Read The Last Kiss Goodbye for Free Online

her lips and a quick glare thrown his way. That’s when Charlie realized that she could see him again. Although he was still a little foggy around the edges, she was getting enough detail to know that he was looking at the girl like she guessed he might have looked at a live bomb.
    “We need to get down.” As Charlie gestured at the windows then dropped into a crouch, the girl’s eyes went even bigger than before. “He could shoot through the glass.”
    With one more terrified glance at the windows, the girl followed suit, letting her back slide down the wall, sinking down until she was folded in a soggy huddle with her chin almost touching her knees. A puddle was already forming around her as her eyes locked with Charlie’s. They were glassy with fright.
    “I don’t know, ” she answered the operator. “They just need to get here. Please. ”
    “Look, I …” Charlie began, meaning to conclude with, I’m on your side, only to be interrupted by the sound of the Ewells’ phone being picked up at last.
    “Hello,” Ken’s wife, Debbie, said in her ear.
    “It’s Charlie Stone across the street.” In the spirit of not wanting to further spook the girl, Charlie tried hard not to sound as panicky as she was starting to feel. “I need Ken over here right away. There’s a girl in my kitchen, and she says—” explaining the whole thing was going to be too complicated and time-consuming, and anyway Charlie still had no idea precisely what the whole thing was, so she cut to the chase, “there’s a man with a gun after her. We need Ken now. ”
    “Cops going to get here any faster ’cause you’re hanging out with The Black Dahlia here in the kitchen trying to get yourself killed? Run upstairs and lock yourself in your bedroom and stay put until the po-po show up.” A solid-looking presence now, Michael planted himself between her and the girl. That was deliberate, Charlie knew, as was his aggressive stance. Whatever he was or wasn’t, where she at least was concerned he seemed to have a marked protective streak. Of course, since she was all that was anchoring him to the world of the living that shouldn’t come as a big surprise. “Damn it, Charlie, you’re not doing her one bit of good by sitting here looking into her eyes. You’ve done your Mother Teresa thing: you let her in. Cops are coming. So leave her to it and go. ”
    Shooting him a shut-up-or-die look, Charlie gave a quick, negative shake of her head.
    “How far away are they?” the girl moaned to the dispatcher.
    “He’s in bed asleep,” Debbie objected. Of course, it was nearing midnight. In Big Stone Gap, that was late for decent folks.
    “Can you wake him up ?” Charlie did her best not to yell on that last part, with indifferent success. At the same time she watched Michael disgustedly mime a gunshot to his own head with a thumb and forefinger and frowned direly. The frown was directed at Michael, of course, but the girl, whose eyes she had been holding until she had flicked that sharp stop it look up at Michael, shrank away. “I really, really need him. Like I said, there’s a girl in my kitchen being chased by a man with a gun. ”
    “Well, I guess.” There was a sound that Charlie interpreted as Debbie laying the receiver down. Over the still-open line, she listened to her neighbor calling to her husband. Who as far as she could tell wasn’t answering.
    Damn it.
    “I’m Jenna McDaniels,” the girl said into the phone on a shuddering intake of breath, in obvious answer to a question posed by the dispatcher. “I was kidnapped three days ago. The other girls are—uh, w-were— Laura Peters and Raylene Witt. There has to be somebody looking for us. Are the police even close ?”
    Jenna McDaniels? Even caught up in the aftermath of a nightmare as she had been, Charlie had heard of the University of Richmond sorority girl who had vanished from a college-sponsored event just as preparations for the fall rush were getting under