Read Online Unhinged by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online Page B

them. “A real mess,” Bob added unnecessarily.
    To distract myself from the mental images I fixed my eyes on the horizon. The storm was in the mid-Atlantic states now, raising hell all over the place; state of emergency on the Jersey shoreline.
    “Thing like that, you ask yourself,” Bob said, “what’s the point? But in this case, you look at the big picture, seems like knocking off a whole lot of people
was
the point.”
    I turned back to him. “What do you mean?”
    He shook his head sorrowfully. “The cop connection made it special, and maybe there was some grudge-type reason somewhere in the past. Somebody targets cops, it’s ’cause they don’t like cops. But when people
keep
killing people, bottom line it’s usually ’cause they like killing.”
    Brr
. He peered at me. “Looks like someone had a poke at you, too, Jake. Or are you working on your house again?”
    “House,” I confirmed tersely. No need to add to my already stellar reputation by detailing exactly what had happened.
    Bob got up, gazing across the street at the concrete barrier that I gathered Sam had crashed into; the night before, it was on Bob’s orders that I’d been kept from the scene until Sam was revived. The barrier bore dark blue car paint and white scars from the impact, its orange reflectors smashed, shining bits of them littering the street.
    “Kid’s lucky,” Bob commented, hitching up his belt which was burdened with baton, sidearm, and cuffs. Bob was the kind of guy who expected the best but always prepared for the worst. “He’s going to be okay? And Maggie?”
    “Uh-huh.” Just thinking about it again made my heart do a buck-and-wing. “We went back to the hospital before breakfast. Sam said all he thought of when the brakes went was making it around the corner.”
    Or they’d have ended up in the water. The howling I’d heard was Sam desperately trying to slow the car with the transmission. But the Key Street hill was too steep for engine braking, and the attempt had failed.
    “They’re agitating to get out today,” I said. “Sam might but Maggie probably not. She took a harder hit.”
    He’d been chipper, no more cardiac monitor, requiring only codeine to be comfortable. Maggie looked pale and in pain despite stronger pills, but she’d had her game face on, working to get up and into a wheelchair and already suggesting word games she and Sam could play while they remained in the hospital.
    “They’ll be fine,” I said again, mostly to reassure myself. I’d wanted to stay but Sam was clearly mortified at the thought of being watched over by his mother. When I’d left, Maggie had been urging him to concentrate on homonyms: “quail” and “quail,” et cetera.
    “Victor’s there with them, and so is George.”
    “Good. Listen, Jacobia,” Bob said uncomfortably as a breeze through the open door riffled his sparse hair.
    With his slow, face-saving way of handling trouble, people joked Bob ought to have his motto, “All in good time,” stenciled on the cop car. Bob gave a guy room to consider his options, have an apology ready when the moment of truth finally arrived and Bob stood toe-to-toe with him, radiating moral authority. “This story Harry Markle is telling now, about this guy following him,” Bob went on doubtfully.
    We went outside. At one end of Water Street the Top Cat crew was loading big equipment onto a pickup truck: lights, cameras, I don’t know what all else, only that there was a lot of it.
    At the other, in front of the Motel East, people in safari garb climbed into Wyatt Evert’s van. They carried cameras, backpacks, all the gear they would need for a day out observing nature, plus lunches Wyatt had had packed for them.
    “Hope they’ve got plenty of bug dope,” Bob observed.
    Wyatt, looking rocky after his evening of appreciating fine wine at my house, got behind the van’s wheel and peered into its oversized rearview mirror. His assistant Fran Hanson was in the