Sign of the Maker (Boston Crime Thriller Book 4), Brian Shea [free reads .txt] 📗

the gunmetal-gray sky. It wouldn't matter if it broke through; the Boston Public Library’s stone walls shrouded them in their shadow.

His father had taken him there as a child. Kelly remembered the first time he stood outside the doors facing Copley Plaza. Before allowing him to enter, Kelly's father walked him around to the corner of Boylston Street, right where they were standing now. The words etched just beneath the flat roofline held more meaning now than they did then. “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.” His father made him stop and read those words before allowing Kelly to enter. He had taught himself to read later in life, falling in love with the characters and stories that filled the pages of an excellent book.

His father normally picked up his books from the Dorchester branch on Adams Street, but he wanted Kelly's first library card to come from the iconic nineteenth-century building, home to millions of books. Finding the right book was a daunting task, but one that Kelly's father navigated with little effort. When Kelly shrugged indifferently regarding making a selection, his father made it for him, grabbing a paperback copy of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.

The Greasers’ plight made sense to Kelly. Even though the novel's setting was rural Oklahoma, he found things not so different from the world he grew up in on Arbroth Street. The loyalties were the same. Blood oaths were forged in tough neighborhoods. Kelly thought he understood the story as a child. As an adult, his connection to the flawed characters in the book about hard-fought redemption resonated with him on a much deeper level.

He hadn't recalled that memory in a very long time. Its return pleasantly surprised him. Kelly realized Barnes was probably experiencing a uniquely different memory, one he didn't need to be a mind reader to see. They were less than a block from the finish line of the marathon. She didn't avoid it. In fact, Kristen Barnes did the opposite. Every time she went for a run, she made sure her route took her across the line. When Kelly asked her why, her answer was simple. Because they never get to win. Ever.

He put his hands above his head and tried to catch as much of the cool morning air as he could, both to recover from his run and steady his nerves for what he was about to ask. "Let's get a place of our own."

Barnes stopped her forward progression altogether. She jogged in place with her mouth agape for a moment. "What?"

Kelly wasn't sure what he'd been expecting her reaction to be, but that was definitely not it. He back-pedaled. "I just figured things were moving in that direction. Why bother stretching it out any longer just for the sake of appearances."

"I wasn't quite expecting that from you. What about Embry?”

"Embry loves you."

Barnes brought her arm across her chest and stretched her shoulder as she continued to shuffle her feet like a tap dancer keeping beat. "I know. And I love her too. I also know from experience what it's like to have your world flipped upside down at an early age."

"Her world was flipped when her mom and I got divorced. I think this… you and me together… might finally put things right side up again."

"Maybe," she conceded. "That still leaves your mom."

"She's good. Doc said she's fit as a fiddle and can resume life as normal." Kelly gave up any attempt at keeping the jog going. They'd completed three of the five miles, yet Barnes barely looked as though she'd finished a warm-up. Kelly, on the other hand, was dripping with sweat and looked more like he'd just finished three hard rounds in the ring. "I've countered every argument. Unless you've got some other reason?"

The question hung in the air between them longer than Kelly would've liked. For a man who prided himself on his ability to read people, as he looked into the eyes of the woman he'd fallen madly in love with, Kelly had no idea what she was thinking.

Barnes opened her mouth to speak. A loud boom drowned out the sound of her voice. The ground shook with the shockwave that followed as a plume of debris rose from between the buildings ahead.

"What the hell was that?” Kelly asked. “Sounded like a massive transformer blew."

"No way." Barnes broke into a run. "I'd recognize that sound anywhere. It was a bomb."

3

Barnes leaned to the left as she rounded the corner from the Common, taking a shortcut through the garden landscape and onto Tremont Street. Kelly was only a few steps behind her. The scene splayed out in front of them was something out of a war movie, not the Boston Common he'd known. Dirt and debris overwhelmed the fragrant notes from the street vendors and cafés that typically permeated the air surrounding the fifty acres of green space. The oldest park in the United States and the prized jewel of the Emerald Necklace, a thousand-plus acres of linked parks and waterways, had been transformed into a horror show, the sight of which sickened Kelly.

He saw a middle-aged man wearing a wool-lined jean jacket leaning against a lamppost. Something seemed off about him, and it took Kelly only an extra second to see the root cause. The man was bracing himself against the pole, holding on for dear life as if it were a piece of driftwood in a sea of sharks. He'd turned the lamppost into an oversized crutch to support himself. His right leg was severed below the knee, blood draining onto the sidewalk.

The missing piece of his leg was nowhere in sight. Kelly scanned the ground in front of him as he charged forward. Seven or eight uniformed patrolmen and a couple plainclothes were scattered among the crowd of injured pedestrians littering his view.

Barnes detoured to a woman holding the left side of her face. Her blood-soaked double-breasted beige trench coat caught