Read Lou Mason Mystery - 01 - Motion to Kill for Free Online Page B

to get out of the way. Mason screamed back, unable to hear his own voice over the wind, the road, and their dueling horns. He felt as if he were flying and knew he would be when the truck hit him.
    A thin strip of gravel separated the paved road from the tall grass alongside it. Barbed wire strung between steel fence posts marked the outer boundary of a farm. Cows on the captive side of the fence looked up as if they sensed that something was about to happen that even they couldn’t ignore.
    Mason pounded on his horn, screamed again at the driver of the truck and the driver of the Escalade. His hands slid around the wheel, greased by the sweat pouring off of him faster than the wind could dry it.
    The Escalade cut off any retreat. The truck slowed, causing the trailer to shimmy and its load to rock sideways. But Mason knew the driver couldn’t slow quickly enough, the certainty of the impending crash clear in the driver’s stricken eyes.
    Out of options, Mason spun the steering wheel hard to his left and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The Acura bolted off the road and shuddered in the wake left by the truck as it blew past, their front bumpers exchanging air kisses.
    The ground dropped off from the road, and in the next instant, Mason flew toward the cows like an unguided missile. The Acura landed hard and fishtailed clockwise. Mason fought the wheel, found the brakes, and rode out the spin until the car bounced to a stop against the barbed wire.
    His airbag exploded, burying him in a fierce embrace. The jolt was no worse than the countless hits he’d absorbed playing rugby, though those blows were thrown in sport. This was a cold, calculated attempt to put him on the shelf—permanently.
    Mason climbed out of the Acura and scanned the road. The Escalade had disappeared. He walked around the car, checking for damage. The barbed wire had etched an abstract pattern in the paint on the passenger side, but it was otherwise unscathed.
    He leaned against the hood, waited for his heart rate to slow to suborbital speed, and tried to put the day’s events into perspective. Richard Sullivan was dead, probably murdered and last seen with an attractive blonde, not his wife, at a condo he owned with Victor O’Malley.
    Mason was defending O’Malley against criminal charges the feds were about to file. Sullivan had set up Mason as the fall guy in a scheme to get rid of evidence that had to incriminate both Sullivan and O’Malley. And someone had just tried to kill him and make his death look like the result of his own reckless driving.
    It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The picture just didn’t make any sense. He realized that he’d have to take a closer look at the O’Malley files in the morning. If he lived that long.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    Mason lived in a neighborhood thick with large houses built during and just after World War II. The area was a magnet that held on to older people with old money and attracted boomers with new money. A fixer-upper easily ran half a million even after the recession knocked property values into the basement. The house belonged to Claire until she gave it to him when he graduated from law school.
    “I lived in this house for twenty-six years before you came along, and now I’m fifty-five,” she told him. “That’s too long in one place for anybody. I need a fresh start. I bought a loft in a rehabbed warehouse in the Crossroads District. There’s an artist on the first floor that uses his kitchen as his gallery. A couple of tech geeks took the second floor for their start-up something or other, and I’ve got the third floor.”
    Kate winced at the condition of the interior when she moved in.
    “You’ve got Ethan Allen, futons, chrome and glass Scandinavian, oriental rugs so threadbare a moth wouldn’t use them for a snack, Grateful Dead posters, and pictures of dead immigrants.”
    “Think of it as multigeneration chic,” Mason said. “And the dead immigrants are my