Open Season by Linda Howard Read Free Book Online

cost was justified.
    City hall, a two-story yellow brick building, sat on one side of the square, flanked by the police department and the white-columned city library—the first ruled by Chief Jack Russo, a brusque, hard-nosed Yankee who kept the mayor’s town squeaky clean, and the latter by Miss Daisy Minor, as starchy an old maid as ever lived. Not that she was all that old, but she was definitely starchy. She was one of the mayor’s favorite characters in a small town filled with characters, because she was so very stereotypical.
    Various stores faced on the rest of the square, like the dry cleaners, the hardware store, a clothing store, several antique shops, the feed store, the dime store, a hobby shop. Hillsboro didn’t have fancy shopping, but the citizens could get everything they needed to survive and enjoy life right here. There were the usual assortment of fast food places in town, but none of them were on the square; they were all down the road toward Fort Payne. The only restaurant on the square was the Coffee Cup, which did a booming business for breakfast and lunch, but closed at six because the dinner business wasn’t that great.
    It was a peaceful town, as much as any gathering of more than nine thousand people could be peaceful. There weren’t any bars or nightclubs in Hillsboro; the county was dry. If you wanted something alcoholic to drink—legally—then you had to go to either Scottsboro, which had separated itself from the rest of the countyand voted wet, or over into Madison County. Oh, people were always trying to bring booze back home, and the police department tended to look the other way as long as they did indeed go home, but the department cracked down on people who wanted to do their drinking and driving at the same time, as well as kept a sharp eye out for teenagers who were trying to sneak cases of beer back for parties. And there were always people who wanted to smoke marijuana or pop some pills, but Temple Nolan worked hard to keep drugs out of Hillsboro.
    That was one of the reasons he’d tapped Jack Russo as chief of police. Russo had worked in both Chicago and New York City; he had a lot of experience in the streets and alleys, and knew what to look for when it came to drug infestation. If his methods were sometimes a little rough for this part of the country . . . well, you had to take the bad with the good. The best thing about Russo was that he was an outsider. He could get the job done, but he wasn’t hooked into the old-boy network by which an astonishing amount of information and favors were passed around. A favor received was a favor owed, and before you knew it, things were being done that shouldn’t be done, information passed that should be kept quiet. By hiring an outsider, Temple had nipped that in the bud. Hillsboro was to stay peaceful and clean, the way he loved it, and the chief was too isolated to pick up on things he didn’t need to know. So far, that had worked out well.
    Temple had been mayor for nine years, having just won his third term of office the year before. He was only forty-five, a trim, good-looking man with blue eyes and neat dark hair. He’d grown up in Hillsboro, a popular boy who played all the sports—football, basketball, baseball—butnever been the star of any of them. That hadn’t affected his popularity, or his plans. He’d never dreamed of making it big in the major league of any sport. And the star quarterback hadn’t been the one who married the head cheerleader; Temple had that honor. Jennifer Whitehead, lithe and blond, had become Mrs. Temple Nolan, in June, after he received his college degree in business administration. The next year had seen the arrival of Jason, and three years after that blond little Paige had been born. Their family portraits looked idealized, like a brochure for family planning.
    His kids had kept their noses clean, too; Jason had turned out to have a decent throwing arm, and attended college on the