The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton Read Free Book Online Page A

convenient to us when we needed milk or wanted coffee at an odd hour. We went there often enough that Shiloh had once remarked that it was too bad we hadn’t had a traditional wedding; we could have had the reception catered by Conoco.
    “Maybe,” Shiloh said. He sounded unenthusiastic about the kind of food available in the freezer section of a mini-mart.
    “Or,” I said thoughtfully, “we’ve got those slivered almonds and olives and some rice. If we went out and got some tomatoes and lemon—”
    “And chicken, I know. I see where this is going,” Shiloh interrupted.
    Neither of us would ever put cooking very high on our list of skills, but Shiloh was better than I was. Of the several staple recipes that he made from memory, my favorite was a Basque-style chicken. Shiloh fixed it every second or third week, but he seemed to wait for me to ask him for it. I thought that he liked my prodding, liked it that I enjoyed his cooking so much, and that was why I suspected his current reluctance wasn’t genuine. I wheedled a little more.
    “I know it’s kind of labor-intensive, with the prep work,” I said.
    As I’d thought, Shiloh shook his head negligently. “No, I’ll do it. If you’re willing to drive to the store and pick up what we need.”
    “I don’t mind,” I said, already heading back to the bedroom for my shoes. His words, though, reminded me of something. “Hey, where is your car, anyway?”
    “Oh, yeah,” he said from the kitchen. I could hear him taking a can of Coke from the refrigerator, fixing himself a drink. “I sold it.”
    “Really?” I was startled. “That was kind of sudden,” I said. Despite his threats to get rid of it, Shiloh had seen his car through so many mechanical ailments that the news of its sale took me by surprise. I picked up my running shoes and a pair of socks and walked back to the kitchen doorway, where I sat on the floor to put them on.
    “I didn’t trust it to get me all the way to Virginia,” Shiloh explained. “I’m just going to fly instead. I’ll worry about a new car later, after I’m finished at Quantico.”
    “You’ve got some time left before you leave,” I reminded him, lacing up my shoes. “You could buy a new car in that time.”
    “I’ve got a week,” he said, peeling the papery husk off a clove of garlic. “I could buy a car in that time, but I can also live that long without one.”
    “I’d go nuts,” I said, getting to my feet. “It’s not that I mind walking, but just knowing I didn’t have a car if I needed one, that’d bother me.”
    “I know what you mean,” Shiloh said. “A car is a lot more than transportation. It’s an investment, an office, a locker, a weapon.”
    “A weapon?” I said doubtfully.
    “If people really thought about the physics of driving, the forces they control, some of them would be afraid to leave the driveway. You’ve seen the accident scenes,” he said, rounding up stray pieces of chopped garlic with the flat of the knife.
    “Yeah,” I said. “Too many.” Then another thought hit me. “When you were downtown, were you looking for a ride home?”
    “Yes,” he said. “I had to drive the car out to the guys who bought it, then I went to find you. But Vang said you were in court.”
    “You should have waited,” I said. “That was a long walk.”
    “A couple of miles. Not so long.” Then he said, “Have you heard from Genevieve?”
    The question seemed to come out of nowhere. I picked up his glass of Coke and took refuge in a sip of it before answering. “No,” I said. “She never calls me. And when I call her, she’s nearly monosyllabic. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than how she was before. For a while, all she wanted to do was talk about Royce Stewart.”
    Genevieve lived an hour north of where her daughter’s murderer had gone to ground in his hometown of Blue Earth. But she knew sheriff’s deputies down there, and some of them were apparently willing to give