Parallel Lies by Ridley Pearson Read Free Book Online Page B

interest—he appreciated her nerve and resolve, though he didn’t like being on the receiving end.
    One eye still on the door, he said to Shast, “I need those locations. You’re not going to make me beg her, are you?” Shast hesitated. Tyler raised his voice. “Are you?”
    Shast also glanced toward the door.
    As a cop, Tyler knew when to play his trumps. And, as a fed, those cards were larger, more powerful. “Do you want to face obstruction charges?” He didn’t win Shast’s full attention. “The worst
she
can do to you is make a phone call, get your hand slapped. Weigh your options carefully, Mr. Shast.”
    Shast nervously directed Tyler to a wall map. “There are three spots we tell all the drivers to watch. Right past the yard, as the trains are still gaining speed, and then,” he said, standing and pointing to a location on the map well outside the city, “here, where the grade slows down the longer rigs, and again here, about twenty miles on up the line before she crests and gains steam heading for St. Lou. Both those two areas have camps. Homeless camps. Transients. Riders. State cops move ‘em out every now and then—you should check with the staties—but those boys move right back in.”
    “Hobo camps.”
    “Riders,” he corrected. “Listen, you’re new to this. By the sound of it, and the
look of her,
she is, too. So, a heads up: Half those boys are crazy, and I mean clean out of their gourds. A fair percentage are on the run from people like you. They can get downright nasty. Knives mostly, but to a man, they’re good with their fists. They’re boozers and addicts. Losers. It’s not a happy place, one of them camps. I’dgo in careful, and I’d go in armed. I’d shoot first and ask questions later.”
    Tyler thanked the man, asking him to draw him a map with mileage. “How much of what you just gave me—the warning—did you give her?” he asked.
    Shast shook his head. “She’s a talker, not a listener. She wants it her way. You know the type.”
    Tyler left at a run, trying to stop her, to warn her.
    He saw Nell Priest’s taillights receding into the dark and a white plume of exhaust mixing with the cold night air. She was hoping to beat him to a suspect or a witness. He had a feeling she was going to get more than she bargained for. Considering how pretty she was, things might well get ugly.

CHAPTER 6
    Tyler’s Ford caught up with Priest’s Suburban six miles west on a state “highway,” a two-lane road that had a three-digit number for a name: 376. The moonlit countryside was cut into geometric blocks—snow-covered fields that in the growing season were devoted to feed corn. The dead stalks stuck out of the snow in regimented rows, like beard stubble.
    Tyler switched on the car’s interior light, so he could be seen, and pulled out into the empty oncoming lane as if passing. He drew alongside Nell Priest’s huge Suburban, signaling her to pull over. She finally obliged.
    Tyler climbed out and came up to her window, his breath white fog, his temper hot. “What the hell are you doing?” he blurted out, releasing some of the anxiety he’d felt in trying to catch up to her.
    “Pursuing leads, same as you,” she said a little too casually.
    “You’re going to drive into these homeless camps and just say hello, are you?” He shook his head, frustrated. “Do you think
anyone
will stick around if they see a pair of headlights approaching?” He met eyes with her. Hers were luminous. “And if you go sneaking in there, a woman, alone …this time of night—”
    “Oh, please! Don’t give me that crap!”
    “—the keys to a thirty-thousand-dollar car in your purse.” That seemed to register. “What the hell are you thinking?”
    “I need you, do I?”
    “You need backup, yes. You need a plan, certainly.”
    “And you think I don’t have one?”
    The temperature was somewhere in the thirties, but it felt below zero to Tyler. He shoved his hands deep into his