Spectre Black by J. Carson Black Read Free Book Online

they could not revive her.
    If Jolie was out in this desert, she had been here for at least sixty hours. Some of that was night, but a lot of it was day.
    He scanned his surroundings. The land was mostly beige in color, depending on the time of day. There was a striation of pale green where mesquite trees followed the trickle of white sand that called itself a watercourse. All of them dry at this time of year. Dips and washes and small promontories of rock, primarily igneous and metamorphic. But to the naked eye it was a uniform tan, all the way to the washed-out blue mountains.
    The sound of a ringing phone would go a long way out here. But it had not drawn her in.
    Jolie Burke was gone. His guess? Someone had her, and was preventing her from leaving. He’d heard the desperation in her voice, the edge of fear. Jolie Burke was good at masking her emotions. She was good at keeping her own counsel. And yet he remembered hearing it in her voice. As if she were hanging by one fingertip on a high-tension wire.
    She might have escaped whoever it was who had been holding her, but maybe they had found her. She could be anywhere by now. She could be in Branch, or she could have been taken out of state. Or—he glanced in the direction of Mexico—out of the country.
    Or she could be dead.
    It turned on a dime: just like that. One minute he was waiting. Scanning the horizon, hoping for her to come. And the next he knew she was never coming.
    It was time for Plan B.
    Whatever Plan B was.

Chapter 6
    Jolie Burke lived in a rented house on Turner Avenue, an old part of town. Turner Avenue was a generic name for a street where the houses were jostled together cheek by jowl, many of them with small but cluttered yards. Toys, old cars on blocks, dogs of unusual ancestry, and old walnut trees pushing up the sidewalk. Most of the houses were plain-wrap Victorian, which meant they had wood siding and porches with spindly posts. The spindly posts outside Jolie’s place were painted dark green. Landry noted the home protection sign planted in the grass. He also noticed that her yard was neat and the plants and tree were healthy.
    There was an empty lot on one corner and a convenience store on the other.
    Landry made one pass by. Hardly anyone was out on the street. None of the dogs were barkers. They either sat morosely in the shade or trotted up to the fence to get a look at the man driving by. It was a weekday and many of the driveways were empty—people at work. Only one middle-aged woman, dressed like a hippie from the sixties, black hair down to her waist, was spraying her flowerbed with water. She was careful not to look in his direction as he drove past in his Diaz Landscaping Service van. He could have been on the moon for all she cared.
    There was an alley behind the row of houses, choked with weeds, smelling of garbage and the sharp, medicinal stench of alcohol. Landry had counted the houses—Jolie lived four down from this end of the street. He cruised through the alley between the two rows of backyards facing the alley, parking as close to the back wall of Jolie’s yard as he could get.
    Nothing going on in the hot sunlight. Everyone either at work, or at school, or indoors under the air conditioners. Landry noted several swampbox coolers, could hear them rattling on the roofs.
    You could have staged a theater production here, and no one would notice.
    Landry parked up close to the wall behind Jolie’s place. In his blue work shirt, jeans, work boots and cap, he looked like a guy sent to clean up the backyard. He even had a rake and a plastic garbage can.
    This wall had been added to—it was much higher than the other walls on the alley. He tried the gate but it was locked.
    As he approached, he heard a bark. A suspicious sound, low and guttural.
    Of course she had a dog. She was a cop. Cops by nature were paranoid. Cops by nature were all about mitigation. Mitigation and control. Control your immediate space, keep things from