Free In the Shadow of Angels by Donnie J Burgess Page B

seriously injured.
    The thoughts passed through Beth’s mind in fractions of a second.
    She threw her car in park, flung the door open and ran to the gate. Her headlights were still on and shining directly at the walkway where she last saw Jezebel, but there was no one there. She scanned the ground floor and saw no one outside. Then she had another thought. She ran up to the room that Devin was in and pounded on the door. In her mind, Jezebel may have gone back to the room with Devin. There, they talked about how his evil witch of a wife pushed her over the railing. Then they made sweet love as they plotted her demise.
    That was the part of her mind that was being even less rational than the rest though. The more rational part of her mind just passed Devin on highway 62. Even if Jezebel was in his room, he wasn’t.
    She wasn’t sure what to do now. She was prepared for what she would do if Jezebel drove away, at least she knew what she had to do, even if she wasn’t completely prepared for it. She was prepared for what she was going to do if Jezebel was still laying there on the sidewalk, although she really hadn’t thought that through all that well either. She would have called for medical assistance for sure, but what would she tell the paramedics when they arrived? Or worse, the police? She hadn’t prepared for what she was going to do if Jezebel just disappeared.
    It was in a last ditch effort that she went back to the check in counter to ask if he saw her leave. His response was exactly what she would have expected, “I didn’t see anything.”
    Just perfect.
    She thought to ask one last question, “That was my husband in room 213. Did he turn in his key before he left?”
    “Look, lady,” the clerk replied, “not that it’s any of your business, but no one ever turns in their keys when they leave. Not even you did and you’re about as goody-goody as they get.”
    He made a valid point.
    For possibly the first time in her life, she felt utterly helpless. The only remaining option seemed to be to go turn herself in to the police and hope that Jezebel turned up somewhere unharmed.
    But first, she needed to call her lawyer.

Chapter 7
    Edward was sitting in his van watching, when Bethany approached Jezebel. He didn’t know who she was, but her face seemed vaguely familiar. He would have put even money on it being the wife of one of the guys she nailed for favors . He saw these confrontations a couple of times before, so it wasn’t that unusual. Jezebel could fend for herself and he thought she would be fine here as well. Especially so, considering the diminutive size of the woman approaching her. He always told himself he would intervene if it got too bad, but he never did.
    Edward put his camera down. This was something he didn’t want or need pictures of. This was the seedy underside of the, in his estimation, slightly less seedy blackmail game. A wife that is both mixing and confusing anger and jealousy, lashing out at the perceived cause. Jezebel was no more the cause of a cheating husband than a gun is the cause of a murder. Jezebel may be one of the tools their husband used to cheat, but the harsh reality is they should be angry with the other tool. Whether that tool was the husband or the one in his pants would be open to debate. Trying to punish Jezebel was like trying to punish the gun in the murder trial.
    This little blonde approached Jezebel with a purpose though. Edward wondered briefly how Jezebel could always maintain the composure to pull off indifference when anyone else would be terrified. It seems that if you experience something enough times, it becomes natural. Jezebel showed no more concern than she would have shown if the woman was approaching her with a map asking directions. She was one cool operator and that was increasingly troublesome to Edward, being a chief partner in crime.
    It played out exactly as he expected. There was much heated debate and posturing, this all coming from