Three Days of Dominance Read Online Free

begging off and having a sick day, but how would she have described all this? A psychologist would rub his hands with glee at her symptoms. Still, one more bad one and she’d do it. She didn’t want someone getting hurt.
    Luckily there were no more that day. The visions had vanished back to wherever they’d come from. She just needed a rest, that was all.
    One morsel of brightness appeared when she pushed through the front doors of the station at the end of her shift. A slim figure detached himself from the brick wall of the shop across the street and sprinted across a gap in the traffic toward her. Nick Wilmer, teenage graffiti artist extraordinaire, who had more talent in his little finger than anyone deserved.
    “Hi,” he said, thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets and a sly grin on his face.
    “Hi, Nick.” She smiled, but couldn’t help surreptitiously dropping her gaze to examine his hands for signs of spray paint. He noticed.
    “Hey! If I got paint on me, it’s in a good cause. I gotta job now. Working for a place on Trent Street that lets me do freestyle signs now and then.” He grinned and scrubbed his hand through his scruffy blond mat of hair. “Some of it’s boring shit, but I’m getting paid.”
    “Yeah? What about that art competition?” There was no way she could see Nick being happy with just sign painting. “I thought you were going to try entering one or two?”
    He cleared his throat and flashed an even wider grin. “That’s really what I wanted to tell you. I won the new talent section. A hundred bucks. I wanted to say thanks for telling me about it.”
    She grinned back at him. “It’s your art that won it, Nick. Congratulations!”
    “Yeah, thanks. Maybe I’ll enter that big one someday, hey? The Archibald Prize or something. Maybe I’ll paint you?”
    That stunned her. “Uh, no. Thanks for the offer, Nick. I’d just probably melt your canvas.”
    “Ahh, now you’re being modest. You wait.”
    She blew a raspberry.
    He stepped away and ran backward a few paces. “See ya! See ya on my canvas next year!”
    “In your dreams, Nick!”
    But he only chuckled evilly before sprinting off down the street.
    She shook her head at his nonsense but couldn’t help a tired grin spreading across her own face. It was nice to see the boy getting somewhere after a spate of minor juvenile offences, mostly due to his graffiti tagging. Though a month ago she’d caught him hanging out with a gang known for glue sniffing as well as shoplifting and minor assaults to finance their nastier habits. But sometimes things came together the right way. This was why, some days, she wouldn’t swap being a cop for anything else.
    * * *
    The work day over, she pulled into the garage next to her little white weatherboard house and sat in the car for ten minutes with her head back, feeling the tension ebb and fatigue take its place.
    “The weekend,” Danii muttered. Two days to get over feeling like a piece of flattened litter in the middle of the highway. By Monday, she’d have forgotten the man at the lake.
    It was times like these she most missed her brother. He’d always been there for her to talk to, a shoulder to lean on, or at least someone she could send e-mails to—once he’d gone to Afghanistan with the SAS, that had been their only contact. Until four months ago, when he went missing on some mission chasing the Taliban in the mountains. Four months… She wasn’t stupid; he wasn’t ever coming back.
    She huffed, screwed up her face. Fact was, Jacob had never been one for dwelling on the past, or for that matter on doing anything other than enjoying life. She should get on with it, with living. Maybe she should go see a shrink, like her friends suggested. ’Cause having the world regularly go morbid shades of gray and feeling like her limbs and head were stuffed full of cold dough sucked big-time.
    “Rest and alcoholic intoxication. That’s what I need.” By then Killer was whining at the car