Read Blood Foam: A Lewis Cole Mystery (Lewis Cole series) for Free Online Page B

direction of my house. It must have been loud for me to hear it. I rolled out of my sleeping bag, reached for my headlamp, and then thought better of that. Even with the newspapers covering the rear windows, lighting up the interior would just show anybody out there that I was up and about.
    Instead, I rummaged around and found my 9mm Beretta and a flashlight and, after some struggling, managed to slip on a pair of boots. I reached up, disabled the rear interior lights, and opened up the rear passenger door, the one farther away from my home. I stepped outside. The stars were so hard and bright, on any other night I would have paused and admired the view.
    Not tonight.
    Another thump.
    I skirted around the rear of my rental, ducked down so I wasn’t backlit by any lights from the parking lot, and made my way down the rutted path of my driveway. With the starlight and ambient light from the hotel across the street, I had a pretty good view of the situation as I descended to where I once had lived. The wind shifted and I caught again that nasty smell of wet and burnt wood.
    When I got fairly close to my house, I had my Beretta in my right hand and my flashlight in my left. Unlike what you see in the movies ortelevision—with cops or robbers who approach the darkness bracing their wrists against each other, weapon and flashlight side-by-side up to their chests—Diane Woods had taught me a different approach. I held out my left hand high up and switched on the light. “That way,” Diane had explained, “if somebody sees the light and takes a shot at it, chances are it’ll miss you.”
    The light flared out and everything snapped into view. My rocky front yard, my crumpled home, the destroyed outbuilding, and the flapping blue tarpaulin nailed to what was left of the roof and walls.
    But nobody seemed to be there.
    I took my time walking around the house, flashing the light here and there, catching only rocks and the waves coming into my private little cove. I flashed the light at the door and the windows, didn’t see anything ajar or burst open.
    I looked up at the blue tarpaulin again.
    The wind caught a side and made it flap, and the nails held fast.
    Was
that
what I had heard? After the events of the past few weeks, had paranoia taken permanent residence in my mind?
    “Back to bed,” I said aloud, and went back up to the parking lot.
    Inside the Pilot, I didn’t feel like reading and lighting up the interior, so I fumbled around and finally found my shortwave radio, stuck in a little storage compartment on the left. I settled into my clammy sleeping bag, put in a set of earphones, and started crawling through the radio ether, finding WBZ-AM, the powerful radio station out of Boston. I listened to a late-night talk-show host and then the news at the top of the hour, and it took me a long, long while to fall asleep, because of two reasons.
    The first being that the tropical depression off the eastern coast of Florida had become Tropical Storm Toni.
    And the second being that I was positive that I had earlier placed my radio in a storage compartment on the right.
    Not the left.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    A fter a lousy night of sleeping, I got up the next morning and drove into Tyler proper and splurged for breakfast at a small brick building called the Common Grill & Grill, set near the town common where the
Tyler Chronicle
was located. Many years ago it used to be called the Common Bar & Grill, until the owner lost his liquor license, and the new owner decided to drop the “Bar” and replace it with a spare “Grill.” I had a satisfying and fortifying breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, and coffee, and then strolled across the street to a stretch of white clapboard office buildings that held a jewelry store, a card shop, a hardware store, and the law offices of Adams & Lessard.
    Said offices were located up on the second floor, and there was a small but pleasant waiting area with three chairs and a young male sitting