Free Black Lightning by John Saul

wing-backed chair instead of returning to her desk.
    “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” she said, approaching the subject with the directness for which she was famous throughout the school. “Your father’s secretary just called.”
    “Rita?” Heather breathed. “Rita Alvarez?”
    Mrs. Garrett nodded. “Your father has apparently had a heart attack. He’s been taken to the hospital, and your mother wants you to go there right away. Mrs. Alvarez is picking your brother up at his school, then she’ll come—”
    But Heather Jeffers was no longer listening to Olivia Garrett. Instead she was trying to absorb what she had just been told. Her father? In the hospital?
    A heart attack?
    If her mother wanted her to go to the hospital—and Kevin, too—it must be serious! But just this morning he’d been fine! He’d gone out jogging, and when he’d come back, he hadn’t even been out of breath. So how could he have a heart attack?
    Suddenly fifteen-year-old Heather felt far younger than she was, and far more vulnerable.
    Was her father going to die?



CHAPTER 8

    T hey’d been in the air almost two hours, and if the uncomfortable silence between Anne Jeffers and him was going to go on for another three, Mark Blakemoor decided, he’d have a couple of drinks and then try to get some sleep.
    He’d done far too much drinking lately, though, especially in the ten months since Patsy had left. Eighteen years and then the marriage had simply been over. All she’d said was that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she couldn’t deal with being a cop’s wife any longer. But what else could he do? He couldn’t change careers—didn’t even want to. On the other hand, Patsy had complained about his drinking, too, and if he wanted to be really honest about it, she was right—he had been drinking too much. Besides, even one drink on an airplane always left him with a hangover. Better to spend the time finding out what, if anything, Richard Kraven had told Anne Jeffers before he’d died.
    “Anything you want to talk about?” he asked, shifting his muscular six-foot-two, 210-pound frame a fraction of an inch in a futile effort to make himself more comfortable in the cramped seat.
    Anne had been staring out the window at the endless expanse of clouds that lay in an unbroken blanket a few thousand feet below the plane, and at first the detective’s words didn’t register. Then she sighed, rubbed at her stiffening neck and glanced over at him. “About Glen?” she asked, deliberately pretending she couldn’t read Blakemoor like a book. From what she’d gathered about his recent divorce, the man had barely paid any attention to his own wife when he’d been married to her; so why on earth would he now be interested in her husband, whom he didn’t even know? Then she relented: after all, Blakemoor had been willing to give up his seat on this flight, even though it hadn’t come to that. “Or is it Richard Kraven you want to talk about?”
    “Either way,” Blakemoor replied. “But I guess I’m not real good with the sympathy thing. Patsy always used to say—” He cut his own words short, reddening slightly. “Oh, the hell with what Patsy used to say, right? So come on, give. What did Kraven say? I’ve got a lot of open cases back home. If you can close even one of them for me, it’d sure help.”
    Anne shook her head. “Believe me, Mark, if he’d said anything relevant, I’d tell you. Even if I didn’t use it in a story, I’d still tell you. You’ve put too much effort into this for too many years. But it was the same old thing: he didn’t have anything to do with anything, he was framed, there’s a conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
    The detective’s eyes narrowed darkly. “You’d think a man’d want to go to his grave with a clean conscience, wouldn’t you? But not Kraven. Coldest son of a bitch I ever saw.” Silence fell between them again as each retreated to his own