Last Breath by Karin Slaughter

Author:Karin Slaughter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781460709245
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

5

Charlie sat in her parked car outside the near-empty diner, which was mostly chrome and red vinyl in a homage to the fifties. A quick call to the courthouse that she should’ve made this morning had revealed that Mark Patterson was millions of dollars in debt. The Range Rover she had seen parked in the driveway when she left the house was about to be repo’d. The balloon payment on the McMansion was in arrears. He even owed some swank private school down in Roswell so much money that they had turned him over to a collection agency.

Obviously, they wanted Flora for her money. Whether they had worked out an agreement for cash up front or monthly rent or something else untoward was a question that Charlie needed to get answered before she proceeded with any of this.

There were other questions, too.

Flora had said she wanted to get away from her grandparents before they depleted all of the money in her trust. Why go to the trouble of emancipation only to fall into the clutches of two different adults who wanted her money just as badly? Did Flora think she could keep the Pattersons on a tighter leash once she was legally declared an adult?

There was only one way to find out, and that was to ask Flora herself, but Charlie had found herself seized by inertia once she had pulled her car into an empty space in front of the diner.

Why hadn’t Flora been honest with Charlie in the first place? Was she afraid to tell the truth, or was she playing Charlie for a fool?

Through the windows, she watched Flora talking to her last customer. She looked the same as she had this morning: like a perfectly nice, girl-next-door kind of teenager. Earnest. Honest. A bit fragile, but at the same time, also a bit determined.

The girl’s hair was up in a bun. She was wearing a white apron over her blue jeans and the green Girl Scout shirt. Flora’s customer was a lean, beef-jerky-ish old man with a comb-over, the kind of guy who had a lot of boring stories for pretty young girls. Flora seemed game to listen. She smiled and nodded, then nodded and smiled, then carefully slipped the bill onto the table before walking away.

Comb-Over slapped her on the ass.

Charlie gasped.

Flora had obviously handled this before. She grinned, wagging her finger at the dirty old man, before returning to work. He practically drooled as she leaned over to clear plates from a recently vacated booth.

Charlie’s cell phone rang. She recognized Ben’s office number. He had probably found out from the surveillance crew that she had been at the apartments.

She waited for the phone to stop ringing, guilt niggling at her conscience.

When she looked back at the diner, Flora was laughing, her mouth open, eyes closed. There was a second waitress, a girl about Flora’s age, who had likely said something funny. That seemed to be the long and short of the other girl’s contribution to the job.

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