Instinct, Jason Hough [acx book reading TXT] 📗

opportunity to introduce myself. Bonus points if this inquiry ends up with me making friends with the person who bakes scones this good. “Wow,” I say through the mouthful I just popped in. “Awesome.”

“World rocked?”

“Very much so.”

“I grow the rosemary myself,” she says, beaming, then waves as she returns to her oven.

Back on the sidewalk, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a spring in my step. As starts to the morning go, today’s has been pretty great.

Part of the daily routine Greg has established is a drive from Silvertown down to the bridge at Keller’s Gorge, to look for disabled vehicles or any other obstructions that might otherwise “impede the flow of tourists.”

So barely an hour after that mind-blowing scone, and thirty minutes after installing Clara at the front desk of the police station, I’ve traded walking the beat for driving my cruiser.

And now, at this exact moment, I am in deep shit.

My police cruiser is skidding sideways down the mountain road.

By the calendar it’s still a week until autumn, but no one told the leaves. They started falling in droves the day after Johnny’s funeral, as if the trees were in mourning, too, or so half the town has taken to saying. After three days of that the roads are blanketed in great circular patches of red and yellow.

Across this slippery carpet my cruiser now glides.

Traction control alerts flash on the dashboard. I strain against the wheel, fighting for control. Trees line the right side of the road, but just ten feet beyond them is a two-hundred-foot drop. On the left there’s a sheer rock face where the mountain was cleaved to make way for this very road.

In the middle of all of this sits a man, his butt right on the double yellow.

I catch a glimpse of him, there in the center of the lane, head between his knees, oblivious to the car sliding toward him at high speed. He hasn’t even looked up.

My brain regains control of my muscles. Right foot moving from brake pedal to gas. I goose it, one hard tap, and the front wheels fight for purchase, then catch. The car lurches more than I want. I overcompensate, and now I’m spinning the other way, facing backward. Not two feet from my window the man glides past, still oblivious. Two-foot difference and he’d have been smeared halfway to Granston.

With a shudder and an awful grinding noise, I’m off the road. Gravel roars under the tires, spraying up the quarter panels. The car is careening toward the rocky wall. I clench my teeth and brace for an impact that doesn’t come.

Everything goes still. Peaceful, you might even say, once I kill the engine. My breathing slowly returns to normal. The motor ticks like a failing clock.

I’m going to catch hell for losing control of the car. Greg warned me about it before he left. Said it’s the most common problem we have up here in the fall. State Route 177’s unofficial name is Slippery Slope for good reason. “City folk like you can’t drive on fresh fallen leaves.” I took offense at that. I pointed out the potholed, damp streets of Oakland that I cut my teeth on, and how that must count for something. But Greg just laughed.

And the thing is, he was right. About all of it.

Yesterday it was a brand-new Land Rover full of hikers trying to finish the “lake loop”—Lake Forgotten being an optional last on that list. And today… it’s me. I’ve lived here for two months, and in that time I’ve driven this road a hundred times at least. I should be able to handle some leaves. In my defense, Chief, I’m not used to rounding a bend to find a man sitting in the road.

Speaking of which… I blink away the dregs of my adrenaline and look for him, half expecting to find the man in the road was an apparition.

Nope. Still there. A weekend warrior, gray-haired head between designer denim knees, sitting right on the double-yellow line.

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s lost control today. A Harley-Davidson is wedged between two trees about twenty feet away from him. All bright chrome, red paint, and polished leather. The exhaust still pings and clicks, cooling in the misty morning air, in concert with my Dodge. The bike is mere inches from going over the side.

“Hello there,” I call when I feel confident my senses have fully returned. “Are you injured, sir?”

He looks up, then starts to twist toward me and thinks better of it. His helmet lays at his side, and I can see a scuff mark across its otherwise gleaming surface.

I try again, stepping out of my cruiser and onto the road. “Silvertown police. I’m Officer Whittaker. Are you injured?”

He shakes his head this time, and kicks at a pebble in a way that is so childish I almost laugh. “Pissed about my bike,” he says.

“Umm… yeah. Looks like a nice one.”

“Missed the turn,” he adds.

“Okay,” I reply, maybe a little too skeptical. “Kinda hard to miss.”

“Messed,” he corrects with a sudden forcefulness. Wounded male pride, maybe. “I messed up the turn, took it too fast.”

“But within the speed limit, I’m sure.”

He nods slowly.

“And you’re sitting in the middle of the road why, exactly?”

The question briefly pulls his attention from the motorcycle. He glances at the pavement around him, the leaves, the yellow lines. He picks up his helmet and examines the scuff mark across its side.

“I guess I could move,” he says, finally.

A sudden image appears in my head of him stumbling over to his bike, disoriented, only to slip and fall into the gorge. A fate not unlike that of the boy, Johnny Rogers. The thought makes me shiver. “You know what? Just stay put. How about you tell me about your Harley?”

Keep him stationary and talking, that’s the best option. He starts to rattle off the model name and some no-doubt-impressive stats, looking at the bike rather than me. I turn