Crosscut by Meg Gardiner Read Free Book Online Page B

the window, tassels flopping up and down. Behind the counter, the cook was watching a wrestling match on the TV.
    “Getcha something, hon?” she said.
    “Two bottled waters and a couple of burgers to go.”
    She tossed hamburgers on the grill, and I headed down a creaking hallway to the women’s room. The desolation on Abbie’s face lingered in my mind. Ceci had been murdered in Wally’s dental office; that was all I knew. I leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on my face. Straightening, I looked in the mirror.
    A woman stood behind me, watching me over my shoulder.
    I froze. I hadn’t seen the door open, hadn’t heard her boots on the groaning floor. She leaned back against the wall and blinked, slowly, like a Siamese cat.
    “Go on, finish washing up. Don’t mind me,” she said.
    Cold water ran down my face and dripped onto the counter. She grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser and handed it to me.
    I dried my hands and face. “Hello, Jax.”
    “Don’t look so surprised.”
    “Then don’t be such a drama queen.”
    “Honey, I’m forty-four years old. I’ve lived this long by knowing when to do dramatic things.”
    I stared at her in the mirror. The sleeveless black T-SHIRT clung to her frame like high-gloss paint. The fatigue pants left more to the imagination, but there was no mistaking her ballerina’s posture. Diamonds gleamed on her ears and left hand, six carats at least, set off against almond brown skin.
    Not many women would walk into a flyblown desert café wearing Caterpillar boots and $50,000 worth of jewelry, but Jax wasn’t like other women. She wasn’t wearing a holster, but I knew she was armed. Not that it mattered. Anybody who messed with her, I thought, she could kill barehanded.
    No good could come out of seeing Jakarta Rivera here today.
    She stared at me with the detachment of a runway model. Sidling over, she lifted my left hand and looked at my bare ring finger.
    “You and your man ever going to tie the knot? The suspense is killing me.”
    “Why are you here?”
    “I brought a gift to your bridal shower. I expect performance. Heat those cold feet up, honey.”
    “Please tell me Tim isn’t out in the car having this same heart-to-heart with Jesse.” I glanced at the door, wondering if she had locked it. “Is this about your dossiers?”
    For nine months a fat envelope had lain in my safe-deposit box. It contained documents that convinced me Jax and her husband, Tim North, were who they claimed to be, and had done the things they said they’d done. CIA, British intelligence, and, as they put it, private work. Contract assassination.
    “No, this is something else,” she said.
    They told me they wanted me to write their memoirs. In fact, they wanted something very different, but, after everything was over, they delivered the envelope to me. I suspected they were using me as a dead drop—a place to park stolen and classified documents that they wanted for self-protection or blackmail. Possessing such documents, I knew, could put all of us in prison, but I couldn’t return them. Jax and Tim had gone into the wind.
    But the envelope was also a bargaining chip, for them and for me. I could sell it to their enemies, get them killed, and probably earn myself a hell of a payday. And they could, if they wished, torture me for the key to the safe-deposit box, retrieve the dossiers, and murder me.
    Nice little balancing act they’d subjected me to.
    “Shall we go out to the counter?” I said. “Catch up on the family, watch wrestling on the TV?”
    “You need to talk to your buddy in the China Lake Police Department. Have him contact the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit and get their profilers out here.”
    The bathroom smelled of ammonia. My stomach was queasy.
    “Shit,” I said. “You think a serial killer committed the murders.”
    “Murder doesn’t describe these acts. Try butchery.”
    I ran the back of my hand across my forehead. “Two killings in twenty-four