Elusive (On The Run Book #1) by Sara Rosett Read Free Book Online

make another stop. She spotted him in the back corner
eating alone. She hurried to get some food for herself then slid into the booth
across from one of her most important contacts. “How’s the tuna sandwich,
Mort?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “Same as always,” he
said, his voice monotone.
    Mort was a burly guy of about
fifty, but he looked as though he should be collecting social security checks.
His physical appearance hadn’t changed much in all the time Jenny had known
him: medium height and build with a thatch of thick hair, which had gone gray
prematurely when he was in his late thirties. She had once told him his hair
made him look like a mad scientist. She’d been seven at the time. She’d had her
arms hooked over the backyard fence and her feet braced on the support boards
to boost herself up so she could see what their neighbor, Mr. Mort, was
harvesting from his garden that ran along the side of the fence. He’d laughed
and asked her if her mom wanted tomatoes. He didn’t laugh much anymore, not
since his daughter’s leukemia diagnosis. After two years of treatment, tests,
and hospitalizations, she’d passed away.
    Unlike his physique, which was
unchanged, his face reflected all the stress and grief and pain of his loss.
His personality had changed, too. Instead of his normal friendly manner, he was
withdrawn and almost listless. The washed-out version of Mort worried her, not
because she was afraid he’d quit or move away and she’d lose a source, but
because she’d known him forever. She’d been fascinated with him when she was a
kid.
    The FBI agents she saw on TV or
in the movies were always young and handsome or they were slightly older and
troubled, but still handsome. They were nothing like her middle-aged neighbor
who told great knock-knock jokes and gave away tomatoes. In fact, Jenny thought
that her incessant drive to discover the truth—her aspiration to be a
reporter—could be, partially at least, traced back to her desire to find out
the truth about Mort—was he
really
with the FBI?
    She’d spent long hours observing
him on weekends from the safety of her upstairs window, which overlooked his
house. She kept careful notes. He mowed his grass, weeded his garden, and had
conversations with her dad about the brown patches in their lawns. It seemed too
mundane for a real FBI agent. Then one day, his wife Kathy had invited her
inside their house and Jenny had seen proof: his badge. And she’d also seen the
pictures lining the hallway. Sequenced in a timeline, the photographs traced
his time in his military uniform, then in a tuxedo for his wedding, and later
in his police uniform. At that point, the pictures shifted to their daughter.
Walking slowly back down the hall, turning back time as it were, Jenny realized
she’d learned her first lesson in truth. The truth of Mort belied all those
television stereotypes. Mort was real and the truth was more surprising to her
than the made-up stuff.
    During college she’d kept in touch
with Mort and Kathy in a distant way, dropping in to see them for a few minutes
during Christmas or spring break when she was home. She always took a mystery
novel for their daughter, Ellen, who was several years younger than Jenny.
Ellen had been a surprise baby who had arrived when they were in their late
forties, long after they’d given up on having a family so it seemed especially
devastating when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. She fought for
two years, but died when Jenny was in her senior year. It was only after Jenny
returned home with her new journalism degree that she realized how bad off Mort
was.
    She didn’t know much about
clinical depression—the health sciences were about as far away from journalism
as you could get—but she was willing to bet that Mort was seriously depressed.
His partner of fifteen years retired and moved to the Alabama Gulf Coast, and
his new, younger partner tended to rub him the wrong way, to put it