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

startlingly yellow dress.  Her shoulders were bare.  She straightened herself and pushed her hair into her headband.  I shaded my eyes with my hand, to see her better.  A pair of fighter planes thundered overhead to the west, to Beirut.  We both watched them.
                 
                  When I looked down again I saw the fire.
                  As fast as an illusion, brighter than the midday light, it spread along the main street of Dura like a big yellow tiger.  There were no voices or noises, no movement of an excited or panic-stricken crowd.  Everything was swallowed up in the gray-green expanse, everything apart from an enormous pile of flames which towered above the tops of the trees in the Athenaeum garden.
                  Seized by a sense of disaster, I jumped out through the window.  Going down the way I had come up meant losing about twenty minutes, and eye contact with the scene as well.  What was left, then, was the slope, which stretched out before me, strewn with rocks and the prickly bushes.  I broke a branch off the oak and plunged into the undergrowth.  A goat track wound down to the valley.  I ran along it, jumping up from time to time to look, until I landed on all fours in a coil of barbed wire.
                  First I extricated my shirt, one barb at a time.  Then my trousers.  Eventually I was free enough to apply my handkerchief to my knee and one of my arms, which were both bleeding.  On the other side of the fence was the vegetable garden of the clinic, empty and neatly hoed.  I lifted the barbed wire with the oak branch and crawled underneath it, smelling the watered earth and rotting vegetables.  Through the clinic window I could see the upper part of the medicine cabinet.  I advanced slowly between the furrows, along a narrow irrigation channel.  At the edge of the garden was a ridge of loose earth.  Beyond it lay the wadi at the outskirts of the village.  I climbed up to the ridge to look.
                  "You're crushing my radishes."
                  I turned round.  The woman was leaning on a short hoe.  Her wet hair hung down to her shoulders, dampening a kind of military shirt she was wearing on top of the yellow dress.  "I've just sown them," she said.
                  "I'm sorry..."
                  She did not reply.  I shuffled in the loose earth, trying to find the safest way down.  At every step my feet sank deeper.  She sighed impatiently. 
                  "Wait, don't move," she said and vanished with her familiar, labored walk.  When she returned she was carrying a wooden plank.  She threw it down at my feet.  "Now you can cross."
    I felt quite ridiculous, spreading my hands out to the sides, balancing myself on the narrow board.  She waited in silence, her arms folded, her fingers indicating irritation.  When I was down she bent and picked up the plank. 
    "I hope I haven't caused too much damage," I said.
                  She nodded in the direction of the barbed wire.  "You'd better leave the way you came. The dogs won't let you pass in front."
                  We walked to the fence together.  She looked at my bandaged knee, then at my arm.  Beneath her piercing gaze I went down on my belly and crawled out of the garden.  After that, as far as my painful knee would allow, I ran to the cover of the bushes.   
                  The goat-track led in only one direction - back.  In the ruined building I fell, panting, onto the straw mattress.  There was no longer any point in hurrying.  The sense of urgency was replaced by a great weariness.  What was it about the place which made me feel so helpless?  I searched through my pockets.  I had lost my packet of cigarettes.  I found my lighter.  I collected the stubs on the floor and arranged them in front of me according to size.  They were