While You Were Dead by CJ Snyder Read Free Book Online Page A

twenty-seconds. Ninety more passed while the nurse checked.
     
    Lizzie wasn’t with her mother. Anxiety churned in his stomach as he helplessly listened to that voice in his gut get louder. More demanding.
     
    Secure the area.
     
    Max wanted to scream. There was no need to secure the area. Lizzie was just. . .off somewhere. Doing some Lizard thing. Hiding from him. Paying him back for being gone all day.
     
    Secure the area.
     
    Still denying the need, he turned in a slow circle, eyes searching for every possible hiding place. Anywhere she might even now be watching him get angry, laughing at him. . ..
     
    The busgirl timidly touched his arm, then nodded at a Hispanic janitor who stood beside her. “You look for girl? This tall?” The man gestured a height close to Lizzie’s.
     
    “Yes.” The growl was all he could get out of his throat.
     
    “She went out.”
     
    “Out where?” His hands twisted to claws at his side.
     
    “Outside. After you. With,” the janitor held up two fingers. “With two mans.”
     
    Max closed his eyes when a sucker punch of helpless defeat leveled him nearly to his knees. As it was, he had to shuffle back a step until his legs were stiff enough to hold him again. He bit back the roar of denial building in his chest and opened his eyes.
     
    “Nobody leaves this room,” he said, and shoved open the door to a dark corner of his soul. The motion allowed orders, actions and responses to flow automatically from that place inside he’d sworn never to visit again.
     
    Voice calm, he turned to the busgirl. “Get your boss. Here. Now.”
     
    His gaze pierced the janitor as his fingers curled around his cell. “Guard that door. Nobody out. Nobody in.” He stabbed 9-1-1 into the phone and faced the only other exit to the room, backing away from his lunch table as he did. It was now a crime scene.
     

Chapter Four
     
    Kat pasted a smile on her face and sat down in front of her mother. She didn’t get a chance to deliver her rehearsed greeting.
     
    “What the hell happened to you? You look like death. It’s that shark, isn’t it? I told you he was a no-good attorney and now look at you! We should have stuck with Jonesy. I liked Jonesy.”
     
    Her mother had hated Stephen Jones as much as she currently professed to hate Lincoln Goldberg. Kat gave her head a shake, waiting for her mother to take a breath. “It’s not Mr. Goldberg, Mom. Just a bad week. You’re looking well.”
     
    “Don’t know how I could. What’s new? Did that shark make good on his promises? Do you have a new trial scheduled?”
     
    “Mr. Goldberg didn’t promise a new trial, Mom.” There was absolutely no reason for a new trial. Kat revisited the original trial every time her mother got fed up with her attorney and hired a new one. “I haven’t heard anything from him lately, as a matter of fact.”
     
    “Then what are you doing here?” Cold suspicion glittered in Ellen’s green eyes.
     
    Kat released a little sigh. “I’m here to see you. I love you.”
     
    “Hmmph! If you loved me you’d have me outta here by now. Do you know how many years it’s been, Katherine? Do you have any idea what it’s like for me? Day after day, week after week. . .”
     
    “No, Mom.” Kat tuned her out. She tried not to, she really did, but each and every visit boiled down to the same thing and she couldn’t take it, not today. Not when she’d spent the entire plane trip rehashing her ridiculous conversation with Max. What happened to her backbone? She’d discovered she had one–even faced down some of the most vicious defense lawyers in the country and walked away unscathed. But thirty seconds of Max seemed to have destroyed years of meticulously-built self esteem.
     
    “I know, Mom,” she muttered at the right spots, interspersing it with, “of course you don’t, Mom.” So why was she here? Every month, an entire day away from her practice, for what? Her mother’s words suddenly echoed