Vile Blood Read Online Free

response to her wave.
    The town was quiet this time of night, and she could hear a snatch of guitar music swirling over the border fence, then nothing but the croon of the night insects. It was warm, the heat trapped by the shroud of cumulus that obscured the moon, and she felt beads of sweat on her upper lip as she left behind the last of the squat buildings, the pot-holed pavement stuttering out and giving way to dirt.
    Skye had reached the ruins of the roadhouse, just a tumble of rotten roof beams lying like a discarded game of pick up sticks on the concrete slab, when she heard that squeal of a laugh and then saw the big car parked off the road, the glow of a match coming from inside.
    She caught the acrid stink leaking from the lowered windows and hurried on, willing herself into invisibility but she hadn’t gone far, the water tower on its skinny legs still a distant silhouette, when she heard the growl of the engine and the headlamps warmed the sand around her.
    They toyed with her, letting her increase her stride to that of a speed-walker, the driver juicing the gas just enough to keep pace, letting her run, all the while holding their position behind her, only surging forward when she fled the road and onto the sand , the desert a flat table top stretching down to the border .
    And Skye ran, ran faster than she ever had at the track meets at school, pumping her legs and arms, sprinting, running from herself as much as she was running from the men. 
     
     

5
     
     
    Sheriff Dellbert Drum was smart enough to know that he was dumb as a box full of hammers, and it didn’t perturb him in the slightest, never had done. He held no truck with this business of broadening the mind, in fact he’d spent a lifetime narrowing his down to the very essentials. Being dumb didn’t preclude low cunning, and that he had in abundance.
    And he also possessed certain gifts: a photographic memory, for one. Growing up dyslexic and barely literate had made this a necessity. So, when tight-assed little Gene Martindale had turned his back on him at the crime scene and gone off to stare at the mess of body parts like one of those heads was going to tell him what in the name of sweet Jesus had befallen it, and Drum spied the ruined pair of eyeglasses nearly hidden in the dirt beneath a clump of agave, he knew immediately they belonged to the Chief Deputy’s sister.
    What was left of the glasses lay on the seat beside him, safely encased in a ziplock bag, as Drum drove the Ford deep into his own county. The frame of the glasses was broken in two, snapped at the bridge, and one of the lenses was gone. The other lens was cracked and splattered with blood. Not the girl’s blood, he was prepared to wager.
    What had made Drum so sure that these eyeglasses belonged to Skye Martindale was the blue paper clip employed in place of a screw where the left arm hinged. He’d been over to Earl’s diner for a cup of coffee a few days before, and when Skye had served him, barely lifting her feet as she scuffed her way to his booth, her mousy hair hanging over her face, he glimpsed the paper clip, and wondered how Martindale could let his sister be seen like that in polite company.
    So Drum hadn’t questioned the impulse that had him squatting down (surprisingly loose-limbed for such a big man) and snagging the broken eyeglasses, hiding them in his giant paw while he got into his vehicle. When he’d had a chance to examine the glasses, under the dome light of the Ford a safe distance from the crime scene, he’d been pleased to note a mousy blonde hair trapped in the grasp of the paper clip. A DNA test would tell a merry tale.
    As he drove along the main road leading toward what had once been the county seat and was now little more than a ghost town, Drum slid a cell phone from his top pocket and prodded at it with a massive digit. The phone purred for long enough to get him riled up, and he had to contain his temper when he heard his nephew’s