Blood Memory Read Online Free Page B

start, okay? Not tonight.” My throat tightens, and a sour taste fills my mouth. “I’m in this situation because I put myself in it.”
    “I know, but—”
    “Please.” I make a fist to stop my right hand from shaking. “Okay?”
    This time Sean heeds the hysteria in my voice. When we reach the Audi, he takes my keys, unlocks the door, and loads my cases into the backseat. Then he looks back up the block, toward the LeGendre house, probably to make sure Piazza isn’t watching us. That he has to do this, even now, is like a knife in my belly.
    “Tell me what’s really going on,” he says, turning back to me. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
    Yes. But I’m not going to play that particular scene here. Not now. Not like this. Even I cling to some fairy-tale dreams, and this wet street after a murder isn’t part of them. “I can’t do this,” I tell him. It’s all I can manage.
    His green eyes widen in a silent plea. They have a remarkable intensity sometimes. “We have to talk, Cat. Tonight.”
    I don’t reply.
    “I’ll get away as soon as I can,” he promises.
    “All right,” I say, knowing it’s the only way to get out of here. “There’s Captain Piazza.”
    Sean’s head whips to the left. “Where?”
    Another knife thrust. “I thought I saw her. You’d better get back in there.”
    He squeezes my upper arms, then opens the door of the Audi and helps me inside. “Be careful driving home.”
    “Don’t worry about me.”
    Instead of leaving, he kneels in the open door, clasps my left wrist, and speaks with genuine urgency. “I am worried about you. What is it? I know you, damn it. Tell me!”
    I crank the engine and pull slowly away from the curb, leaving Sean no choice but to let go of my wrist.
    “Cat!” he yells, but I close the door and drive on, leaving him standing in the wet street staring after my taillights.
    “I’m pregnant,” I tell him, far too late.
     
    Two miles from my house on Lake Pontchartrain, I realize I can’t go home. If I do, the walls will close around me like suffocating pillows, and I’ll pace the shrinking rooms like a madwoman until Sean pulls into the garage and lets down the door with his remote control. Every word he says after that I will hear against a ticking clock that marks the time remaining before he has to go home to his wife and kids. And I absolutely cannot endure that tonight.
    Normally, after working a crime scene, I stop at a liquor store and buy a bottle of vodka. But not tonight. The little agglomeration of cells growing inside me is the only pure thing in my life right now, and I will not do it injury. Even if it means the screaming heebie-jeebies and a rubber room. That’s the only thing I’m sure of this minute.
    I tried to go cold turkey in the beginning, thinking it was best for the baby. Twenty hours into that particular mistake, I got the shakes so bad I couldn’t unzip my jeans to pee. A couple of hours later, I started seeing snakes in the house. A small rattler in a corner of the kitchen, curled into a deadly spiral. A fat cottonmouth moccasin hanging from a fern planter in the living room. A brilliantly hued coral snake sunning itself in the painful glare by the glass doors in the den. All lethal, all planning to slither up to me, bury their fangs in my flesh, and not let go until every drop of poison in their venom sacs had been injected into me.
    Hello delirium tremens …
    Cold turkey wasn’t going to cut it. I hit my medical books, which told me that the first forty-eight hours of withdrawal would be the worst. Addiction specialists prescribe Valium to blunt the physical symptoms while the psychological addiction is cured, but Valium can cause cleft palate in a developing fetus, the risk depending on dosage and duration of use. The full-blown d.t.’s, on the other hand, can cause seizure, stroke, and death in the mother. This choice of evils was ultimately no choice at all. I know a dozen oral surgeons