Five in a Row by Jan Coffey

Author:Jan Coffey [Coffey, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MM Books (reissued from Mira Edition)
Published: 2016-10-20T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Debbie was one of those people who selected each pair of shoes she owned with the same care that Michelangelo used in selecting marble for his sculptures. And she never threw a pair out or left them at anyone’s house without going back for them.

Or at least, that seemed like a perfectly good reason for what she was doing…if she got caught in there.

For most of Monday morning, the key to Lyden’s condo was burning a hole in the pocket of her jeans. She peered through the half drawn blinds of her kitchen window at least a dozen times after finally deciding that she was really going to do it. Only two cars occupied the ten slots. The battered, old Chevy parked right across from her condo was hers, and the new Cadillac five spaces down belonged to an ancient couple that lived in the last condo in the row. Mr. and Mrs. Romero and Debbie were the only ones who didn’t work an eight-to-five job.

What happened yesterday still lay heavy on her mind. She was out of sorts; she couldn’t get her head together and figure where she’d gone wrong. Where she always went wrong. At first, Lyden seemed like a nice guy, even normal. But she now knew that he wasn’t. His temper had scared the hell out of her. There was also something strange going on with his supposed girlfriend. Emily, he called her. The way he talked about her, though, made her sound unreal. Or maybe she was dead, chopped up and stored away in a trunk in his basement office.

God, why was it her fate to always hook up with losers and weirdoes?

Picking up the phone, she called her friend Mary, another waitress at the restaurant. No one was home. She left a voice mail message saying that she was going to her next door neighbor’s house to pick up a couple of videos she’d loaned him yesterday. Debbie asked her friend to call her back later.

If something happened to her in Lyden’s condo, she thought, then she wanted people knowing about it. She wasn’t going to end up a rotting corpse in anyone’s basement.

Debbie looked one more time out the window at Lyden’s empty parking spot before grabbing her cell phone and going out. They’d had a good couple of hours of steady rain early this morning. The sky was still overcast and as gray and dingy as the walls of the restaurant’s kitchen where she worked. Her shoes sank in the mud as she tried to take a short cut through the bed of evergreens between the two condos. She wiped her feet on the rubber pad in front of Lyden’s door.

To be safe, she pressed the doorbell. No answer. She looked over her shoulder at the quiet street. The only cars that came up to this end of development belonged to the residents of this block.

Debbie turned around and rang the doorbell again, this time following with a couple of knocks on the painted steel door.

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