Read Kaleidoscope for Free Online Page A

completed, Sally could for the first time in eighteen months simply relax.
    No walls. No guards. So quiet. So still.
    She closed her eyes and breathed. The air was clear, swept of haze or smoke by a mild breeze just hinting of autumn.
    She must have fallen asleep because when next she opened her eyes there was a tall blond man standing near. Some swell in spats. Fiddling with a carnation.
    “Gorgeous, isn’t it?”
    She jumped as if hit with a cattle prod.
    “Didn’t mean to startle,” Arno Becker removed his derby.
    “I didn’t hear ya.”
    “I imagine not. I apologize.”
    Sally reached blindly for her letter, wadding it inside the butcher paper that wrapped her sausage.
    “Not leaving on my account, I hope?” Arno remained amiable.
    Sally dropped the letter and wrapper into the trash.
    “Look, I ain’t no whoor.”
    “Never imagined you were,” he replied.
    “We got no business,” she gathered her soda bottle into her fist.
    “Oh, but we do, Sally.”
    She froze at the unexpected familiarity. “…I gotta go.”
    Arno reached out almost lazily to jerk the bottle from her hand.
    She cried out sharply.
    “Ever hear a panther, Sally? A panther in the wild screams exactly like a woman in agony. Monkeys, too. Monkeys can scream bloody murder. Not that anyone would hear a primate or a panther out here. We are so out of the way, aren’t we? So…isolated.”
    “Whadda you want?” her pale face was grey.
    “Why, the loot, Sal. The moolah. Your boyfriend’s pickings, and don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
    “But I—AHH!”
    She gasped, her wrist jacked up now between her shoulder blades.
    “Fifty thousand dollars twists a lot of arms, Sally girl. Not to mention a quarter million in railroad stocks. So let’s just forget the ifs, ands and buts, shall we? Now, where did Jerry Driggers hide the stash?”
    “Makes you think he’d tell me?”
    “Oh, you know something. Or maybe somebody,” Arno found the knife inside his corded twill trousers. “I don’t presume to know the details, but Jerry surely did and you were Jerry’s gal, weren’t you, Sally?”
    “Jerry was just the driver; he wasn’t the brains! He wasn’t!”
    “Who was, then?”
    “Oh, God!”
    “Come on.”
    “I can’t!”
    “They say you keep it shut pretty good, honey. Well. We’ll see.”
     
     
    Jack Romaine scoured the zoo’s grounds at a limping dogtrot, his tie pulled loose from a shirt soaked wet with sweat, his jacket slung over an arm.
    Sally was here, somewhere, she had to be!
    A trumpet blared to split his skull.
    Well, she wasn’t at the elephants’ cage. Wasn’t around the monkeys, either. Or at the arboretum—he’d checked all those exhibits. In fact, he’d checked everyplace. Unless she had doubled back—?
    A fresh panic. Who was he kidding? She could have come and gone and he’d never know! What the hell were the odds, anyway, of finding anybody at a goddamned zoo?
    What if he couldn’t find her?
    What would Bladehorn do?
    Jack had a fleeting impulse to bolt. Five hundred bucks gave a man a good head start. He could take his son and mother in law, catch a train—To where?
    You couldn’t outrun bastards like Bladehorn. Jack had scrammed his ass out of Chicago and what had it gotten him?
    Jack skidded to a halt and the thought occurred. More like a hope—
    Maybe Sally wasn’t here for the exhibits at all. Maybe she was just trying to lie low.
    Jack wiped his forehead. Even assuming she was still on the grounds, how would he go about a search? There was a hell of lot of territory to cover. Acres!
    Start with the lake, he decided. There was nobody on the water, yet. But the shoreline? Sure! A perfect place for somebody looking to stay out of the sun. Or out of sight. Out of the way.
    So how many places could you find along the shore of Swan Lake? How long would it take to go all the way around?
    Jack set off at a lope.
     
     
    It was a half hour later and he almost missed