Core Punch by Pauline Baird Jones Read Free Book Online

remembered more about storm surge, what it did and when. All she remembered was that it could “rise unexpectedly fast.” And that the rise depended on where one was, something about tides and where the eye came ashore. WTF was moving in west of the city, which put them on the wet side. It was not good to be on the wet side of a hurricane. There’d been some blah, blah, blah in the news vids about how lucky they all were to not be dirt side this time. She didn’t feel lucky.
    Whatever, she had to phone home. She still hesitated. Captain Uncle was going to burn her already uncomfortably hot backside. She sighed. “Might as well get it over with.”
    His gaze shifted her direction. “I believe that would be wise.”
    Something in his tone made her uneasy. She activated a channel. Nothing. Didn’t even get the not-connected hum. She tried a love tap. Another. Followed them with a hate tap. That was odd. Could always get a not-connected hum. Though this was the skimmer’s first serious storm test. And there was that bang against terra soggy. “Do you think the storm is affecting communication?”
    There was a lot of electrical activity out there. And the winds. Could WTF have already taken out the communications network up top? It wasn’t a ridiculous worry. Grand Maw Maw had better tech than the NONPD. Oh, budget, the curse of all our lives….
    He hesitated. “That is the most logical supposition.”
    He’d never made logic sound so dubious. She felt a chill despite the heat building both inside and outside the skimmer. She looked around, but there wasn’t anything to see other than the rain.
    â€œDo you know why the authorities waited so long to retrieve these dirt-siders?”
    The question seemed a bit random, but Vi wasn’t adverse to a distraction. “That’s right. You weren’t there when it came up.” Vi rubbed an errant rivulet of water out of her eye. “They popped up on the sensor, rather like our corpse, between the last two feeder bands. Captain Uncle thought maybe they’d been using some temperature screening stuff and either changed their minds or it got damaged. If they are getting nervous it should make retrieval easier.” She could hope. Hope was good. It was like bright and stuff.
    â€œCurious.” She arched a brow at him and he added, “That both the dirt-siders and the corpse were hidden from the sensors.”
    She frowned. “Yeah, but—” What did it mean?
    â€œThe weather is an unpredictable element,” he said, as if following a line of thought all his own.
    â€œWhich could have been predicted to be unpredictable,” she felt compelled to point out, though it shouldn’t have been quite so unpredictable. “Do you really think both events were deliberate?”
    â€œI have a suspicious nature,” he admitted, like that was a news flash.
    â€œBut what’s the end game?” she asked.
    â€œUnclear.”
    â€œSabotage isn’t logical,” she offered, a bit uncertainly. Though it would be ridiculously easy to sabotage this piece of crapeau . Just give it a good kick. Still…too much about this felt wrong. And one thing she’d learned was to trust her gut when things felt wrong. “Logically, someone would have had to be out in this to un-screen our vic. And mess with our tech—which could have been overki—unnecessary.” Unless they had some really cool something that could do those things for them. She added, though she wasn’t sure what it meant, “The vic is a dirt-sider.”
    A squatter, someone out of the tech loop, in fact. A little person, barely on the grid. Who might have died the same way a crime boss had died, but wouldn’t that be something a killer would want to hide? All of this seemed designed to draw attention, to make them suspicious. Okay, going with attention getting, whose attention was someone