Out of Circulation (Hemlock Creek Suspense Book 1) by Heather Day Gilbert Read Free Book Online Page B

reassuring voice nearly unleashed her brimming tears.
    "I'm not going to leave you alone, Katie." His rough fingers lightly grazed her neck as he shifted her hair back over her shoulders. "I promise."
    She settled against the wall, determined to be strong. Some kind of FBI agent she would have made, nearly crumpling into tears in the face of a loud blast.
    As Ace went to check things out, she began to pray there would be no more explosions.
    For the first time, she allowed herself to entertain the possibility that the bank heist money could have fallen into Dad's possession. If it had, didn't she have a responsibility to find it and stop this madness?
    Maybe it wasn't even Dad's doing. What if his partner, Jim Chrisman, had been dirty? He could have hidden the money somewhere. Strangely enough, Jim's life had also been cut short, undetected late-stage cancer taking him a year before Dad. She remembered Jim's jokes about her red hair every time he came to go fishing on Dad's boat.
    There was an idea: they could search the boat. She hadn't been to the marina in years, but Mom maintained the membership for Brandon, since Dad had left his boat to him.
    She was tired of being a target. It was time to go proactive, like Ace had said.
     
    ****
     
    Staring at the smoldering, twisted remains of Katie's car, Ace wished he could beat himself up.
    Bomb-sniffing dogs had swept the parking lot and the library and it became apparent that only one charge had been set—directly under Katie's car.
    He now realized it was no accident that all the parking spots had been taken this morning. He cringed, imagining Anatoly's men as they hunched in multiple cars, observing Katie and him. After he'd obliviously walked her into the library, those punks had probably planted that C4 charge and later remote-detonated it.
    At least they had blown the heap after the kids left the library, and before they had walked to the car at closing time. That told Ace they weren't ready to kill Katie yet. They still believed she would find the money.
    After sharing his suspicions with the police sergeant, he walked toward the library, but the sergeant motioned him up the hill. "They've been evacuated. That way."
    Ace followed the man's pointing finger up the incline the building was situated on. On Main Street, a cluster of library evacuees huddled in front of the bank. He easily spotted Katie's towering red head and rushed to her side.
    "What happened, Ace? Before they moved us over here I looked out the window—where's my car?"
    There was no way to soften the truth. As he explained that her car had been the target of an explosive charge, she began to shake violently.
    Instinctively, he pulled her close and smoothed her forehead as he would a feverish child. "Shh. It's okay. It's going to be okay." He tried to ignore how perfectly her body snuggled into his side. She was tall, but the right kind of tall.
    A coconut scent wafted from her hair and he tried to focus. "I'll get you home, don't worry."
    She pulled back, resting her still-shaking hands on his chest. But determination filled the steady gaze she leveled on him. "No. We're not going to go slinking home. I'll phone Mom and see if someone can pick us up, but we're going to get your rental car and take a little trip to our storage unit and some other places. It's high time we started hunting for that money so I can protect my family."
     
    ****

6
     
    Mom picked them up in her small Toyota, wiping at her eyes the entire trip home.
    "It's okay. I'm okay." Katie kept up a stream of reassurances, but Mom's uncharacteristic silence hung like a weight in the car. When Esther Sue McClure's bubble of cheer was popped, the only way she could deal with it was to retreat into herself. It had happened only once before that Katie remembered, for the entire year following Dad's death. She had prayed Mom would never have to go through such grief again.
    But then again, maybe Dad's decisions had brought these mobsters to