Free The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) by Amnon Jackont

screen into the dark corridor. 
                  "Amen, amen, amen," the children chanted at the empty altar.  I passed through and went out, just as a military truck crossed the square.  I waited beneath the colonnade until it had disappeared.  Then I went down the steps and plunged into the market.
     
         I do not usually make a study of the people in places where I am about to act.  Something in my mind insists on connecting only to objects that have an enduring, challenging quality: buildings, barriers, armor.  But something undefined occurred in the market among the vendors of household goods, cheap clothing and food as I passed them.  Eyes were fixed into my back.  Voices fell silent as I came within hearing.  It was impossible to ignore.  I found myself peering at a mass of impassive faces, clutching glances which had not managed to escape, a movement of an eye, a friendly curl of a mouth, an imperceptible smile.  I lingered in the doorway of a grocery shop.  A fat man wearing a robe was untying a sack of beans.  I could see that he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.  In the neighboring shop a chicken was cackling above the slaughtering block.  The butcher, knife in hand, stood and watched me too.  In fact, the whole market was watching me.  Checking every step.  It was a new kind of loneliness: in the past I had been hidden and the world open.  Today I was walking about exposed while the world around me was an enigma.
                  I needed an advantage of some kind - height, distance, perhaps both of them - which would conceal the uncertainty in me, the beginnings of apprehension.  The movement of the sun in the sky cast the shadow of the mountain over the village.  Only the peak remained golden.  Slowly, so as not to arouse the hunting instinct, I turned in its direction.
                  As I walked out of the village I noticed things I had missed in years of city life: hoof-prints of animals in the dust, the snake skin on the ground, tendrils of wild vines hugging an old pine tree to death.  By the time I reached the clinic my tongue was dry and my face stiff with dust.  The sandy square was empty.  The dogs lay in a dark huddle in the shade of the sycamore.  A tap was dripping onto a bed of mint.  Parched with thirst, I stepped carefully into the sandy square.  From the foot of the sycamore several tails sent me a lazy warning.  I retreated to the road.  A little further along, up the hill, toward the peak, a row of barbed wire had been unrolled between two barrels, upon one of which was written "Border Ahead," and on the other, "Caution: No Man's Land."   I knelt down and peered beyond the barrier.  There were no tracks but neither were there any hollows or hillocks to indicate mines.  I went round the barrels and walked carefully up the road, beside a sea of briars.
                  When I reached the top I looked back.  The village lay stretched out on the edge of the abyss, looking terribly vulnerable.  The surrounding hills extended a green carpet on which the conflagrations of war had left dark stains, boils on the coat of a dog.  What explosion could I make that would impress anyone in this scorched land?
                  A marten flew out of the bushes and disappeared behind the walls of a ruined, roofless building.  A path of crushed grass led to the remains of the entrance.  I peeped in through the window.  The walls were charred, bonfires had blackened the last few floor tiles and the broad trunk of an oak was growing in the middle.  I jumped in.  Beyond the trunk of the oak, beside a wall which had been cleaned of soot, lay a straw mattress and a tattered blanket.  Cigarette stubs were scattered around it.
                  From the window I could look down at the back garden of the clinic.  The woman was there, hoeing the vegetable garden.  She was wearing a short,