To Snatch a Thief Read Online Free Page A

sick, but Pretend-it makes me sneeze.’
    She let out the breath she’d been holding in. ‘Good, that’s good, Lex. Not the sneeze,’ she clarified as his brows knit again. ‘The spray tickles your nose I know, but it stops you getting really, really bad illnesses.’
    ‘Like daddy?’
    ‘Yep,’ she managed. ‘Daddy didn’t have any Preventix.’ The medical shield against most known diseases had been an unattainable luxury in their house. ‘So he got something the doctor’s couldn’t fix.’
    ‘Like Mummy.’
    The fact their mother had died giving birth to Lexie was something she dreaded having to tell him. One day he’d have to know she’d slipped through the system, but that was in the far distant future; it was too much weight for a child to carry. She took the coward’s way out. ‘That’s right. Look, I have to go, Lexie.’
    Watching his eyes begin to swim, she blew him a kiss. ‘It won’t be long now, Lex, I promise. Love you. Be good. Keep that klip in a really safe place so I can call you next week.’
    She broke the transmission and cried herself out.

.
    CHAPTER THREE
    For a dead person Sargeant Goodwin looked surprisingly happy. Her paper-thin lips were shaped into a kind of a smile. It gave Skye the willies.
    ‘Here,’ she grinned showing her teeth. ‘Lieutenant Hunter left this for you.’ She dumped a pile of hardcopy manuals and a compact E-reader on Skye’s desk. ‘Homework.’ Her black uniform made her sallow skin look even more ghastly.
    ‘Are you serious?’ She was gob-smacked. Wasn’t it bad enough the walking-dead had interrupted her girl-chat with Ashleigh without handing her… homework, for God’s sake?
    ‘I don’t do homework,’ Skye said. ‘I don’t do any sort of work, especially when it involves reading and remembering and writing stuff down. It’s not in my DNA.’
    The thin lips threatened to split her skull. ‘You do now. Ridiculous as this scheme is, this part’s made my day.’
    ‘But…’ she didn’t know what else to say, just watched the woman positively dance out of her room. Well hell.
    She rose from her prone position on the bed and poked the E-reader aside with the tip of a finger, tilting her head to scan the top manual’s title. Basic Points of Law. Well, double hell, and take a naked nose-dive into the flaming fires of damnation.
    That’s not bad, Skye. Pleased with her colourful imagery, she used the pat on her back to steady her nerves for what was to come.
    ‘ Congratulations on your purchase of a Whiz-Quiz KI-5000 the interactive touch sensitive educational tool, with photovoltaic glass screen and preloaded with five hundred multiple choice questions ,’ the stupid machine recited when she eventually dared to switch it on. ‘ What do you want me to do ?’
    ‘Walked right into that one didn’t you?’ Skye muttered. ‘Oh, okay. Start your silly programme.’
    ‘ Was that, start the second programme ?’
    ‘For goodness sake!’
    ‘ I’m sorry. Let’s try that again.’
    Teeth gritted, she glared at the thing, decided it was useless to argue with an inanimate object however much she wanted to fry its circuits, and admitted defeat. So, keeping a picture of Lexie’s sad little face in her mind as incentive, said more pleasantly, ‘Start the first quiz.’
    Outside the tinted windows dusk fell at three thirty, activating the light sensors. Two illuminated squares in her ceiling increased power by fifty percent. She leaned back in her chair, running a hand around her stiff neck. Allowing for food breaks and a couple of trips to the mirror to check her brain wasn’t actually dripping out of her ears, she’d been wading through manuals for five hours.
    God, she deserved a medal. No, Skye corrected, she deserved chocolate. Okay, she was going to have to settle for an all-nutritious, rehydrated, vitamin-enriched carob bar from a vending machine, but as she’d never tasted the real McCoy, she wasn’t about to be finicky. Idly,