Resonance, J. B. Everett [the top 100 crime novels of all time txt] 📗

while driving, he turned square to check her out for a moment. “Then why are you here?”

Her mouth quirked up in a way that she couldn’t help. “Let me rephrase that. My blood family is there. You and Landerly understand me a lot better than they ever did.”

He smiled.

 

And she laughed at him. “I think you two may even like me.”

 

Again the flash of true grin, one she hadn’t seen in a long while. “That I do.”

 

For a few minutes she just studied him, taking in the charming profile, the straight nose and brilliant eyes.

 

His smile had faded, taking the boy into man. The mouth opened and his voice interrupted her thoughts.

 

“What about David? I thought you two were getting serious.”

 

“Oh no. David is … David. He only really cares about David.” She shrugged.

 

“I thought you liked him.”

 

“I do. I just accept him for what he is, and isn’t.”

 

Jordan nodded, eyes still in tune with the road ahead, not looking at her face.

 

Her voice was small when she spoke, realizing what needed to get said. The first words were always the hardest, and after that it would flow. “Thank you-”

 

“For what?” He looked at her full on again, teal eyes full of concern for whatever he didn’t know.

 

“For taking care of me. The way Landerly says it, you busted your ass to save my life.”

 

He reddened a bit, but spoke with pride. “Yeah, I did. And I’d do it again … you owe me big time.”

 

Her laughter burst out of her, filling the edges of the car, and she wasn’t sure if she saw something when he looked at her again. After the giggles died down, she settled back, they still had several hours to go. So she started in, knowing Jordan was the only one who would understand.

 

“If everything changed when the poles shifted, and some species wound up on one side of the shift but not the other, won’t they evolve differently? The whole ecological structure has altered.”

 

“That makes sense.” He nodded, but didn’t give any other follow-up.

 

“So, in a thousand years our descendants will have evolved differently from David and Becky’s.”

 

“I don’t think Becky will have him.”

 

She almost punched him in the arm, but held back.

 

He spoke again, even as he swerved the car around a tire scrap in the road, “I don’t think David should ever reproduce.”

 

Jillian rolled her eyes and steered the conversation back to where she wanted it. “So probably the same thing happened the last time the poles shifted. Some species went one way and some went the other.”

 

She waited until Jordan nodded, acknowledging her idea. “Does that mean that there are dinosaurs somewhere?”

 

It made perfect sense, but she just wasn’t sure she could wrap her brain around it.

 

Alternate

The thick smell of blood wasn’t a shock. He was used to it. What startled Lee was the woman. She was sitting at the dining room table, seemingly oblivious to the carnage mounted on the wall behind her. She was working over something, like she was writing, and deep in her work where she didn’t acknowledge him.

 

A large red bow, the kind you would put on a three foot Christmas present, stole his attention sitting there on the table beside her. She wrote with precision, her head bent low, her rich chestnut hair worked into braids and wound round her head in a style that called to mind The Sound of Music.

 

Lee suppressed the boiling anger in him down to something in the range of a solid simmer and took a step toward her, wondering if she was in shock. Her right hand came up sharply, one leather gloved finger telling him to wait a minute, but the rigid control he saw in her told him she intended for him to wait as long as she wanted.

 

In that moment he saw what he had previously missed. She wore leather, in several shades of shadow, from her fingertips to her toes. The braids weren’t cute, they were cop hair - the kind you couldn’t get a hold on and use to yank a person around.

 

“There.” Surprisingly, given the growing stench of death emanating from what Lee was now pretty certain was her handiwork, her voice was musical and held a low note of pride. She stood and turned to face him, holding the bow and what was apparently a large gift tag. And she smiled at him.

 

The smile reached her large chocolate eyes, and Lee felt the blood drain out the soles of his feet. She was insane. Clinically insane. There was no other reason a person would be truly happy here. Add in that she was armed to the teeth - a short dagger was sheathed at her waist, a pair of matched sais were slid into long thin pockets down each thigh, strange wood and metal sickles slipped gracefully through lined up loops so they didn’t jangle when she walked - and the sweetness he had initially perceived fled like dandelion tufts.

 

She looked at him like she would a small puppy sitting at the edge of her living room, like he was cute and non-threatening. Lee’s hand inched under his jacket to his hip, fondling the warm butt of the 9mm there. Given everything else, he wouldn’t put it past her to be fast.

 

But she didn’t say anything, just went about fastening the bow to the body and plumping it a little, like she was Martha Stewart off to a birthday party. The body was held to the wall behind it by serviceable unadorned throwing knives. At least he was pretty certain they were unadorned, only the last inch of the handle was visible on each of the six that knives that had crucified the man to the wall.

 

Lee thought he had seen lethal in his time, but it looked like the body had been alive when it had been pinned there, and the buried knives were sunk into wall studs. It was the only way that the heft of the large, muscular man wouldn’t have come forward, bringing drywall with him. That took planning.

 

The face of the man on the wall sagged, eyes and mouth open, blood running in thin rivulets from the edges of each. He had suffered a thousand punctures and surface slices in his final moments, and the woman carried exactly the implements to do it. Although she must have cleaned them thoroughly before sliding them into their leather homes along her lean legs.

 

Stepping back she admired the tag. Lee, for the first time, read it.

 

In payment for murder, rape, and the destruction of families.

 

One by one, she used claw-like throwing stars to pin obituaries, newspaper articles, and pieces of police reports to dead flesh. After a moment Lee no longer cared what she was tacking to the corpse, he just wondered where in hell the stars were coming from. She would simply produce another and another, like a sick magician.

 

She turned to smile at him again, and his breath hitched. A wailing started deep at the back of his head.

He’d been wrong. She was just a girl.

Imprint

Text: J. B. Everett
Publication Date: 05-29-2016

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