Free Still Life With Crows by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page B

made no move to give them to her. She took a step forward and snatched them.
    “Your car’s out back in the lot,” he said. “You can settle up the seventy-five-dollar towing fee later.”
    Corrie opened the door and went outside. After the air-conditioned jail, it felt like walking into hot soup. Blinking against the glare, she made her way around the corner and down the alley to the little parking lot behind the sheriff’s office. There was her Gremlin, and there, leaning against it, was the pervert in the black suit. As she approached, he stepped forward and opened the door for her. She got in without a word and slammed the door behind her. Slipping the key into the ignition, she cranked the engine, and after turning over a few times it coughed into life, laying down a huge cloud of oily smoke. The man in black stepped away. She waited a moment, then leaned out the window.
    “Thanks,” she said grudgingly.
    “It was my pleasure.”
    She pressed the accelerator and the car stalled. Shit.
    She restarted it, revved a few times. More smoke poured out. The FBI man was still there. What the hell did he want? She had to admit, he didn’t really look like a pervert. Curiosity finally got the better of her and she leaned out the window once again.
    “All right, Mr. Special Agent. What’s the catch?”
    “I’ll tell you while you give me a lift back to Winifred Kraus’s place. That’s where I’m staying.”
    Corrie Swanson hesitated, then opened the door. “Get in.” She swept a heap of McDonald’s trash off the passenger seat onto the floor. “I hope you’re not going to do something stupid.”
    The FBI agent smiled and slid in beside her as smoothly as a cat. “You can trust me, Miss Swanson. Can I trust you?”
    She looked at him. “No.”
    She popped the clutch and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving behind a pall of oilsmoke and a nice ten-inch pair of tire marks on the sheriff’s asphalt. As she careened out of the alley and slewed onto the street, she was gratified to see the stumpy little sheriff tumble angrily out the door and start to shout something just as her black contrail obliterated him from view.

Eleven
    T he commercial district of Medicine Creek, Kansas, consisted of three dun-colored blocks of brick and wooden shopfronts. It took Corrie three, perhaps four heartbeats to reach its edge. As she jammed on the accelerator, the rusted frame of the Gremlin began to shake. There was a pile of some three dozen tapes littering the space between the front seats: her favorite death metal, dark ambient, industrial, and grindcore music. She riffled through them with one hand, passing over Discharge, Shinjuku Thief, and Fleshcrawl before finally selecting Lustmord. The dislocated, eldritch sounds of “Heresy, Part I” began to fill the small car. Her mother refused to let her play her music out loud in the house, so she’d retrofitted a tape player to the old Gremlin.
    Speaking of her dear, nurturing parent, it was going to be a bitch going home. By now, her mother would be half drunk, half hungover—the worst combination. She decided she’d drop this Pendergast guy off at the old Kraus place, then go park under the powerlines and kill a few hours with a book.
    She glanced over at the FBI man. “So, what’s with the black suit? Somebody die?”
    “Like you, I’m rather partial to the color.”
    She snorted. “What’s this catch you were talking about?”
    “I need a car and driver.”
    Corrie had to laugh. “What, me and my stretch AMC Gremlin?”
    “I came by bus and I’m finding it rather inconvenient to be on foot.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding. The muffler is shot, the thing goes through a quart of oil a week, there’s no AC, and the interior is so full of fumes I’ve got to keep the windows open, even in winter.”
    “I propose compensation of a hundred dollars a day for the car and driver, plus a standard rate of thirty-one cents per mile for fuel and depreciation.”
    A