Better Left Buried by Belinda Frisch Read Free Book Online

burning her constricting throat.
    “Help. Help. Help!”
    Tires squealed and the smell of burnt rubber moved as a cloud through the alley.
    Adam appeared; his face tight with anger. He pulled the man off her and delivered a single solid punch to his jaw, knocking him into the dumpster. The half-dressed drunk collapsed, one arm over his head, revealing a gun in his waistband.
    Harmony froze from shock.
    “Are y ou all right? Are you hurt?” Adam backed away and looked her over like a parent examining a child who had fallen. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Harmony, can you move?”
    She forced herself to sit up, her shoulders and hips hurting, gravel ground into the skin on her back. She shook the trash from her hair and adjusted her shirt, unable to stop staring at the man who had attacked her.
    A pool of blood s eeped from his temple, matching a spot on the dumpster where his head had slammed into the metal edge.
    Adam followed her gaze. “Come on. We have to go.” She didn’t answer. “Harmony, we have to get out of here. Now!”
    Her mind played out the inevitable police scenario. She looked around for anything she may have dropped. “We have to get my things. They’ll trace this back to me. We have to get everything.”
    Adam eased her onto her feet and into the passenger’s side of his truck. “I’ll make sure I grab it all.”
    She watched as he scurried to put things right, praying the man she’d have killed herself five minutes earlier wasn’t dead.
    “Check.” Adam got into the driver’s seat, sweaty and spattered with blood , and set her stuff between them. “Check to make sure that’s all of it.”
    She did as much of an inventory as her strained mind could manage. “I think so.”
    “Shit, Harmony. This is bad.” He was hurt. There was blood on his hand and at least some of it was his.
    She wanted to dote, to ask if he was okay, but all she kept thinking was why had he shown up in the first place.
    “How did you find me?” She stared ahead, dazed, hurt, and scared.
    “That’s what you have to say to me right now?” He squeezed the fish mouth wound closed to help it clot, but he was bleeding pretty hard. “I got what I could get done at the shop, but I told Walter I had to go to your appointment. I went to Bennett’s office and when you weren’t there, I just started circling the bus stop near 9th. When I saw that broken bottle, I was afraid something was wrong.” Blood spilled over the back of his hand. “Then I heard you screaming.”
    “Just my luck, right?”
    “I’d call it pretty lucky.” Adam unclenched his jaw and pointed to the glove compartment. “Hand me a napkin.”
    She passed him a wrinkled stack. “Why did you think you had to come to Bennett’s?”
    He wrapped the napkins around his knuckles and started the truck. “How about ‘thank you for saving me from the rapey pervert’?” He pulled out onto 9 th Street, heading back toward Bennett’s.
    “ You still don’t trust me.”
    “I don’t trust anyone , Harmony.” The truth was hard to hear. “Do you have any idea what could’ve happened to you back there?”
    “I had it handled.”
    “Sure looked like it, too.” He rolled his eyes. “You can take care of yourself. I get that. I’m just trying to help.”
    “I   help  myself.”
    “You’re going to help yourself right back into the system going to Bennett dressed like that. You don’t get it, do you? You have to do what they want. Six months from now you can tell them all to go to hell, but if you don’t want to end up in a group home, away from me and Brea and anyt hing else you care about, then play by the rules for once in your life.” He reached behind the seat and handed her a plastic grocery sack with a pair of jeans and a t-shirt inside. “Here, put these on.”
    “I’m not going to change how I dress for these people. I am who I am.”
    “This isn’t a negotiation.” He pulled into Parker Center—an old, brick school converted