Mailboat III by Danielle Lincoln Hanna

Author:Danielle Lincoln Hanna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Suspense
Publisher: Hearth & Homicide Press, LLC
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MONICA

I rolled the pen between my fingers uncomfortably. This wasn’t the Mailboat captain I’d known most of my life. Tommy had always been a straight shooter. He said things like they were. He didn’t have time for games or even niceties half the time. But now he was evading my questions. Why? Had the perp threatened him? Or were the memories still too raw? Was I pushing him too hard?

But I had to push. This whole event sickened me. Infuriated me. I was a firestorm of death to anyone who harmed someone I had cared about, even as a teenager. So I needed the facts. I needed to find that sick son of a bitch who had shot Tommy and whack him in the nuts with the entire penal code—large-print edition.

I needed Tommy to remember, and I needed him to tell me.

“He just made sure it was you, then pulled the gun?” I prompted.

Tommy nodded.

Once again, I was convinced he wasn’t telling me everything. His eyes had gone cloudy, as if fixed on something a million miles away. A sheen of sweat glistened across his brow.

I tilted my head. “Tommy?” I called softly.

He shook his head as if waking from a reverie. Looked at me as if surprised to find me there. I didn’t like it. Maybe I’d mention it to the hospital staff. But it was becoming clear this was all I was going to get out of him for now.

I bit back my impatience, folded the cover of my portfolio over my pen, and leaned forward. “We aren’t going to let him walk free,” I said. “We’re going to catch him and lock him away until no one so much as remembers he existed.”

Tommy nodded.

“Do you have anything else for me? Anything else at all?”

He rolled his eyes toward the opposite wall and sighed. He was silent several moments, and I thought he’d simply close up and say nothing. But then he spoke. “I remember…”

My ears pricked eagerly. “Yes?”

“He was wearing a leather vest.”

My body froze solid, except for my eardrums. They hummed with anticipation. A leather vest? That’s what Bailey had said: The man who killed Jason Thomlin had been wearing a leather vest. “What color?”

“Black,” Tommy said. “With silver studs.”

I stared at him for the span of several universes. A black vest with silver studs. I wrapped my hands around the evidence and enfolded it to my chest. At last, proof. These weren’t isolated incidents. It was all connected. It all went back to the same person. The same .22 rimfire. The same black leather vest.

My tone dripping with eloquence, I dropped a gem-encrusted f-bomb.

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