Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train Read Online Free

taken by someone else. The man in the green trench coat. She’d hoped not to run into him again. No thanks necessary. No explanations. No promises to “send you a check if you don’t mind giving me your name and address.”
    Having inadvertently made eye contact, she nodded and he nodded back but didn’t speak. His hair a greasy brown rat’s nest, his khaki pants soiled with several different stains, he looked homeless and lost. Strangely though, his trench coat looked fresh and new.
    Lacy recalled seeing vending machines, but where? When she stepped into the toilet area, she had looked through to the next car. It seemed to have a sort of buffet or snack bar. She grabbed her toothpaste and brush, wobbled through the join between cars and found a vending machine that dispensed bottled water. She backtracked into the vestibule, the track noises assailing her ears again, and stepped into the hole-in-the-floor toilet where she took a wide stance and managed to crack open the bottle, brush and rinse her teeth, and spit into the hole—all without dropping anything. She returned to the same seat, but now the scruffy man was gone. He’d left his trench coat on the back of his vacant seat, as if he planned to return.
    She studied the map she’d bought when she changed trains in Konya. Although it was a great map for archaeology, with dozens of ancient sites marked in this section of the country, all the words were in German. They hadn’t had one in English. Which of these was Paul’s dig site? Or was his even marked? The train was entering a region that the map showed to be nearly blank compared to the western coast Lacy had left behind. Fewer roads, fewer towns.
    Lacy folded the map, stood, and stretched. At that moment she saw something fly past the window. Quickly. So fast it was only a blur, but she got a good enough glimpse to know it had flown out from the train itself. Most likely from the leading end of the very car where she now stood. A man. Body limp. Khaki pants.
    “Stop the train!”
    * * *
    Lacy screamed it out, and her fellow passengers all jumped, startled, but none reacted as if they understood her words. “A man fell out! A man!” she shrieked, pointing to the window, but by now the train was past the point where he must have landed. Emergency. Stop train. Can’t stop train. Driver is way up front. Many cars away. Must be a way! How can you stop a train? Emergency, handle, break glass—something. They must have something.
    Hadn’t she just seen something red? Something behind a glass? Where? She looked around the car, then remembered. She dashed through the door at the end of the car and into the vestibule where she was surrounded by more doors leading to the next car, to the toilet, and to the outside. A rectangle of plate glass embedded in the bulkhead caught her attention. Behind the glass, a bright red handle. Though she couldn’t read the Turkish instructions, her common sense told her to break the glass and do something to that handle.
    Lacy yanked off one boot and smashed the glass. She pulled on the handle and, for good measure, twisted it. A deafening alarm sounded immediately as if coming from all directions at once. The train screeched to a halt, metal banging against metal.
    She flew to the window in the exterior door and saw that the ground sloped down from the tracks to a dry, dusty field some ten feet below. Where was he? Not here. How far had the train traveled between the time she saw him fly by and the time the train actually stopped? Lacy tried the door handle and found that it did open. She hurried down the steep steps of the train to the ground and continued a few feet. She heard shouts and looked toward the head of the train. Several uniformed men were already gathering outside the engine. She turned away from them to scan the slope in the opposite direction, looking for a sign of khaki, a prone human form—anything. Passengers all along the train began opening windows, poking