on me at that point and started hitting at my face with
whatever he had in his hand. I kept my hands and arms up, my
shoulder screaming at me as I tried to grab whatever it