Linger 2: Trail of the Beast (A Linger Thriller) by Edward Fallon & J.D. Rhoades

Author:Edward Fallon & J.D. Rhoades [Fallon, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Braun Haus Media, LLC
Published: 2015-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

"Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle nowhere you find yourself."

~Unknown

19

_____

KATE LOOKED UP AS MORALES walked back into the waiting room. He stopped by her chair and fished a key out of his pants pocket.

“I’ll be at the church,” he said, handing her the key. “After that, I may be gone for a few days. You can keep using the house until you get the car fixed.”

“Wait, what? Where are you going?”

“If you need to move on before I get back, leave the key under the rock by the front porch steps.”

“What about your congregation?” Kate asked.

“I’ll call the bishop,” Morales said. “They’ll find a substitute.”

“And what about Tara?”

“She has her own key. I’ll tell the church secretary to keep paying her as long as she keeps coming to clean up.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it. She needs you.”

Morales shook his head. “I’m the last thing she needs.”

Weston walked up to them. “He’s running,” he said contemptuously.

Morales didn’t take the bait. “You’re right. I am. I’m running. I’m running from a woman, so you can add that. Because if I stay I’ll ruin her life. And mine. And everyone’s.”

He turned and walked away, heading for the waiting room door.

A moment later he was gone.

Weston sank into the chair next to Kate. She saw the expression on his face.

“What?” she asked.

“Before he cut and ran, I told Morales about what we’d found. He brought up something that probably should have occurred to us.”

“What?”

“Unless he’s some kind of soothsayer, what’s the one way that Bonner, or Beaumont, or whatever his name is, could know we’d be at Tara's? Or at the priest’s?”

It slowly began to dawn on her.

“He didn’t move on,” she said. “He’s still here.”

“Somebody’s been driving Clyde around. Maybe it’s him. And that’s why Clyde’s getting crazier.”

Kate glanced over at Christopher. “Looks like it’s time we had that talk.”

She raised her voice so the boy, who seemed engrossed in an episode of Adventure Time on the Cartoon Network, could hear.

“Chris? Could you come here a minute?”

At that moment, however, the doors to the waiting room opened and Tara walked in. Her face was streaked with tears and her hair hung limply around her face.

Kate and Weston jumped up and met her halfway across the waiting room.

“They’re lettin’ him go,” she said, her voice still hoarse with grief and shock. “They’re just turnin’ him loose.”

Kate couldn’t believe it. “What?”

“The doctor said they ain’t got any reason to hold him. They say he’s just drunk.”

“Goddamn it,” Kate said.

The doors to the ER made a sound like a pistol shot as she burst through them.

An African American nurse in blue scrubs sitting behind a desk looked up in alarm as she blew past it.

“Ma’am,” she said, leaping up, “you can’t go back there.”

Kate rounded on her. “I need to talk to the doctor who treated the young man who was just brought in here. The one with alcohol poisoning.”

“That would be me,” a voice said.

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