Mirror of My Soul by Joey Hill (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

Snatching up the phone, he recognized Violet’s cell number, squashed his disappointment.

“Tyler, where are you? Are you still in the city?”

“Yeah.” Mac, apparently having gotten his whereabouts from Sarah, came through the backyard, a grim set to his mouth. “Mac just got here. What’s going on?”

“Tyler, someone broke into Tea Leaves. They beat up Chloe pretty badly. She’s on the way to the hospital. Marguerite—”

Her next words came as quickly as the first, but for Tyler there was an abyss

between her name and that moment, as if he was teetering on the edge, straining for that opposite side but knowing that eternal darkness yawned beneath him. He was cognizant of Mac at his shoulder, the look in his eyes. “—wasn’t there when it happened. She called it in, though. Mac picked it up on the dispatch radio at home.”

“All right, I’ll head right over there—”

“There’s more. The perp kidnapped a little girl Chloe was watching named Natalie Moorefield. Chloe’s a tough kid. She wouldn’t let them put her in the ambulance until she told them all she knew. Marguerite’s gone after him.”

“What? How the hell does she know—”

“Chloe said he wrote something over the doorway. ‘Let’s finish it.’ Marguerite took one look at it, left Chloe her cell phone and was gone. Mac called me. I sent him to you right away but I went with a hunch and called the prison where her father was. They’ve released him, time served.”

“But she would have—” Tyler broke off, remembering Marguerite’s behavior when

he’d called her from Cape Cod that day. How she’d been so standoffish and prickly, then suddenly desperate in the dim quiet of her bedroom.

He doesn’t know where I am.

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Joey W. Hill

How many women had said that? Believed it? Died believing it.

“Bank of Florida building. I’ll bet my life on it. We can be there in two minutes from my place.”

It was ten miles from his house but Violet wasn’t going to argue it. “I’ll call it in.”

Tyler broke the connection, headed into the house. Going to his office, he unlocked the gun safe, pulled on the dual shoulder holster and fitted it with his nine millimeter and his Desert Eagle. He slipped the licenses to carry the guns and extra clips into his jeans’ pockets. “Don’t say a fucking word to me about being a civilian.”

“Wasn’t going to.”

Rage and fear mixed together became hard, cold resolve. “He’s intending to take all three of them over. He’s sick as they come, Mac. The only thing he’s living for is to finish the equation. The child’s just a bonus, the bait to get Marguerite there.”

The two men left the house, hit the bottom step of the front porch together. “I gave her an engagement ring last night,” he said.

Mac glanced at him, understanding in his expression. “Then I hope you’re asking Violet to give you away, or she’ll be pissed.”

“Marguerite hasn’t said yes yet. She actually was kind of ticked off at me about it.

We have to protect her, Mac. At any cost. She doesn’t deserve this.”

Tyler strode out into the driveway. Mac didn’t reply, knew he didn’t need to. From the set of Tyler’s shoulders his mind had only one track now.

Mac’s VTX was parked next to Tyler’s Ferrari. “I can make it there in two minutes on this,” Mac said. “Where will they be?”

“The roof.” Tyler got in the car, slammed the door, fired the engine. “And you won’t beat me there.” The car spun out of the driveway.

Mac had feared for the life of his woman before, knew what it was to find that icy center of control and do things that no person under ordinary circumstances would survive. So he was not at all surprised when Tyler ran through stoplights at busy intersections without pausing, ran up on the shoulder to get past a garbage truck, took turns at velocities only an experienced driver and a car with the Ferrari’s engineering could successfully manage. He just hoped they wouldn’t be too late. If they were…

He leaped onto the sidewalk through the next intersection and then shot back out behind Tyler’s taillights, hearing the scream of brakes as motorists tried to avoid hitting them both.

…he was going to make damn sure Tyler didn’t get there before him.

* * * * *

A light drizzle was falling and it was always colder on top of the building. Natalie might need her coat. Turning up the collar of her rain gear, Marguerite stepped into the foyer of the Bank of Florida building, thinking that everything around her had a surreal 170

Mirror of My Soul

quality. All the colors turned up to high volume yet coated with a dull patina that made the world ugly, not vibrant.

Over the years, she had visited this building often enough that the indifferent security detail had accepted her as one of the corporate types. She’d even manufactured herself an ID that passed at a distance as one of those assigned to the major banking office housed in the building. Today her elegant London Fog rain cape worn against the outside drizzle and her determined step made her look as if she was just an employee coming in to do weekend work.

She needn’t have worried. The security officer was not there and the lock on the glass door that had to be deactivated with a buzzer after hours was not engaged. She peered over the edge of the horseshoe desk. Spots of blood were on the visitor’s log, marks that would have passed as ink stains to the unsuspecting mind. She hoped he was knocked out, dragged to a closet somewhere, but then she leaned farther over the counter, saw his body curled under the desk, his eyes staring. He clutched a note in stiff fingers, the print large enough to read, as if the guard had been turned into a macabre form of sign post.

Come on up.

She looked at the guard a full minute, reached