Read Key West for Free Online Page A

case?”
    “Sit down.”
    “I don’t—”
    “Sit down. You’re about to collapse, and I don’t feel like picking you up.”
    He led her to a sagging chair draped with a brown-and-orange afghan, and plunked her on the seat.
    “I’m sorry.” She had no right to come here like this. But she would do what she had to do. “I’ve probably shocked you, turning up like this.”
    “lt takes a lot to shock me. This isn’t the way you are, is it? Not really.”
    She coughed into a fist. “Annoying, you mean? It doesn’t matter how I really am. I have to find some things out. I came back to Key West thinking...I probably wasn’t thinking. That’s the trouble now: I didn’t think anything through. Because I suddenly knew what Ι wanted to find out. I just came without figuring out how I’d do that.”
    “So you told Roy all about yourself and he elected me your right-hand man.”
    “No.”
    “No?” He retrieved a denim shirt from a hook on the wall and pulled it on, but not before Sonnie caught a glimpse of a tattoo on one shoulder. “No, you didn’t tell Roy, or no, he didn’t elect me?”
    “Either. Neither. I mean I didn’t tell Roy much except that I’m in trouble. Maybe in danger. I could be. I don’t know.”
    He stopped in the act of buttoning the shirt and let it hang. He approached until he stood at a bottom corner of the bed. So large a man who could move so silently disconcerted Sonnie. He sat down and leaned toward her. Their knees almost touched.
    “What kind of danger?”
    She jumped, then laughed, felt foolish.
    “I’m not for hire. Let’s be straight about that. But I am interested in what makes a woman like you act out of character. You’re scared out of your wits.”
    Sonnie shook her head, spraying drops of water from her hair. “I’m not the kind who gets scared.”
    Talon rested his hands on his knees. Spots of moisture had hit his shirt and begun to spread. “So you often change your mind about going home. You bang on strangers’ doors instead—in the early hours of the morning?”
    “Of course I don’t.”
    “Okay.” He drummed his fingers. His hands were huge. Not meaty. Lean, but with wide palms and long fingers—and prominent tendons extending to powerful forearms. Strong hands. Α strong, strange man who kept a Harley-Davidson in the middle of his living room and played eerie violin music.
    “If you aren’t afraid of something, and you’re here by mistake, we don’t have anything else to talk about, Sonnie.”
    She didn’t have a right to be here. He owed her nothing. If he wasn’t interested, he wasn’t interested.
    “Hmm?” He leaned closer. “Do we?”
    “I have a house here on Key West,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “That’s where I’m living.”
    He crossed his arms.
    “After we spoke this evening, I went back there. I went inside and felt as if there was someone there.” Sonnie did look at his face then.
    The expression in his eyes changed subtly. “Felt?”
    “How do people ever explain these things without feeling foolish?”
    “If they do, I’m less likely to take them seriously.”
     “So you do take me seriously?”
    “I didn’t say that. It was just a feeling?”
    He would never give her the smallest break. “Α door slammed upstairs.”
    “Υοu’re living there alone?”
    “Yes.”
    “Probably a draft.” His stillness didn’t help her discomfort. “Either from an open window or when you opened the front door.”
    Mentioning a light she might or might not have seen was out of the question. “Probably.”
    “But because of other things you know, you’re afraid it might not have been.”
    The beating of her heart pounded at her eardrums. “I’m just going to tell you what I need to find out. Okay?”
    He bent a very long leg and rested a bare ankle on the opposite knee. He did not encourage her to continue.
    “I want to knοw if I’m a wife or a widow.”
    “If the people who abducted your husband don’t make