Free Remembering Dresden (Jack Turner Suspense Series Book 2) by Dan Walsh

like this. Especially the stretches. Rachel laughed out loud the first time he’d done them in front of her. Confident he was alone, he found some level ground under a shady tree and started.
    Jack had begun learning Muay Thai nine months ago, about three months after Nigel Avery had tried to kill him. It had taken that long for Jack’s gunshot wound to heal up to where he could work out without pain. During that ordeal, Jack realized how helpless and defenseless he truly was. He’d never thought about owning a gun. And he was 100% sure he couldn’t properly defend himself in a fistfight. He’d be knocked out in the first ten seconds.
    Neither of those things were true of him now.
    In Muay Thai, Jack was still considered a novice, but he felt reasonably sure he already knew enough to adequately defend himself. And with the help of Sergeant Joe Boyd, the police detective who’d saved his life, Jack now owned a 9mm Glock and a concealed weapons permit. The gun made Rachel a little nervous, but considering what they had been through, she completely understood.
    Jack finished with his stretches, then moved into his stance and started shadow boxing, working on his footwork then his basic punches. After several minutes, he added in some elbow strikes and knee kicks. It had been awhile since Jack pretended he was whopping on Nigel Avery during his workout. When he’d first started, he imagined beating the crap out of Avery every time. Eventually, the reality that Avery was dead and could never hurt Jack again took hold, and he was able to let it go.
    But he knew, he never wanted to feel that helpless again.
     
     
    After thirty minutes, Jack finished his workout and headed inside for a shower. As he got dressed, he noticed the time. There really wasn’t enough time to dig in and do more research. Not with Rachel coming for dinner. Sizing up the kinds of food he had brought with him, sometime in the next hour or so he really needed to head down to the store and buy a few things. He walked over to the dinette table and began carefully placing everything he’d spread out back into the plastic container. They needed to eat on this table in a couple of hours.
    The last thing he picked up was the one fiction book he’d brought along, a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five . Jack had read it many years ago but thought, in light of his decision to pursue the Dresden bombing for his dissertation, it might be a good idea to read it again. It wasn’t exactly a war novel and not exactly about Dresden. Vonnegut had elected to depict the Dresden bombing, which he experienced firsthand as a POW, in bits and pieces throughout a unique, if not bizarre, sci-fi story about a guy named Billy Pilgrim who gets “unstuck” in time. One of the scenes Pilgrim keeps revisiting is the bombing and aftermath of Dresden.
    Jack walked the novel over to the recliner and sat down. It was pretty dog-eared and the pages had yellowed, but it wasn’t falling apart. He started to read the back cover when his eyes glanced above the book toward one of the two bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. People’s bookshelves had always fascinated him. You could tell a lot about a person by the books they kept in their personal bookcases. Of course with his generation and the ones coming up behind him, it was something of a dying art. Nowadays, people could store several bookcases, even entire libraries on their tablets.
    Jack set the novel down on the armrest and stood. His head tilted and his eyes began to roam slowly across the top shelves, taking in the titles. Interesting. As he’d noticed before, most of them were hardbacks. Quite a few books about World War II. Some about the aftermath of the war, the creation of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War era with the Soviets. In some of the middle shelves, Jack noticed several books weren’t written in English. Some were in Spanish. Quite a few were in German. Judging by the age of the