Florida Heatwave by Michael Lister

Author:Michael Lister [Lister, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Electronic Books, General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9781440530968
Google: ddez8LxwtMwC
Amazon: B005307N20
Publisher: F+w Media
Published: 2010-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

A BREATH

OF HOT AIR

ALEX KAVA AND PATRICIA A. BREMMER

The pounding came from somewhere outside her nightmare. Maggie O’Dell fought her way to consciousness. Her breathing came in gulps as if she had been running. In her nightmare she had been. But now she sat up in bed and strained to hear over the drumming of her heartbeat as she tried to recognize the moonlit room that surrounded her.

It was the breeze coming through the patio door that jump-started her memory. Hot, moist air tickled free the damp hair on her forehead. She could practically taste the salt of the Gulf waters just outside her room. The Hilton Hotel on Pensacola Beach, she remembered.

A digital clock beside her, with glow-in-the-dark numbers, clicked and flipped to 12:47. She was here on assignment, despite a Category 5 hurricane barreling toward the Florida Panhandle. But forty minutes earlier all had been calm. Not a cloud in sight to block the full moon. Only the waves predicted the coming storm, already rising higher with white caps breaking and crashing against the shore. Maggie liked the sound and had left the patio door open—but only a sliver—keeping the security bar engaged. She had hoped the sound would lull her to sleep. It must have worked, at least for forty minutes. That’s if you considered nightmares with fishing coolers stuffed full of body parts anything close to sleep.

She hadn’t been able to shut off the adrenaline from her afternoon adventure, hovering two hundred feet above the Gulf of Mexico in a Coast Guard helicopter. It hadn’t been the strangest crime scene Maggie had ever visited in her ten years with the FBI. The aircrew had recovered a marine cooler floating in the waters just off Pensacola Beach. But instead of finding some fisherman’s discarded catch of the day, the crew was shocked to discover human body parts—a torso, three hands, and a foot—all carefully wrapped in thick plastic.

However, it hadn’t been the body parts that had tripped Maggie into what she called her “nightmare cycle,” a vicious loop of snapshots from her memory’s scrapbook. Some people slipped into REM cycle, Maggie had her nightmare cycle. No, it wasn’t the severed body parts. She had seen and dealt with her share of those. It was the helicopter flight and dangling two hundred feet above control. That’s really why she had opened the patio doors earlier. She wanted to replace the thundering sound of the rotors.

The pounding started again and she jerked up, only now remembering what had wakened her. Someone on the other side of the door.

“Ms. O’Dell.” A man’s voice. High pitched. No one she recognized.

Maggie stumbled out of bed, pulled on khaki shorts and a T-shirt over damp, sticky skin. She had shut off the room’s A/C when she opened the patio door and the air inside was now as hot and humid as it was outside. Florida in August. What was she thinking shutting off the A/C?

She picked up her holstered revolver on the way to the door.

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