Hot Read Online Free Page B

Hot
Book: Hot Read Online Free
Author: Julia Harper
Tags: FIC027020
Pages:
Go to
oil drum, but it contained caffeine. Caffeine was the only thing keeping him upright at the moment. They’d been in Winosha
     four hours. Before that, it’d taken him and Torelli over five hours to get to Winosha, driving the agency’s navy Crown Victoria.
     It was a damn good thing he had seniority, too, otherwise it would’ve been five hours of listening to idiot jazz. He was a
     Garth Brooks man himself. ’Course, Torelli had been looking a little twitchy by they time they hit Eau Claire. By that point
     they’d run through three Brooks tapes and a Johnny Cash for variety. And Eau Claire had been at least an hour before Winosha.
    “I think Fish
is
his first name, sir,” the deputy said.
    John had already forgotten the younger officer’s name, and the kid was turned just enough away so that he couldn’t read his
     name tag. The deputy was big and corn-fed, with almost invisible blond hair shorn to within a quarter-inch of his scalp. The
     kind of cop that would be good at taking down a drunk and disorderly on a small-town Friday night but might need help filling
     out the paperwork on Monday.
    “Don’t be an idiot,” Clemmons retorted. “Fish isn’t a Christian name.”
    Good point. The reply seemed to temporarily baffle the sheriff’s subordinate, and since no one else in the room was likely
     to know Fish’s name—last or first—there was a silence.
    They were all crowded into the meeting room in Winosha’s small municipal building. The room was utilitarian, with a thin,
     dark gray carpet and cinder-block walls painted light green. Some female hand had tried to decorate the room by printing little
     pink cats in a row around the top of the walls, nearly at the ceiling. There were a couple of long tables, a pile of metal
     folding chairs, the TV, and a coffeemaker with an empty pot.
    The fifth man in the room sat at the same table as John but didn’t seem to pay much attention to the conversation. Calvin
     Hyman glanced at his watch in a manner he no doubt considered surreptitious. John didn’t look at his own watch, but he knew
     it had to be getting on for midnight. Hyman was not only the First Wisconsin Bank of Winosha president but also the town mayor,
     and he was apparently running for the state legislative seat, as well. The man was tall and silver-haired and looked just
     like a bank president and town mayor should. Distinguished. But he was wearing silly green snakeskin boots, and John couldn’t
     entirely trust a man with such bad boot taste. Hyman had lectured them over an hour ago about the finer points of security
     at his bank, not that the security had done a whole lot of good in this case. Only one of the tellers had managed to slip
     an exploding ink device into a bag of money. Wherever they were, the robbers were traveling with lots of inked-up cash.
    Hyman stood and shook out his trousers. “Well, about done tonight, are you?”
    “No.” John smiled at the man.
    Hyman hesitated, then sat down again, visibly annoyed. John hid a grin and glanced at the screen displaying the bank surveillance
     tape. The little dark-haired teller was kicking the redheaded one again. They’d run the tape so many times he had the sequence
     of events memorized.
    “What’s she do?” he asked. He hadn’t met either of the tellers in person; they’d been questioned and sent home before he’d
     arrived. That was first on his mental to-do list for the morning: requestion the witnesses.
    The sheriff looked over, startled. “Who?”
    John gestured to the screen with his empty coffee cup. “Ms. Hastings there. You said she works only Saturdays at the bank.
     What’s she do the rest of the week?”
    “Turner’s the town librarian,” Hyman answered.
    John raised his eyebrows. “Really.”
    On the screen the woman rose slowly from the floor and took the black garbage bag from the robber wearing the SpongeBob SquarePants
     mask. She was a little thing, probably didn’t hit five-foot-two. The

Readers choose