Leopard Dreaming Read Online Free Page B

to be facing the shortest path to run out.’
    ‘You’ve got that feeling too, huh?’
    ‘Squeak, squeak, and Matron Maddy’s the cheese.’
    ‘If there’s trouble here, it’s still off my radar.’
    ‘Nothing stirring upstairs?’
    ‘Nothing that shouldn’t be stirring for work on a weekday anyhow. Same goes aboard all of the nearest sloops. Further out may be a different story. These Night Owls only have a range of three clicks in this mist. Not great for binoculars in day mode.’
    Mira chewed on her lip, trying to keep her thoughts clear. ‘No sign of Maddy yesterday yet either. I wonder: instead of doing a full sweep of the alley for each time frame, maybe I should scan each section in here thoroughly before we pass each bend.’
    ‘Won’t that hurt more, changing shades back and forward so often?’
    Mira shrugged and moved to brace herself against the wall again. ‘If it wasn’t for Maddy, I’d still be in a straitjacket at Serenity. Or worse. A lab rat for military research.’
    Clever Colonel , she thought. He knew exactly how to pull her strings to get her to hunt him here.Except she couldn’t imagine any reason why Kitching would try to lure her to this particular alley using a text message from the matron’s phone. She had to be missing something. A vital clue.
    ‘More glass,’ Lockman warned her.
    Mira turned to check, and found Kitching’s ghost with his back to her, crouched in the middle of the alley, looking lankier and creepier than ever in a dark dripping wetsuit — and doing something to a slim, naked body sprawled out in front of him.
    Young, blond and … face down.
    A teenaged male.
    Relief swept over her — but left her guilty for feeling it when someone else was still dead. It wasn’t Maddy lying there, but the adolescent would never take another breath.
    Maybelline’s superman.
    His boyish shoulders and hips lent him a youthful innocence beneath all the gothic body art — tattoos from neck to toes with snakes and spiders; so thick on most parts of his body they covered him like winter clothes.
    A ghostly snake slithered along a nearby wall, away from the body. Strange place for a harmless tree snake, Mira thought, but at that pace it wouldn’t be around for long.
    Kitching rose and headed out of the alley; one snake outpacing the other towards the estuary. He didn’t look back but Mira did, and saw what he’d left behind.
    A stuffed toy in the halo of blood.
    A leopard with diamond-shaped eyes.
    Blind like her, yet watching the ghostly killer walk away.

TWO
    L ockman scanned the apartment balconies over the inn, keeping watch for any trouble above and behind them. He heard Mira stop and saw the colour run from her face.
    Reflex snapped his hand inside his jacket and he swung about with his Glock drawn, silencer on, in search of a target before logic reminded him that whatever had spooked her had happened yesterday.
    His hands trembled with unspent adrenaline; too quick on the draw and too ready to kill if the situation presented. Demons that first awakened in the jungles of East Timor. His darkest secret; his fear that they’d set him down the same fatal path that had taken his father. A ticking time bomb. A man who’d burst onto a city street in pursuit of rebel militia, and fired shots that missed his targets and struck a bus full of school children.
    Outcast.
    Out of control.
    Out of his mind and dead now.
    In the end, his father had been so lost, he’d been unable to defend himself, let alone his family; a wife, two daughters and son. Lockman’s sisters seemed fine;one a mother herself now and the other in high school. But Lockman knew all the symptoms of stage one off by heart now: edginess, headaches, insomnia — and it wasn’t the killing that bothered him. So far, he’d never hurt anyone who hadn’t deserved it. Stage one complete. Stage two in progress. The pattern made him worry whether the army had trained the killer into him, or merely awakened it from