The Dominic Wolfe Tales- The Complete Series by Lincoln Chase

Author:Lincoln Chase
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Design Vault Press, LLC
Published: 2019-02-10T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

I had Detective Slade drop me off at Homeland, a half mile from my building. I stopped in to say hello to my friend Loretta, but she wasn’t working. I bought a few groceries and walked home to make dinner, lost in thought.

My stepsister was brushing a doll’s hair when I got there. A week ago, I’d have cracked something smartass about it. But it was Ellie’s doll, and Natalie’s eyes brimmed with tears. And in an instant, so did mine.

“It isn’t fair,” she whispered.

“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”

I had taken Ellie in when her family died. The last thing I could have expected was for her older sister Alexis to come back for her. That the woman had managed to return from death, I could believe, though it shocked the hell out of me. She was like me, as it turned out. But Alexis didn’t just reanimate and come for Ellie; she waited long enough for me to embrace Ellie as a permanent fixture in my life, and then she swooped in to take the girl away. I was trying really hard to forgive this; Alexis had her reasons—good ones, in fact—but damn, was it hard.

As terrible as it was for me though, it must’ve been far worse for Natalie, who had taken on the role of Ellie’s surrogate mother. She helped dress the girl, brushed her teeth. Read her books. Played games with her and told silly jokes. I mean, sure—I had done these things too, once in a while. But it was Natalie who had cared for Ellie day in and day out. Especially during the week preceding Alexis’s return, when I was busy throwing the underworld into chaos.

I made spaghetti. Natalie picked her food in silence, avoiding my gaze. I tried once to get a conversation going by asking if she’d seen Otto, but she merely shrugged. I let it go. Otto had been my best friend since childhood. Now, he was like Natalie—half in the land of the living, half milling around the divide between death and eternity. I had Alexis to thank for that as well. But again, she had her reasons. And again, they were good ones.

My business phone—a twenty-dollar Walgreen’s burner—buzzed from my sock drawer in the master bedroom. I didn’t answer it. Actually, I never did. I checked my voicemail daily and returned phone calls from a public phone when necessary. These might’ve been unnecessary precautions, but I upheld them religiously. The anonymity of that phone was the only thing standing between me and a whole world of sickos.

I finished my dinner and shuffled into the bedroom to check for a voicemail. There were two waiting, both from the same caller. A woman with an accent that I couldn’t quite place.

The first, left a few hours earlier: “Hello. A trusted acquaintance gave me this number. I require your services. Will you please call me?”

The other from a few minutes ago: “Hello again. It’s imperative that I speak with you. Would you please call me as soon as possible? It’s a matter of life or death.

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