Running Out of Time by Cindi Myers

Author:Cindi Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2020-04-09T19:38:05+00:00

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THE ELGIN HOUSE was located in an older neighborhood on the edge of town. Most of the houses looked to have been built in the seventies or eighties and were occupied by older couples. By midnight, every house on the block was silent and dark. Leo had turned off the last light in his place an hour before and hadn’t moved since.

Jace, dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, slipped out of the van and made his way along the side of the yard to the back, not in the bushes this time, but alongside them, concealed by deepest shadow. The night air was still and humid, like furnace exhaust, without a hint of coolness. Within five minutes, he was sweating in the heavy sweatshirt.

The shed and root cellar hunched in the back corner of the yard, looking even more decrepit in the washed-out light of a quarter moon. Jace checked the windows on that side of the house for any sign of movement, but found none. Heart pounding, he stepped into the moonlight and walked over to the door.

Using his body as a shield, he trained the beam of a small penlight on the lock, a hefty padlock, so shiny it couldn’t have been on here long. The lock was threaded through a rusty hasp—but the hasp was fashioned with new screws. What are you so concerned about locking up in here, Leo? Jace wondered. He’d have to check the records to see if this lock had been here when the FBI conducted their warranted search.

He studied the lock a moment, then took out a set of picks and went to work. The standard commercial lock popped open in less than two minutes. Jace lifted the hasp, opened the door, then hung the lock in place and slipped inside.

The shed smelled of mildew and weed killer. The penlight revealed a shovel, rake and hoe on nails along the far wall. Bags of potting soil and several five-gallon buckets crammed with wood scraps and bits of rusty metal crowded the floor. A leaning metal shelf against the side wall held flower pots, bags of fertilizer and enough weed killing concoctions to poison half the town. If one of them had been found in the Stomach Soothers, Jace would have been suspicious Leo had decided to take out his own mother.

The root cellar was on the other side of the back wall. Jace played his light over the rough wood siding, looking for any kind of opening. It couldn’t be obvious or the previous searchers would have found it right away. They would have found most hidden doors as well, so this had to be something especially clever.

A big copper pot, the kind once used for boiling clothing over an outside fire, took up most of the back corner of the shed, filled with tangled fishing gear and an old tarp. Recalling the noises he had heard when Leo first entered the shed, of something heavy being moved, Jace dragged the pot out of the way and shone his light into the corner.

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