Operation Whiplash Read Online Free Page B

“Don’t I get invited inside?”
    He thought it over, then backed away from the door after a moment and let me in. He was wary, though. By the time I got inside, he had the waist-high office counter between us. I knew he kept a hand gun within reach, like everyone else in the South.
    He still had a thin face which was usually decorated with a slow grin. His hair was a cross between reddish and sandy, his fair skin was lightly freckled, and he was so skinny every female over the age of fifteen automatically wanted to mother him. Jed Raymond was an unlikely-looking Casanova, but no careful-thinking man on the west coast of Florida turned his women loose and unhobbled in Jed’s vicinity. Which still had never hampered Jed greatly.
    He was looking me over again in the better light inside. Then he shook his head negatively. “I’m sorry if I seem a little slow,” he apologized.
    “Does the real estate business still require you to date the daughters of land developers, Jed?” I asked.
    His grin appeared. “I reckon I really should know you,” he said puzzledly. “Must be my head’s so fuzzed up with figures—” he glanced at his desk which was covered with yellow-paper scrawled notes and neatly typed forms, “—that I just can’t place you.”
    “Still doing your drinking at the Dixie Pig?” I continued. Jed had introduced me to Hazel at the Dixie Pig, a tavern she had inherited from her second husband, Lou Espada.
    Jed frowned. “That’s all changed now.” His head was cocked in a listening attitude while he tried to catalog my voice. “I just don’t recall—”
    A shadow stirred in the farthest corner of the office. It materialized into a huge brown-black German shepherd which stretched itself slowly. The big dog nosed the air, sniffed loudly, then padded toward the counter, its toenails clicking on the wooden floor. The shepherd raised himself on his hind legs, stretched across the counter, and put his front paws on my chest.
    “Kaiser!” Jed exclaimed in a scandalized tone. “I’m sorry,” he said to me for the second time. “Kaiser doesn’t usually have anything to do with strangers.” He paused as if he realized what he was saying. The dog lowered his wedge-shaped head onto my shoulder while his bushy tail wagged busily. “Say!” Jed exclaimed in a shocked tone. He couldn’t have looked more startled if he’d been struck by lightning.
    “That’s right,” I said, ruffling the shepherd’s shaggy fur. “Kaiser doesn’t need to recognize a face to know me, Jed.”
    The shepherd had been my dog before he was Jed’s. I’d rescued him from a roadside ditch after a hit-and-run driver had deliberately knocked the dog into it. During my stay in Hudson, Kaiser and I had been inseparable. When I had to leave hurriedly, I’d arranged for Jed to take over.
    It was fortunate for Jed that I had. Kaiser was the principal reason Jed was alive today. The dog might even be the reason I was alive, too. Jed, as a part-time deputy sheriff, had been point man on a roadblock set up to stop me. Jed didn’t know it was me in the oncoming car, but I could see him plainly in my headlights as I roared up on the two deputies, cruisers drawn across the highway with Jed standing in the gap between them, waving me down.
    I intended to try to smash my way through the space between the back-to-back cruisers whose snouts extended out onto the shoulders of the road, barring escape via that route. Jed was a good friend, but if he stood his ground he was going to have to take his chances, like I was taking mine.
    But then Kaiser had stepped out onto the road in front of Jed, head high, tail wagging. Somebody else will have to explain it to you, because I can’t, but I spun the wheel hard left. The car shot into a field where it hit a ditch. I catapulted out and broke a leg when I landed. I crawled back under the car and shot it out, handgun against rifles, until a deputy’s bullet exploded the gas tank in my face.