LITMIR.BIZ

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pelted them like hail.

      His brain felt like a bottle of soda that had been shaken and popped open, with fizzing bubbles clouding his vision. A ringing roared in his ears, dominating all other sound. He blinked, and his vision cleared to the sight of Joslyn’s dark hair tumbled over the bricks of the yard. He was sprawled on top of her, and he could smell apricot and jasmine, and the scent of walking through a quiet wood.

      “Are you all right?” His voice came from far away. He rolled to the side so he wasn’t crushing her beneath him. “Joslyn?”

      She moved slowly, lifting her head. Her clear, golden-brown eyes were dazed. She didn’t speak, but simply looked at him in confusion.

      “Anything broken?”

      She slowly sat up, checking her slender limbs. She shook her head, then looked behind him at the house.

      There was a gaping hole where the back door had been. Plaster from the exploded wall still rained from the air. The roof lurched drunkenly.

      “Come on, we need to get clear of the house.” He rose to his feet, feeling aches in his joints from the blast and the hard landing on the bricks. Joslyn took the hand he held out to her, and they skirted around the less damaged side of the house to get to the front again.

      Fiona’s next-door neighbor had rushed out to her front yard, an older woman with gray, permed hair, dressed in a tank top and shorts. She gaped at them as they appeared. “Are you all right? What happened? Good gracious, was that a bomb? Fiona’s poor house. What was a bomb doing in her house?”

      What was a bomb doing in Fiona’s house? It had been rigged to explode as soon as the door was breached. Clay had been incredibly lucky to see the tripwire as he opened the door, and his reflexes had taken over, allowing him to grab Joslyn and leap to safety. Luckily, it looked as if it hadn’t been a very large explosion, although it had been enough to blow out a few of the windows in the house. Glass covered the stone garden in the front yard.

      Clay was starting to recover his hearing because he now heard a dog barking from inside the house next door and a car alarm sounding from somewhere nearby. Luckily, there hadn’t been many people home at this time of morning on this street—just the next-door neighbor, and a couple people from houses across the street, including one older woman with two young children.

      “We need to call the police,” Joslyn said to the neighbor.

      Clay’s shoulders knotted. Once the police realized he was an ex-convict at the site of an explosion, things would get interesting. This had nothing to do with his past.

      At least, he hoped it didn’t. The mob family he’d worked for years ago, before he’d gone to prison, was now defunct, and he hadn’t been very high on the totem pole to begin with. He didn’t think he had any enemies left who would want revenge on him, but if he did, then rigging his sister’s house to blow up was a rather melodramatic way to do it. A sniper shot would have been easier.

      “I’m calling them right now,” said a neighbor from across the street who had her cell phone. “I can’t believe this. My great-grandkids are with me today, too.”

      The two kids were standing in the street staring wide-eyed at the house, which didn’t look much different from the front except for some dust and curls of smoke rising from the broken windows. “Can we go see—”

      “No,” their great-grandmother said firmly, then spoke into the phone as the police dispatcher picked up the line. “Yes, I’m here at Braeden Court, and there’s been an explosion!” She gave Clay a suspicious look.

      “Oh, don’t mind her,” Fiona’s next-door neighbor said to Clay. “She thinks the government put microchips in polio vaccines so they could monitor everyone.” The woman waved a finger in a circle around her ear. “Completely cuckoo.”

      “Are you all right?” Joslyn asked her. “Your house is right next door.”

      “Luckily there’s a lot of space in the side yards and the fence is good and thick. My windows rattled but no damage. I’m Mary, by the way.” She held out a gnarled hand.

      Joslyn and Clay introduced themselves, and Mary looked closely at Clay. “You related to Fiona? You look just like her.”

      “She’s my half sister.”

      “I’m a friend of hers from Los Angeles,” Joslyn said. “We came here to see her.”

      Mary’s steel-gray eyebrows rose. “I’d hoped she’d just gone to visit someone like one of you when she disappeared.”

      “She disappeared?” Clay had to fight the alarm he felt.

      “A few weeks ago, I heard barking from her house and went to see what was going on. She gave me a spare key because sometimes she asks me to take care of her dog, Poochie. Looked like the poor thing had been left alone for a day or two, so I took him.” Mary jabbed a thumb backward toward her house, where the dog was still barking intermittently. “I haven’t seen any sign of Fiona since. I filed a police report, but they haven’t done anything. Do you think her vanishing has something to do with the blast? Thank God it didn’t happen when I got her dog.” Mary shuddered at the close call. “Was it a gas leak or something?”

      “Um...we’re not sure,” Joslyn said carefully. She looked briefly at Clay, but he somehow knew what she was thinking. The less they told the neighbors, the better.

      “We were opening the door when it blew up,” Clay said to Mary.

      “My goodness, are you two all right? You don’t look injured, but...”

      “We’re fine,” Joslyn said.

      “You better make sure you get seen by a doctor,” Mary said.

      “What happened?” People started to arrive from other streets in the area, gaping at the house. Mary was only too happy to tell them a dramatized account of the explosion.

      Clay pulled Joslyn aside. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked her. She was tall but slender, and she seemed so delicate.

      She nodded, although there was worry in her face. “Who rigged Fiona’s house to explode?”

      “Your guess is as good as mine. But whoever did it is a ruthless killer.” He sighed and eyed the ruined shell of the house.

      Joslyn shivered, even in the sweltering heat.

      Clay had dealt with men just as ruthless when he’d been a street thug for that mob family in Chicago. He hadn’t killed anyone, but if he’d kept going down that road, who knows what he might have become?

      That thought was like a dark blot on his soul.

      Police sirens blared, and soon a squad car turned the corner and barreled down the street toward them, followed by paramedics. Clay’s shoulders tensed out of habit, and he relaxed them. He wondered if there would ever be a time when his past wouldn’t crop up in his present.

      He answered the officers’ questions evenly, but that only seemed to make them suspicious, if the curious looks they threw at him were any indication. He submitted to the paramedic’s exam, but other than a few minor cuts from flying glass and debris, he was unhurt. Part of the door frame had hit him on the side and a chunk of plaster had glanced off his shoulder, but he shook off the bruises. He’d had worse.

      He knew the exact moment the officers had looked him up and found out about his prison record. They had hard glints in their eyes as they approached him. “So Mr. Ashton, what are you doing here in Arizona? You’re a long ways from Illinois.” The officer’s name badge read Campbell.

      “I came to see my half sister, Fiona Crowley.”

      “And that’s it, huh?” Officer Talbot, the younger man, squinted up at him. “Nothing else?”

      “Nothing else,” Clay said through a tight jaw. He might have been tempted to mention the phone call from his sister if it hadn’t been for the

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