Free Deadline by Craig McLay Page A

you back to your apartment.”
    Colin rubbed his forehead. “Well that would be spiffing. Anyone except Detective Betts, of course. Otherwise the next dismembered body you’re called in on will probably be mine.”
    The hell with it
, Giordino thought.
    “You know what?” she said, pulling her keys out of her jacket pocket. “Where do you live? I’ll drop you there myself.”

-19-
    I t took Colin a while to realize that the pounding he heard was not coming from his head but his front door.
    He naturally assumed that it was the police coming to arrest him, so he just stayed where he was and waited for them to break down the door. It needed to be repaired anyway and the landlord had been dragging her feet. It was a crummy basement apartment and he hadn’t been forced to cough up a security deposit, so, as far as he was concerned, the cops were welcome to have at it with their battering rams. He wasn’t going to resist, but he wasn’t going to get out of bed voluntarily, either. He had gotten a grand total of four hours’ sleep in the last 48 hours. At least in jail he’d be able to catch up on all those hours he had missed.
    So he was a little surprised when the pounding continued, replaced intermittently with repeated doorbell ringing. His curiosity was starting to get the better of him. That wasn’t the cops, so who the hell wanted to talk to him so badly?
    He rolled out of bed and staggered to the front door. As soon as he had gotten home last night, he had peeled off his damp clothes, spent five minutes in a scalding hot shower and then collapsed. According to the clock on the dresser, it was 8:15 a.m. That meant his collapse had lasted a grand total of two hours and ten minutes.
    He yanked on the door, which took a couple of pulls to open. Standing on the landing was not Giordino and an army of tactical response officers in body armour, but it certainly wasn’t anyone else he would have expected to see out there, either.
    “Janice?”
    Janice Yu covered the student association beat for the
Sentinel
. She was a couple of years older than Colin and had a university degree in something he couldn’t remember off the top of his head. Sociology? Something like that. Her research was always impeccable, but she was inherently shy and disinclined to do a lot of interviews. Colin distinctly remembered at least a couple of occasions where he’d asked her to go out and get more opposing viewpoints to some of the Westhill Student Association initiatives. She seemed to be a natural conflict avoider, which, in Colin’s mind, meant she had no business working as a reporter.
    “Hi Colin,” she said. Colin noticed she was wearing a heavy-looking backpack over one shoulder and carrying a cardboard takeout tray with two large coffees in it. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to wake you up, but this is kind of important.”
    Colin looked down and realized that he was wearing only boxer shorts. An old pair of boxer shorts where the button was missing on the fly, in fact. If he crouched down or bent over, there wouldn’t be a lot that Janice wouldn’t know about him. He debated what to do. Invite her in or tell her to call back later?
    Ah, fuck it
. “That’s okay,” he said, motioning her inside. “Just give me a sec.”
    Janice stepped into Colin’s small living room area while he went back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “How did you know where I live?” he asked through the door.
    “CJ told me,” she said, looking around. The place was neater than she’d expected, with surprisingly modernist furnishings. It stood in sharp contrast to most student apartments in that the couch didn’t look like it had been scavenged from a curb side and the kitchen looked like somewhere a professional chef might settle in with only a few reservations. She took in the copper saucepans hanging from the racks, the carbon steel knife set and the crystal wine glasses with a raised eyebrow. There was evidently