Sour Candy Read Online Free Page A

the most elaborate pranks he’d ever seen. Any
minute now the cops would break character and reveal that he’d been
had. You’re a good
sport , they’d say, right before they let
him out into an audience of their coconspirators. Lori would be
there, laughing and apologizing for being in on the game, for maybe
being the source of it. But such reasoning faltered at the notion
that anyone would think almost killing him and destroying his car
would be good for a laugh.
    “ Assuming you’re right,”
Cortez asked, with no more warmth in his tone than before. “How
would the kid get in?”
    “ I don’t know, but I’m
guessing if she went to the trouble of finding out where I live,
then she wouldn’t stop at just dropping him outside. Did your men
check for signs of a break-in?”
    “ Our men? ” Marsh asked. “One of
those men was
Officer Patricia Velasquez.”
    “ Oh for fuck sake, you know
I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “ Then you should have put it
differently.”
    “ And watch your language,”
Cortez added.
    “ Sorry, sorry.” One arm
cradling his injured ribs, he hissed air through his teeth, afraid
to take as deep a breath as the situation demanded. Clarity would
come, he knew. He just needed to maintain control. No matter how
bizarre the situation seemed in that moment, he knew the truth and
could prove it. A chance encounter with an insane woman had knocked
his world off-kilter, but if he kept his cool and didn’t antagonize
the detectives any further, he could get them to see
sense.
    “ Any word from your
girlfriend?” Cortez asked.
    They had allowed him to use the car
charger to juice up his phone long enough to turn it on for a few
minutes, but there were no missed calls and no texts from Lori,
only another reminder from Verizon that his phone bill was due. His
attempts to call her had gone straight to voicemail.
    “ No.”
    “ Is that
unusual?”
    “ Very. I left her at home
and she knew I’d been in an accident. She would have waited there
or at least tried to call me back. Maybe she panicked when I didn’t
answer and checked out the hospitals or the police
station.”
    They passed the gaudy neon lights of
Ming’s Chinese Restaurant, a favorite haunt of Phil and Lori’s.
They had eaten there the night before last.
    “ If she’d gone to the
station,” Cortez said, “we’d know by now, so rule that out. And if
you weren’t at the hospital, she’d have come back home to see if
you were there, right?”
    “ Right.”
    “ You guys been having
problems lately?”
    “ What? No.”
    “ No reason you can think of
why she wouldn’t answer the phone?”
    “ None.”
    Where the hell are you,
Lori?
    Her absence from the house bothered
him a great deal, and not merely because she represented his sole
anchor in an otherwise unmoored day. When he’d left, it had been
with the expectation that they would lounge together in front of
the TV, enveloped in a chocolate coma and each other. They’d had
problems in the past, of course—what couple didn’t?—but nothing to
explain her just up and vanishing from the house without a call to
let him know where she was going. It just wasn’t like
her.
    “ Well,” Cortez said, as he
turned onto Grady Avenue, a street lined with elms and ordinary
houses and ornate streetlights, a street unremarkable but for the
insidious implication of what might be awaiting him there. “I guess
we’ll see soon enough.”
    They had to be wrong. He willed them
to be wrong. His life thus-far remained unpunctuated by drama
beyond the typical expected of a man his age. He had a decent job
at a respectable bank. He had more acquaintances than friends, but
that was hardly anything new. He was moderately attractive (on a
good day). Unremarkable. This new element simply did not fit and
thus his mind could not process it. He’d have had an easier time
believing that aliens had invaded the town.
    Cortez pulled the car to a halt in the
driveway. Lori’s Volkswagen was