Free The Dark of Day by Barbara Parker Page B

red light.
    Caught by the car ahead of her, Judy watched the taillights on the Audi getting smaller. When the light turned green, she gunned the engine and zigzagged through traffic, but he was gone.
    She hit the steering wheel and laughed out loud. “Damn. You’re good.”

chapter SEVEN

    after two tries on the doorbell, Kylie stepped off the front porch and walked around to the side of the house. The only car under the portico was a twenty-year-old Buick sedan. She had come all this way for nothing. She hadn’t called first because it would have been too easy for C.J. to say no on the phone.
    She heard a noise from behind the house. It sounded like an electric saw. Kylie followed a mossy brick path to a gate, looked through the bars, and saw shade trees, an arbor with hanging baskets of orchids, and, beyond that, a stucco cottage painted the same white as the main house. A power cord came out the screen door of the cottage, down the steps, and over to the back wall, which Kylie couldn’t see from where she stood.
    The saw started up again. She tried the latch. It opened.
    A long ladder reached the second floor, and a skinny man in a straw hat stood near the top holding a jigsaw against a PVC pipe coming out of the wall. Bits of white plastic flew everywhere. He turned off the saw, hung it on an S-hook, and brushed off the end of the pipe.
    Kylie stepped closer. “Excuse me? Sir?”

    The straw hat turned. Under the brim she could make out a pair of thick glasses, a small gray mustache, and a face lined with wrinkles. “We’re not buying anything.”
    â€œI’m looking for C.J. Dunn. This is her house, isn’t it?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œIs she home?”
    â€œNot right now. And who might you be?”
    â€œKylie Willis. My mother is a friend of hers.”
    He nodded slowly. “Seems I’ve heard the name.”
    â€œWill Ms. Dunn be back?”
    â€œI expect so. She lives here.” He reached into a bucket hanging off another hook and took out a short piece of pipe with a ninety-degree angle. “Said she’d be here about nine o’clock. You’re free to wait.”
    With a sigh, Kylie sat on the bench under the tree. She checked her watch: ten minutes past. A breeze came through, cooling her bare arms and legs. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the hem of her T-SHIRT. Five minutes ago, getting out of her borrowed car, she had seen how the street came to a dead end at the water, with a little park at the turnaround, the kind of street she’d live on if she had the money.
    â€œDad-drat it!” The old man stared down at the grass. “Girl! Get that for me, will you? That little can of PVC cement.”
    Kylie put her glasses back on, found the can, and went up the ladder. “What are you doing?”
    â€œDiverting water from the shower drain to that barrel there.” He unscrewed the cap and painted glue around the end of the pipe coming out of the wall, then daubed the brush into the angled connector. “We’re in a drought, in case you hadn’t noticed. We used to have dry spells, but not like this.”
    â€œGlobal warming,” she said, going down the ladder again.
    â€œNo! It’s too many idiots moving down here. Greed. Stupidity. We’re paying the price now, boy-oh-boy, are we. When I was your age, Miami was a paradise. Pure spring water bubbled right up through the aquifer into Biscayne Bay. There were rapids in the Miami River, till they blew it up with dynamite and dredged it. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

    He pressed the connector onto the end of the pipe, grunting, then reached into the bucket again and came out with a red-handled valve on a threaded piece. He screwed the piece into the connector. “Now give me the hose. It’s over there, by the barrel.”
    He pointed toward a blue plastic barrel lying on its side under a window. She couldn’t see