AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Damn it, I’m looking for it!” she said aloud.
She heard her voice, saw her image in the full-length mirror propped in one corner, and she gasped. She was wan, thinner than usual, all of her vitality gone. Her hair was a tangle and she couldn’t remember when she’d last brushed it. She was still holding Jay’s jacket in a death grip, her knuckles showing white, the collar of the jacket wadded in her clenched fingers.
She told herself to calm down. To not go off the deep end. To think like a rational person.
But her emotions were ragged and torn, her anger pulsing in her temples, her fear and outrage coagulating in her guts.
“Pull it together, Kris. You can do this.”
Slowly her fingers unknotted and she tossed the jacket on the bed before walking through the house. Testing the doors and windows, scrutinizing every room and finding nothing more unsettling.
Yet.
But there were hours and days and weeks to come. She had to find some kind of inner strength. Finally she was convinced nothing else was out of place. She hung the damned jacket in the bedroom closet, then snapped blinds shut and pulled down shades before forcing herself to settle onto the oversized couch. Rubbing her shoulder, she recalled how the doctor had told her with a knowing smile that the wound was “healing nicely,” and once more she’d heard again how lucky she’d been that her injuries hadn’t been worse.
“Yeah, right,” she muttered, but the headache that had come with the concussion was long gone and she could rotate her arm, lift it over her head, and even lift small items without much pain. “Lucky,” she reminded herself.
Snagging the remote for the television and clicking it on, she watched the local news, but Jay’s murder of two weeks earlier wasn’t mentioned. Still a little edgy, she pushed herself from the couch and found her way into the kitchen where an unopened bottle of Merlot was waiting for her.
As it has been for half a month.
She felt the need of a drink, the anticipation of the buzz, the warm, cozy feeling of just a glass. Or two.
It wasn’t just the life inside her that made her hesitate, it was the dance with alcoholism that had claimed her father, even though Rick Bentz was not her biological father.
“Close enough,” she reminded herself as theirs wasn’t what anyone would call a traditional family. She considered Rick her father; he’d claimed her as such and that was that. She wouldn’t go down that dark path of her conception. At that thought she touched her abdomen. This child wouldn’t know his or her father and that, in and of itself, was sad.
Scrounging in a drawer, she found her corkscrew, and opened the bottle of her favorite red. The scent wafted up to her and she remembered dozens of nights sharing a bottle with Jay.
Now she was a widow.
Make that a pregnant widow.
She lifted the bottle to her nose for a better smell, then walked over to the sink and poured, watching as the wine, so like the color of blood, streamed and swirled down the drain. She remembered all the blood that night. Hers. Jay’s. Blending together from a random assault.
At least she thought the attack was random.
Jay’s warning cut through her brain.These people are capable of unspeakable acts.
That thought stopped her short. She assumed that the attack against her was random, someone who’d intended to rob her, or do her harm, but only because she was walking alone on the street that night.
But maybe she was wrong.
Possibly she’d been targeted.
The police weren’t sure.
And neither was she. But it didn’t matter. Whoever had wielded the knife that night had ended Jay’s life. That miscreant’s days were numbered. One way or another, she was going to locate that sick son of a bitch and nail him to the cross.
Justice would be served.
Along with a satisfying slab of vengeance.
CHAPTER 3
“I’ll just be a sec,” Montoya said as he cut across traffic and slid the cruiser into a restricted space where paint was peeling from the curb. The mid-October sun was peeking through a haze of clouds, weak rays piercing the dirty windshield, the inside of the cruiser warm.
Bentz pointed to a signpost. “You’re parked in a loading zone.”
