Her Last Scream Read Online Free

stopped by and brought you along. You were in uniform and couldn’t stay because you had to get back to work.”
    “Now it’s making sense,” I said. “The other stuff you mentioned …”
    Intuition v. logic. Poetry. The ladies.
    She smiled. “Must have been overheard at the Police Academy. Or elsewhere.”
    “Like good ol’ Uncle Harry?” I suggested.
    She did the lip-zip motion.
    “Harry never mentioned a niece in the department,” I said.
    “He was respecting my wishes. Our family connection might lead to me getting special treatment.”
    It took me aback. Most recruits with kin in the department would have used the connection like a backstage pass. I was getting to like this kid when the object of our conversation walked up, slapped a hand on my shoulder, and presented me with a can in a foam insulator bearing the logo of the New Orleans Saints. Beer, bless my mind-reading partner.
    “I discovered your secret, Harry,” I said, aiming the can toward Reinetta Early. “An empire of Nautilae is usurping the MPD.”
    “You had to find out sometime,” Harry said, sotto voce. “Just keep our kinship under your hat. Rein’s afraid it’ll –”
    A chubby, jolly woman by the picnic tables yelled “ Rein! ” and beaconed our comrade to view a photo in one of the many albums scattered across the white tables.
    Reinetta Early touched my hand, said, “See you gentlemen later.” She winked and spun away.
    “You could have told me,” I said to Harry, “that you had a niece enrolled at the Police Academy.”
    Harry looked into the trees, shaking his head.
    “I probably would have, Carson. If I’d known about it myself.”

6
     
    It was Saturday, sneaking-into-Boulder-day. Treeka crouched in a stand of trees beside the two-lane highway until she saw the bus cresting the hill in the distance before jumping out and waving it to a stop.
    The door closed and Treeka made a fast check of the passengers, though she had scant fear of recognition: the only people Tommy allowed Treeka to befriend were bible-thumpers from their church. Boulder had stores that sold marijuana, restaurants that didn’t believe in meat, and couples of the same sex kissing right out on the street. Everyone at the Parch Creek Pentecostal Church held that the Devil had poked his finger up through his roof one day and it broke through at Boulder. The congregation went to Denver instead, which was bad, but not a vent pipe from Hell.
    Treeka made her way to a seat, happy for the locale’s wide-ranging public-transportation system. Tommy had sold Treeka’s red Corolla one month after the union, saying too many bad things happened to women out on their own. After three months of a straitjacket existence on the eighty-acre ranch, Treeka had steeled up her courage and caught a bus into Boulder, eighteen miles away.
    Today would start like usual, Treeka figured. She’d wander Pearl Street, enjoying the happy faces of the tourists and listening to the street musicians playing guitars and trumpets and didgeridoos, long Australian horns with low, sad voices. Or she’d walk up to the Hill, the university area, and watch the faces of young college girls, their eyes bright and hopeful.
    It was on the Hill where she’d seen the words on that little white sign outside the brown house:
    W OMEN’S CRISIS C ENTER OF B OULDER
     
    Can I do it today? Treeka wondered as the trees flowed by the side of the bus. Can I walk to the door, turn the knob, and step inside?
     
     
    “So your very own niece joins the academy, goes through all the training, and becomes a Mobile cop?” I asked Harry. “All without telling you?”
    He rolled his eyes. “She was in Oxford, last I’d heard. Going to the University of Mississippi, pre-law. Then I find out she got an address in Mobile to fulfill residency requirements, applied to the academy. Naturally, I discovered all this after she was on the force for two weeks.”
    “Congratulations. You must have been a helluvan