Read Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) for Free Online Page B

to see Issy looking up at him.
    “What?” he said.
    The cat just stared at him.
    “Yes, I know,” he said. “I’m a fuck-up. I’m a fuck-up who can’t be bothered to pay attention to a cat let alone a kid.”
    Issy jumped off the lounge and went into the cottage. With sigh, Louis looked at the postcard again.
    Until just a few months ago, he hadn’t even known he had a daughter. Lily’s mother Kyla had been an on-and-off girlfriend during his senior year at University of Michigan. The night she came to his dorm to tell him she was pregnant was etched in his memory like a bad dream.
    Rain pounding on the window. Kyla standing at the door of his dorm room, so soaked from the rain he didn’t even notice the tears running down her face.
    I’m pregnant, Louis.
    What do you want from me, Kyla?
    I want to know you love me. I want to know you’ll be there for me.
    He didn’t tell her what he was thinking. That he was twenty years old and he didn’t want his life to be over. He just wanted -- after too many foster homes, too many years bouncing from one place and face to another –- he just wanted a clear smooth road ahead for a change.
    Kyla’s last words to him that night still stung.
    I’ll get rid of it then.
    And his words stung worse.
    Go ahead.
    Louis stared at Lily’s looped signature. Lily...just Lily. That was always how she signed the cards. What did he expect? Love, Lily ?
    Lily. Just Lily.
    Kyla couldn’t have known of course. Couldn’t have known that the name she had given to their daughter was a hybrid of her own name and that of Louis’s dead mother Lila. Strange that the two females in his life who were like strangers to him had blended into this third little female who was becoming...
    Becoming what?
    His daughter?
    He wasn’t a father. Not yet. He had a long ways to go to earn that title. He had no idea what it was going to take right now but he had the strange feeling it was going to be like running the tactical course, a series of twists and turns where things would come flying out of the blue and you never knew what was going to hit you and lay you low.
    He downed the last of the beer. The low slant of the sun told him it was maybe six-thirty. Still plenty early enough to call Ann Arbor.
    He gathered up the mail and went back inside. Setting the mail by the phone, he dialed Kyla’s number but it went to the answering machine. He had a vague memory of the last time he had phoned and Lily telling him she was going to ballet camp in Interlochen sometime in August.
    Damn.
    Breaking the news to Lily that he wasn’t going to make it for her birthday was not something he could leave in a message so he hung up. He’d try again in a couple days .
    He stared at the steady red light of the answering machine, thinking now of Mel and Ben.
    He thought, too, about the small group of people who circled in his life’s orbit. Dan Wainwright, the first chief he had worked with when he moved to F ort Myers. Dan had retired two years ago and moved to Arizona . And Sam and Margaret Dodie , the older couple who treated him like a son but lately only seemed to call on holidays. And his foster parents Phi l lip and Frances. Even his contact with them had dwindled. Last time he talked to them -– was it a month ago or two? -- they had bought a new Airstream and were planning to wend their way toward Yosemite.
    Everyone was moving on with their lives, moving away from him.
    Even Joe.
    Especially Joe.
    After she left her job at Miami homicide to take the sheriff’s job up in northern Michigan, they hadn’t managed to make good on their promises to visit each other. When he had called her last Christmas, she had said that maybe they should see other people. It wasn’t just the two thousand miles that separated them, he knew. It was the widening hole in his own life. Joe had put words to it.
    I want you to want something for yourself . Louis .
    And her unspoken words -– and until you do I don’t want you.
    He