Free Killer Commute by Marlys Millhiser Page A

across his forehead, and an incredibly expressive face. He had a carefully maintained and muscular body but a relaxed, lazylike posture and flowing movement that, along with the sardonic expression, mocked your expectations.
    Charlie would miss them both, bless them.
    She didn’t know the president of Esterhazie Concrete well, but his expression was a combination of concern and anger. Which made sense. Because of Charlie’s family, his had become involved in a murder. His son was infatuated with her daughter. Libby had once schemed to get them married because Ed belonged to the yacht club and she wanted entrance to the teenage social set and activities available there.
    But Ed had been about to marry for the second time—Doug’s mother having moved to Florida with his sister and a new husband. Dorothy and the second marriage lasted about a year. And Edward Esterhazie was once again an available millionaire or billionaire or whatever the rich did now. Wealth was so relative these days.
    Ed’s handsome was a more responsible one than Larry Mann’s. A white bandage around his head, the craggy face of a sea-going yachtsman, the latent good humor of a man who’d made it.
    The mortician must have left her contacts in because she could see them so well.
    Hey, hold on here. How come you see when you’re dead but not hear?
    And then a sharp pain in one ear as if God had grown impatient and hit her up the side of the head. And then far away and barely discernable, Maggie Stutzman said, “Hey, Greene, you going to loll around all day?”
    And her stupid pale face with the snapping blue eyes joined the guy faces above Charlie. Next was Libby, who said nothing but did look like she cared, and who still sported three healthy zits.
    â€œI’m not dead,” Charlie heard herself say but as though through several feet of cotton.
    *   *   *
    Charlie sat upright in a hospital bed trying to convince Maggie and Larry that the compound had to be watched tonight because somebody blew the gate apart to get entrance to Jeremy’s house to steal tons of cash he must have stored there in order not to have to write checks for things. He could take cash in to a bank and get a money order for big stuff, pay the rest in cash. Probably what he was murdered for. That’s why he wired the compound. Her hearing may be almost destroyed but her mind was working pretty damn good, and she was dizzy with relief to not have been formaldehyded. Charlie knew she was babbling while slurping down clear broth, Jell-O, tasteless tea, and buttered toast.
    Charlie was being held for observation and without bail at Community Hospital. She’d been scanned and X rayed and probed and prodded, all bodily fluids microscoped, her eyes and ears and nose tested by instruments of torture too numerous to remember. Nobody would give her an opinion on anything. But the layer of cotton lurking between Charlie and the world of sound seemed to grow thicker. She could hear herself now, but when Maggie and Larry talked it was distant, muffled, impenetrable.
    â€œWait, can somebody lend me some money?” Her purse had accompanied her, probably because it contained her identity and insurance card, which here was the same thing. But her cash, which was minimal, had been removed to a safe somewhere to be returned to her upon her release to protect the hospital from responsibility. Her credit cards were still there, though. Maggie handed her ten and Larry a twenty.
    Charlie knew the denominations only because she held the bills an inch away from her eyeballs. Maggie had thought to bring her lens case and solution and her eyes were soaking. Her contacts had been in too long with her eyes closed and needed it.
    She knew her two best friends watched her, slid glances at each other, and were talking, but she couldn’t determine if they were talking to her or to each other about her on the other side of the yards-thick