Dead Frenzy by Victoria Houston Read Free Book Online

serious.
    “Boy oh boy, did I run into an old nightmare today,” said Osborne as Lew turned onto Highway 45 heading north. He wasn’t quite ready to break the spell of the late afternoon with talk about Erin.
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Remember Catherine Plyer?” said Osborne. “She’s older than you, I think—had two younger brothers, both troublemakers, and her father was a general practitioner in Rhinelander.”
    “I knew Patty Boy. He was a year behind me in high school. There was a kid had problems—”
    “Everyone had problems with that guy,” said Osborne, interrupting her. “He was trouble right from the start. Yep, he was the younger of the boys. Dickie’s the other one. I think he moved to Florida. Anyway, I hired Catherine to work in my office one summer. She was seventeen and I needed a receptionist for two months while the woman who had been working for me took a maternity leave.
    “Everything was just fine at first. Catherine was a tall, attractive, articulate young woman. She was very good on the phone, friendly with patients, could type, help with the billing. And it was only a summer job—what could possibly go wrong, right?”
    Lew looked straight ahead. “Plenty, if I remember right. I know the old man drank himself to death, died in a gutter down in Madison. The mother left years before, when those kids were still small, I think. What I remember most was those brothers and their father—they were tall, good-looking men. You would never expect such … well, that was one crazy family.”
    “Oh, you have no idea—” Osborne turned toward her eagerly, but just as he looked over at Lew, his eye was caught, as they passed, by rapid movement in the window of a black Mazda Miata pulled off the road heading in the opposite direction. Lew saw it, too: a woman’s hands fluttering like a grouse in flight.
    “What the hell—?” She slammed on the brakes.
    Before Osborne could manage an answer, Nellie was in a power slide sideways up Highway 45.

six
    “The congeniality and tact and patience demanded by matrimony are great, but you need still more of each on a fishing trip.”
    —Frederic F. Van de Water, author
    “Dammit !” Lew smacked the steering wheel with the heel of her right hand as the truck sashayed along the shoulder back toward the parked car. “I knew I should have a radio installed in this truck. Damn! Damn!”
    Arms up against the dashboard, Osborne braced himself and said nothing. He had mixed feelings about that. The most selfish was knowing full well that having a radio in the truck would sabotage the few hours of uninterrupted fishing that Lew was able to squeeze into her busy days.
    As head of the department, she was already on call twenty-four hours a day every day. All she ever tried to take off was an hour or two—well, okay, three if you added in travel. And she always left someone in charge. Plus, this was Loon Lake, for God’s sake—how much could go wrong in that short a time? No-o-o, thought Osborne to himself, no radio if he could help it. On the other hand, if not having a radio meant they were about to lose the person in that car …
    Before Nellie had skidded to a stop behind the Miata, Osborne was out the door in a dead run.
    He didn’t even have to think. When it came to CPR, he was on automatic pilot—able to see pages of the training manual in his mind. Throwing open the door of the little car, he wrenched on the seatbelt, then pulled the young woman down onto the pavement.
    No longer convulsing, she was unconscious. Not breathing? He straddled the limp form, gripped the jaw hard with his left hand, and thrust his finger down, searching for the tongue. Then lifting and pressing, he was forcing air into her lungs even as Lew ran up.
    “Cell phone on the seat!” he rushed the words as he lifted his head to inhale.
    “Let’s hope to hell it works.” Lew leaned into the car to grab the phone. She punched in numbers and waited.
    Tourists were always stunned