If Looks Could Kill by Eileen Dreyer Read Free Book Online

stop him.
    How had Chris Jackson known? How could somebody who lived in a converted hundred-year-old mercantile that smelled like potpourri and had porcelain teapots cluttering old sales cases and bears ringing the balcony, possibly know what it was like to be that desperate?
    It was one of the things that intrigued Mac so much. He'd been hearing about Chris Jackson all night long. A sweet person, an unassuming folk hero who joined in all the town's activities. A shy celebrity who, for all that fame, was just as normal as your neighbor—well, with just a few eccentricities, but heck, she had a right to be just a little different, didn't she? In fact, the town would have been just a little disappointed if she hadn't. But, for all that, bright and open and funny. A nice, talented person with a vivid imagination.
    Except that Mac didn't believe it. There was something more there, something the good people of Pyrite weren't seeing, something dark.
    She'd faced it. Somewhere in the vague recesses of her past before she'd shown up on Pyrite's figurative doorstep, Chris Jackson, a.k.a. C. J. Turner, had really waded through some shit.
    Mac knew the look. He had it. The people he respected back home had it, the ones who'd earned their street degrees. The shadows left behind from all the violence they'd taken part in, the sum of the misery they'd seen. You wade through enough sewers, you're going to smell like them.
    A couple of times, Mac had been forced to baby-sit a writer or an actor researching a role. They'd asked to sit in with him, to dig into his methods and memories, to cull whatever it was they'd need to give back a realistic portrayal of a cop on the mean streets. And each time Mac had looked into their eyes, he'd known they didn't have a hope in hell of getting it right. Cushioned by their safe, comfortable lives, they'd thought they could step into reality for a few days and just absorb it. Get a little dirt on their hands and show the world how well they knew the real streets. But it was bullshit. The look of their eyes had been too shallow going in, and too shallow when they'd left again. They might have picked up the language and the gestures and the lingo. They would never have the ghosts that came with the job. They would never have to wake up in the morning knowing that it really wasn't going to get any better out there. The thousand-yard stare was earned, and they'd never do it.
    Chris Jackson liked to laugh. She was smart and funny and bright, just like her neighbors said. Mac would even give her points for eccentricity—even in a town with a resident ventriloquist. But what they didn't seem to see was that behind all that deliberate normality was the darkness. It was as if she'd done it backwards, stepping into their world to see if she could get that right after surviving the sewers.
    She might come close, too. Close enough to fool people who didn't know better. Al MacNamara knew better. He had a feeling she wrote nights because she couldn't sleep either.
    When the phone rang, he was still sitting at the table. Going on five, the world was just beginning to lighten up outside. Birds chattered out in the big oaks that ringed his porch, and down the street somebody was pulling out of his driveway to go in to work. Mac was in his kitchen, dressed in running shorts and keeping company with Miller and Camel.
    "Chief?"
    He didn't realize he was rubbing at his head again. "Yeah."
    "This is Crystal... you know, the night dispatcher?"
    Nineteen, bleached blonde and six pounds of eyeliner, hot to have a cop in her shorts. Mac knew all about Crystal. "Yeah, Crystal."
    "Well, Curtis is down at the junction of Highway W with a multi-vehicle accident with fatalities."
    "Can't he handle it?"
    "Well, I think he's part of the accident."
    Mac's head hurt worse. His first goddamn day. He'd had no sleep, ached in more than one place from the wrestling match down at the Tip a Few, and was numb in a few others from about half a