Read Online The Ninth Step by Barbara Taylor Sissel - Free Book Online Page A

sepia-toned tissue and lying on the porch swing. They were beginning to wilt in the morning heat as if they might have been there a while . . . since sometime in the night. Irises . . . harbingers of hope . . . the promise of love.
    Livie set down her satchel and picked up the flowers. She brought them to her face, then fingering the stems, she hunted for a card, but there wasn’t one and her heart wallowed, even as her glance rose to follow the curve of the road.
     

Chapter 4
     
    It wasn’t the sort of thing you could say on the phone, he could figure out that much, so he drove there, parked down the street from the Latimer’s house. It was near dusk. Dinnertime. Quitting time. Cotton imagined himself going up on the Latimer’s wide shady porch. He imagined the way he’d knock on their door. Then what? He’d deliver the knockout punch? Hah. More likely he’d be the one laid out.
    Are they into vigilante justice. . . .? Anita’s question played through his mind. He guessed he’d find out, if he went through with this, if he could make himself do it.
    Within a half hour or so, he saw an Escalade pull into the driveway and loop around to the back. Where the garage was, Cotton assumed. A man was driving. Wes Latimer? Cotton waited a while longer. Pretty soon he heard a lot of racket coming from the back yard, sounded like lumber getting tossed around. There was the whine of a saw, the pounding of a hammer. He figured some project was getting built. He rested his head against the seat liking the noise.
    In another life, he and Wes might be friends. Wes would know Cotton could build damn near anything and that he was always ready to help a buddy out. They’d have had something good going on between them instead of this screwed up mess that had Cotton skulking in a panic. Maybe Anita was right. Maybe turning himself in to the cops was best. He wished to God he knew what to do. He wished he was drunk, then he wouldn’t care.
    After a while, he drove away.
    But two evenings later, he was back, repeating the same routine. He came a third time and a fourth even though he risked being noticed, being taken for a pervert. It was warm and he kept the window down for the breeze that was laden with the sounds and smells of ordinary life, onions frying, an occasional shout or burst of laughter. And the sounds of construction that were ongoing from the Latimer house. On the fifth evening, as soon as Cotton saw the Escalade turn up the driveway, before he could stop himself, he bailed out of the Mercedes, crossed the street, and followed in the SUV’s wake. Panic fishtailed hard through his chest, tightened the muscles of his calves. What was he planning to do? his brain asked.
    Tell them, he answered.
    Tell them what?
    Something. The truth.
    I don’t know. . . .
    He wasn’t prepared to see the dog that bounded joyfully toward him. He knew it belonged to the Latimers; he’d seen it before. It was brownish gold, a mixed breed, some variety of lazy foolish hound dog you couldn’t help but like, that just made you smile. He felt the grin, the bump of his humor, start somewhere inside him and it was so out of place and time, he was unnerved by it, he felt almost disabled, and then the girl appeared.
    The Girl.
    Her.
    The vision from his nightmares. The one for whom he had been given a message.
    Nicole Latimer. 
    Older now, but still very much a child. Cotton got an impression of dark hair, blue t-shirt, shorts, sneakers.
    His heart rammed his chest wall.
    “Humphrey!” she shouted. “No, don’t jump on him.” She came up to Cotton. “I’m sorry. He never minds.”
    “It’s okay,” Cotton said. “I like dogs. His name’s Humphrey?”
    “Yeah, but he acts so silly all the time, we mostly call him Doofus.”
    Cotton scratched behind Humphrey’s ears. His tail wagged in delirious circles. “I had a dog like him when I was a kid, part Black Lab, part hound. His name was Bogey.”
    “Like the actor? Oh, my gosh! Are you