Birds of Prey by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online

grandmother, to do the same. It was long after my mother’s death from cancer and only when my grandfather had been crippled by a stroke and was at death’s door himself that I had reestablished contact with them.
          No, as far as Beverly Piedmont Jenssen was concerned, there were far bigger issues at stake than an evening spent plying the handle of a one-armed bandit.
          “Lars is in my room sleeping,” I said. “I think he spent most of the night sitting outside in a deck chair.”
          “Silly old fool,” Beverly murmured. “He’ll probably catch his death of cold.”
          “Don’t you want to go talk to him?”
          Beverly sniffed and dabbed at her nose with a lacy handkerchief she had fumbled out of her pocket. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m just not ready to talk to him yet. I don’t know what I’d say. In fact, I think I’ll go back to the cabin and lie down for a while myself. The truth of the matter is, I didn’t sleep very well last night, either.”
          “Come on, then,” I said, helping her up and offering my arm. “I’ll walk you to your door.”
          Her hand on my arm was almost bird-boned, and she leaned against me as we walked. The gale had yet to blow itself out, and I was happy to be there to steady her as we made our way down the long, narrow corridor to their cabin on the Bahia Deck.
          “I’m glad to see you’re wearing your bracelets,” she said when we stopped in front of her door and while I waited for her to extract the room key card from her pocket.
          “They saved my life,” I told her. “In this kind of rough sea, if I weren’t wearing them, I’d probably be flat on my back in bed.”
          I held the door open for her and walked her as far as the freshly made-up bed. “You’re sure you don’t need anything?” I asked.
          “No,” she said. “I’m fine. I’ll just take a little nap. And if I do need something, the attendant is right outside.”
          “All right, then,” I said, backing toward the door. “Sleep well.”
          “Jonas?” she said.
          “Yes.”
          “Are you going to tell Lars what I said?”
          “Do you want me to?”
          “I don’t think so. If he’s as smart as I think he is, he’ll figure it out on his own. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.”
          “Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.”
          I went out and closed the door. As I walked back up the corridor carpeted with a distinctive strewn-seashell design, I was struck by a fit of despair. Lars and Beverly were both pushing ninety, for God’s sake, and the two of them still couldn’t make heads or tails of the battle of the sexes. If with a combined total of over seventy years of experience with marriage they couldn’t make it work, then there sure as hell wasn’t much hope for the rest of us.

 
     
    4
     
    A FTER DEPOSITING BEVERLY in her cabin, I returned to mine. Lars was still asleep, only now he was sprawled crosswise on my rumpled bed. Because of that, I didn’t hang around. Instead, I went down and tried walking around on the Promenade Deck. When that proved to be far too wet and blustery, I went up to the Lido Deck’s buffet and drowned my sorrows in a couple of cups of coffee.
          It turns out I did have some sorrows to drown. I’ve never been one for great feats of introspection, but now, retired from Seattle PD, I found that self-examination had caught up with me anyway. I’d be fine as long as I was preoccupied with whatever was going on around me, but as soon as I was left to my own devices, waking or sleeping, a single image invaded my being.
          In my mind’s eye I would once again see Sue Danielson, wounded and bleeding, lying propped against the living-room wall in the shattered ruins of her apartment. She would be clutching her weapon and waving me down the hallway toward