The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

never seen anyone fitting Roman’s description interacting with Tessy, who was a waitress and occasional performer at the club.

“I’ve asked the staff if they know anything about where she is,” the guy said, “and nobody does. She just didn’t show up for work. That’s when I called her mother.”

Outside the place, Shaw called the friends whose names Maria Vasquez had given him—at least those whose numbers he could find. Three answered but no one had any knowledge of where Tessy might be. One young woman, though, did tell him that Tessy was really into busking—street singing—lately. She’d mentioned she’d worried about some of the “pervs” in the parks and the squares she sang in, but she could provide nothing specific.

Shaw biked back to the safe house.

The place, which had seemed alive thanks to Russell’s presence, was now stark. A newly formed fog didn’t help much.

June gloom . . .

Shaw hung his leather jacket on a rack near the front door and tugged off his sweater, draping it on the rack too. The house was warm. He walked into the kitchen and pulled out a bag of ground Honduran coffee from the cupboard. He brewed a pot through a filter and poured a cup for himself. He hadn’t brought the milk from the Winnebago, but he found some powdered Carnation in the refrigerator. Apparently his brother liked coffee the same way he did.

And where was the man now?

On a private jet to Singapore?

In a bunker in Utah?

Tracking down a terrorist in Houston?

The survivalist skills that Ashton had taught the family were a double-edged weapon. They could keep you safe from intrusion. But they could also be used to get close to your enemies, eliminate them and then evade detection as you escaped.

He recalled the matter-of-fact expression in his brother’s eyes after he’d killed Blond in the alley. The only concerns were practical—getting his team there efficiently and quickly for the cleanup and getting away.

He sat on the couch and stretched back, boots out in front of him.

Thinking of the driver of the green Honda.

A girl . . .

And hot . . .

But who the hell was she? What was her mission?

One thing about her was clear. She was smart about keeping him from catching her: pitching the nails into his path. Smart too in using the two Neanderthals on the street in the TL. They’d said she’d been panicked and begged them to help; the man chasing her was an abusive ex, who’d put her in the hospital a dozen times. He’d broken her arm twice.

“You believed her?” Shaw had muttered.

Curly had shrugged. “’Course. She was like, yeah, you know, beautiful.”

Ah, beauty. A lie detector that Shaw had heard of before.

They knew nothing else and had not seen the Honda’s tag, so he’d left them to their labors. He’d made a brief canvass of the street where she’d parked the Honda. No one had noticed the woman or the car—at least that was everyone’s story.

He wondered how her presence here would play out.

In the absence of fact, any theories were speculation, and trying to formulate any deductions was a waste of time.

His eyes strayed to something on the shelf nearby: the dark statuette of the eagle he’d seen earlier.

Colt, no. Don’t! It’s not our job . . .

22

Are they crazy? They’re going to die.”

Russell is peering up the side of a steep snow-covered mountain, as he speaks these words to his younger brother. Colter is fourteen, his brother twenty. Russell is visiting his family in the Compound over semester break.

They are in snowshoes and dressed for the January cold, which is cold indeed at this elevation. They’ve been looking, unsuccessfully, for bighorn sheep, whose season is the latest of any game in the state. You can hunt them well into February.

Colter follows his brother’s gaze to watch two people snowshoeing across a steep slope. One is in navy-blue overalls and stocking cap, the other wears lavender with a white head covering. The build of the latter tells Colter it is a woman. They are hiking from one side of the angular hillside to the other, about a hundred yards below the crest.

The land here is Shaw property but this particular location is about three miles from a public preserve. Ashton posted much of the land but generally doesn’t make an issue out of trespassing unless there are firearms involved, which might include hunters or—as Colter learned just last year in an armed standoff—an ominous intruder, overly interested in Ashton Shaw and his property.

His concern at the moment is not their legal right to be here, though. It’s that the couple—apparently on a photographic safari—are at serious risk.

The pair is trudging through the heart of an avalanche field. They’ve come from Fresno or Bakersfield or Sacramento to record in pixels the soaring whitewashed mountains after several days of impressive blizzarding.

“City slickers,” Russell mutters, using a term Colter understands though he’s never heard it. Russell has spent two years away from the monastery of the Compound and has been exposed to many, many things that Colter cannot even imagine, new words and expressions among them.

“Don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Got to warn them.”

A hissing wind lifts powder from the crest and continues down the slope. Upwind, the couple couldn’t hear them from where they stood.

“We have to go up, get closer.”

Russell nods. “But stay out of that field. It’s a land mine.”

In his survivalist training sessions, Ashton spent hours lecturing the children about avalanches. And Colter sees instantly how dangerous these conditions are. Snow is at its least stable immediately after a storm, as now. And it’s particularly erratic on north faces, like this. The south sides of mountains get more sun, which melts and packs the fall. North side snow is hoar, as in hoarfrost, unpacked, loose and slippery as grains of sugar. Another factor: any incline above thirty degrees makes a mountain avalanche prone, and this slope is easily that.

Colter and Russell trek as quickly as one can on snowshoes and