Bad Moon Rising by Katherine Sutcliffe Read Free Book Online Page A

She’d hinted more than once that she was interested
in more than friendship. But he had had only one consuming passion in his life
at that time. Law. There simply wasn’t room in his life for both. So they had drifted
apart, lost touch the summer between his graduation and starting law school.
Months later, he had received an invitation to her and Eric’s wedding.
    Still, there were times when the loneliness, the emptiness
of his life threatened to erode his self-restraint. When the pain boiled up
inside him, ripping at his heart, gnawing at his belly. When he felt as if he
were tumbling back into the madness of grief. When the faces of his children
paraded through his mind’s eye and the memory of their laughter sent a dagger
through his raw, bleeding soul.
    The phone rang. He didn’t answer. If it was Beverly again, he might suggest that she come over ... to talk. About Patrick. But he was feeling too damn needy at the moment. And
she was too damn vulnerable.
    The machine kicked on. It wasn’t Beverly.
    “Damascus? J.D. Damascus?” A woman’s voice, a little
sultry. Definitely nervous. “My name is Holly.” Pause. “Holly Jones.” A sound,
as if she had dropped the phone. There was loud talk in the background. “Okay,
ah ... I found your number on the bathroom wall. I think I need a
lawyer. I’ve been arrested. ... I
think I might have killed someone.”
    The phone went dead and the machine cut off.
    J.D. remained on the balcony, the rank, muddy smell of
the river as cloying as the hot, August night. Raising the gun, he pointed it
toward Tyron’s window and looked down the site. “Bang,” he said through his
teeth. “You’re dead.”
     
    After a night spent in hell cell ten listening to two dozen prisoners howl
about their civil rights, Holly wasn’t in the best frame of mind by the time
Damascus showed up at ten a.m . looking like death warmed over. He wasn’t at all
what she expected or remembered from her days of living in New Orleans, and she
wondered, briefly, as she stared at him through the cell bars, if the name and
number she had found on the ladies’ bathroom wall had been another J.D.
Damascus. The unshaven middle-aged man, wearing jeans and a threadbare sports
coat over a T-shirt, shaggy, dark brown hair to his shoulders—not to mention a
small, gold loop in his right ear— could hardly be compared to the
Versace-suited shark who had once made the area’s criminal element shake in
their shoes.
    “Holly Jones?” he asked in a slightly husky voice as
he stared at her with bloodshot eyes. He was that J.D. Damascus, all right.
While his appearance might have gone to hell, there was no mistaking that voice
and the steely eyes that had the uncanny ability to crawl into a person’s
psyche.
    Not good, she thought. Definitely not good. But she
was in no position to be picky. Not by a long shot.
    As the cop beside him opened the cell door, Holly
stood up and willed the strength back into her legs. She nodded.
    Damascus waited until the cop had departed, then entered the
cell, his gaze looking her up and down, eyes narrowing as if assessing her
guilt or innocence.
    She swallowed and ran her sweating palms up and down
the butt of her jeans. “Look, I shot him, okay?” she blurted. “But it was in
self-defense. The creep was dressed like Darth Vader and came at me with a
knife.”
    He nodded and dug into his pocket, withdrew a couple
of white tabs, and popped them into his mouth. “You’re a hooker,” he said as he
chewed and continued to study her.
    Her face began to burn. “No.”
    One dark eyebrow lifted and his mouth curved. “I guess
you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, huh? Just
cruising that warehouse because you had nothing better to do at two in the
morning.”
    “I was ... looking for someone.”
    Again with the grin that made her face burn hotter. “Obviously.”
    “That’s not what I meant.” She cleared her throat in
an attempt to keep her voice