The Best Victim (Kindle Serial) by Colleen Thompson Read Free Book Online

straight.”
    From behind the seat, the fat dog scratched the floor mat and groaned, resettling her old bones.
    “Sounds like our passenger could use a break, too,” Brent told Lauren. “Don’t want her springing a leak on my upholstery.”
    “Dumpling’s perfectly housebroken,” she said before qualifying, “unless she gets upset.”
    “Do long car rides generally upset her? We’ve been on the road more than three hours already.
    After a measured silence, Lauren said, “Maybe we should stop, then.”
    With little to choose from this far out of town, he pulled into the lot of a restaurant called Burger Palace, which boasted a grassy margin that looked decently dog friendly. Still, he would need to leave her to go inside for a few minutes. The question was, could he trust her to still be here when he returned?
    “The way I see it,” he told her, “I’ve got a couple choices here. I could cuff you to the steering wheel and leave you ’til I get back. But I figure that would make Detective Jimenez in Austin right about me, and I don’t want him to be right, don’t want to be the kind of man who’d—”
    “Go to prison for decades, maybe, on a charge of armed abduction?” One corner of her mouth rose slightly.
    He nodded. “There is that. And if I end up rotting in a cell, that’d leave the Troll King free to go after other women, to destroy their lives and the lives of their families.”
    She looked at him for a moment, a frown tugging at one corner of her mouth. “Where would I go, even if I did run? One way or another, I have to get to Austin to fix this, and you’re my fastest way there.”
    The words told him she was still bouncing between shock and denial, still hoping she could bargain her way out of Rachel being dead. Grief would do that to a person. He’d gone through it himself with Carrie. Was still going through it on an unconscious level, waking up with a sense of crushing loss after dreams of finding her, alive and well—really well and not the shattered shell she’d become throughout the last months of their marriage, nor the obsessed and anxious woman she’d been before Adam.
    “Just hurry up and go inside already,” she said. “I’ll need you to hold Dumpling’s leash so I can visit the facilities, too.”
    He did as she asked and was relieved to see that she was still there, walking the dog among the frost-crisped weeds when he came out of the restroom. Watching her through the glass, he took a chance and ordered a couple of burger baskets and drinks for the road, which he paid for and told the clerk his friend would pick up in a few minutes.
    As he came out, he said, “You mind grabbing our order on your way out if it’s ready?”
    “Our order?” She waved off the idea. “I told you, I don’t want anything.”
    “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to eat, but we still have a long drive. You might change your mind.”
    She shrugged in answer and returned about five minutes later, just as he was wondering if she’d slipped out the employee exit or talked the manager into calling 9-1-1.
    He unwrapped his burger, and they were underway again. Maybe it was the smell of the food, or maybe she’d paid attention to what he’d said before, but about twenty minutes later, she picked at the fries and nibbled one end of her sandwich. Every so often, she leaned back and shared a bite of grilled beef with the dachshund, who was making obnoxious little grunts, snuffles, and whimpers as she begged from the backseat.
    He increased their speed as they rolled beyond the edge of town, the road slicing an arrow-straight swath across more empty land. Or nearly empty, save for a single dun-colored horse that jerked its head from grazing to watch them pass.
    It should have a pasture mate, he thought, remembering the horses he’d grown up with on his grandparents’ ranch in far West Texas. Like cattle, equines were herd animals, always jittery and uncomfortable, sometimes flat-out