Spooky Business (The Spectral Files #3) - S.E. Harmon Page 0,2

look up the phrase everything you want to know.” He crossed his massive arms over his chest. “I have to hit the john.”

“Thanks for the update on your bodily functions,” I said dryly. “I’ll get the CO.”

I’d like to say I got up in a dignified manner. The truth was I almost knocked over my chair in relief. I could’ve used a break two hours ago, but I couldn’t be the first to say so. Power was important to inmates because everything in prison was designed to show them that they didn’t have any.

I rapped sharply on the glass. Silence. I forced myself to wait another twenty seconds before knocking again. They were probably just a little slow on the gate today. Maybe they dropped their keys. Sprained a fucking ankle. Fell down an elevator shaft.

What the fuck is taking so long?

My back was tense as a drawn bowstring as I knuckled the window again. I refused to show any fear—that was just what Kane wanted. He liked to keep people off-balance and unsettled. He didn’t like to just turn the tables, he wanted to flip them and set them on fire.

When the chains shackling his legs made a scraping noise against the floor, my shoulders jumped. I turned quickly and the hell with how it looked.

“Relax,” Kane said as he stood and stretched languidly. “It’s Brenda’s birthday today. They probably stopped by the breakroom to help her celebrate.”

I didn’t know who Brenda was, but that was fucking fantastic. Now I was alone and unsupervised in a room with a serial killer, who had fists like Christmas hams. It would certainly make a fitting epitaph on my tombstone: Here lies Rain Christensen, sacrificed for grocery store sheet cake.

“I guess we’ll just have to wait,” I said calmly. “We should sit down.”

I didn’t sit back down.

Kane tilted his head briefly and damned if it didn’t look as though he was scenting the air, like a lion on one of those nature shows. He chuckled softly, almost to himself. “If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you?”

“Would I?”

“Yeah, I think you would. No gun, no pepper spray. Just us.” He rounded the table and got even closer, but I refused to move an inch. I wanted to tell him to back the fuck off, but with a man like Kane that would only escalate the situation.

I could smell his breath, foul and stale with cigarette smoke. He was a big man, at least eight inches over my own rather modest five-ten. Five-nine-and-a-half, if you cared about accuracy. I swallowed hard. He probably didn’t.

“I could take that pretty blond head right off your shoulders. Put it right on the table to greet the guard when he comes back.” Kane smiled. “Think you could stop me?”

Only if my iPad morphed into a revolver. Was there an app for that?

Keep it together, Christiansen. I knew how Kane’s warped thought process worked, and that gave me the edge. My mind was all the weapon I needed… although I certainly wouldn’t turn down the Glock I’d secured in my glovebox.

“Is this how you liked to intimidate your victims?” I asked. “The need for power probably stemmed from your childhood. Your father was abusive, and your mother wasn’t much better. It probably made you feel good to have absolute control for once in your life.”

He was still crowding my space, but those flat eyes flickered. I continued, my voice steady and matter-of-fact. “But it doesn’t take much of a man to threaten someone smaller with physical superiority, does it?”

A scowl creased his face. “I could handle a guy twice your size without breaking a sweat.”

“Yes, but you didn’t.” I gave him a cool look. “Your average victim was about five-foot-four and a hundred and ten pounds. I’m a lot bigger than that. A lot heavier than that. Whatever you think is going to go down here isn’t going to happen.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.” I stepped forward, closing that last inch between us. “So I think you should just sit the fuck down and wait for the guard.”

I hoped that my hunch was right, and I wasn’t about to get a mouthful of bloody Chiclets for teeth. Despite my bluster, I didn’t know how long I could hold him off. If you asked any of the sparring dummies in the precinct gym, I was a beast. But I didn’t think Kane would stand there with his arms extended and let me beat