The Samaritan by Mason Cross Read Free Book Online

outset. Almost too straightforward for me to take an interest, in fact. The problems of rich guys and their spoiled, wayward rich kids aren’t usually my area of expertise. I’m at my best when I’m playing for higher stakes than that.
    However, not having anything else going on, I agreed to take the job when it was offered to me. As happens from time to time, a straightforward assignment had turned complicated. Church had been looking for a professional to find his daughter. Caroline was the wayward type but had never disappeared as effectively or for as long as she had this time, and he was starting to worry that something had happened to her. I met with Church and decided that he was on the level: he just wanted to make sure his kid was alive and safe. I gave him the usual terms: no interference, no questions, half up front, half on completion. He’d agreed readily and I’d gotten to work, appreciating the novelty of looking for someone who wasn’t likely to be armed and dangerous.
    It was early spring and still cold in Massachusetts, which to my instincts made it more than likely she’d gone south. It hadn’t taken me long to identify a trail that confirmed that direction of travel, and as it turned out, she’d gone all the way south, to Florida. Church wanted to travel down with me. I reminded him of my terms but told him he was free to make his own arrangements, which he did.
    I narrowed the location to Lauderdale and within twenty-four hours, I’d tracked her as far as the hotel and the guy who’d sold her the used Audi for two grand cash. Then it was a simple matter of cutting down the possibilities. It was a Saturday night, and there were only so many dive bars and only one of them had a red Audi parked nearby. Everything had gone smoothly, right up until the bar and the complication of Caroline’s erstwhile boyfriend.
    After reuniting her with her father, I had taken a walk down to a quiet section of the beach. There I’d wiped the two HK45s down and thrown them as far as I could out into the ocean, one after the other. I didn’t worry too much about them washing up on the beach; they weren’t mine, after all. Then I drove the Audi to a long-term parking lot serving the airport and parked as deep into the compound as I could get. I wiped down all the surfaces in the car and the touch surfaces on the exterior too, not forgetting the spot where Zoran’s man had slapped the roof. I checked the trunk, the glove box, and beneath the seats, finding only a used lip gloss stick. Plus fifteen thousand dollars that I’d managed to forget all about. I removed both and locked the car, dropping the keys and the lip gloss in a trash can on my way out of the lot.
    A shuttle bus took me back into town, and I got off a couple of blocks from my hotel. There were three charity thrift stores right by the bus stop. I split the cash into four wads by feel: three bundles of roughly four grand each, and a slightly smaller bundle making up the difference. I slipped a bundle of each through each store’s mail slot and deposited the last one in the saxophone case of a late-night street musician. He didn’t notice, or if he did, it didn’t interrupt his interpretation of “Rhapsody in Blue.”
    Ten hours and a restless night later, I was walking into a nondescript diner on the opposite side of South Atlantic Boulevard from the beach. Most of the customers seemed to be sitting outside at tables beneath red and blue parasols. I passed them by and took a seat inside next to one of the picture windows. I ordered a cup of coffee and drank it as I stared out at the ocean. An Otis Redding song played through the diner’s sound system. Not “Dock of the Bay,” which would have been appropriate, but one of the lesser-known ones.
    I’d received a text from Church to let me know that he and Caroline were safely aboard the eight-a.m. flight to Logan. As long as she dyed her hair back to brunette and didn’t broadcast the details