American Rules: (John Rader Thrillers Book 4) by Ian Quarry

Author:Ian Quarry [Quarry, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

It was after eleven p.m. by the time John Rader pulled into the street in a small middle-income neighborhood, two miles north of Deadfall City. For a while he’d passed nothing but frame bungalows, a shopping plaza, then more frame houses. Beyond that he could see blackness up ahead. Sylvia Merlino’s street was at the top of a winding hill, dense forest either side, then a condo building on the right. There was heavy cloud down here in Deadfall City, and the trees darkened the road as he snaked left past a row of two-story apartments. The address he had was the last apartment, on a corner, by a sloping field and more trees.

Rader stopped at a short lawn and got out of the car. He carried his gun, his wallet—in case Ms. Merlino demanded some financial guarantees—and his PI license as he walked up the path towards a glass entranceway, pressing a buzzer beside the surname Woodward. That was the name Bellows told him to expect. Rader was puzzled that she had given up her cover so quickly to a man on the end of a phone, but then Stan Bellows could be very convincing. A black cat crept around his ankles as he waited, moving back onto the lawn to study him. Then came a pronounced click from the entrance, and the glass door swung open. Rader stepped into a tiled landing, heading left to the stairs. He was very aware of the silence as he trotted up to the second floor.

Up here, in a small blue landing decorated with plants and a few baskets, a woman was waiting for him at a partway open door. Rader couldn’t see much more than that she appeared young, and brunette. Her eyes didn’t blink. They just studied him from that space between the door and the frame, like the cat. Then the door opened wider, and she beckoned.

‘All right,’ she said, a curt motioning gesture, ‘come inside.’

Rader walked behind her into the house.

‘I fit the description?’ he said.

She said nothing as she moved through to a dimly-lit room, and stood between a couch and a table. The room was warm, as though the AC had been left off all day. On the table was an ashtray, packed with butts, ash scattered around the base. Rader headed towards a chair opposite, glancing around a room of few adornments. Both of them remained standing. In this light, he wondered if it was the same woman Bellows described. She might’ve been early-twenties; she might also be forty-five. Her skin had the pastiness of a housebound senior who didn’t sleep, and in her linen pants and plain shirt her body seemed tiny and shrunken and fragile, like an anorexic with weak bones. Many inches shorter than Rader, she gazed at him with solemn eyes and shook her head.

‘I don’t know what you expect from me,’ she said, a faint smile on her lips. But still the solemn eyes. ‘I don’t have much left.’

Rader glanced

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