Red After Dark (Blackwood Security #13) - Elise Noble Page 0,88
nurses too.”
“And a woman called Julie?”
Ice formed around my heart. Damn Sky and her intuition. My mother was firmly off limits. I didn’t even want to think about that bitch, let alone talk about her.
“Don’t fucking go there.”
Sky must have heard the barely controlled animosity in my voice because she offered a hesitant smile.
“I’ll get Rafael to drive me into Richmond. Tell him I need new boots or something.”
“Do me a favour—get him to stay and have dinner with you as well.”
My earlier hopes of letting Emerald fade into darkness had been scuppered when Beth came up with a new lead. A phone number. I was beginning to suspect that Alaric was right and Emerald was cursed because she’d sure screwed up both of our lives from the moment she came into them.
I’d had Mack run the number, and surprise, surprise, it came back as unregistered. A burner phone. But she’d been able to access the call history, and over the past two months, it had been used seven times. Four times to call our videographer, once to call a Chinese restaurant in Norfolk, again to call an automated banking service, and finally to call a feed store in the small town of Penngrove, just south of Chesapeake. Two connections to the same area—Norfolk and Chesapeake weren’t all that far apart—and the call to the feed store interested me. It had lasted four minutes. Nobody called a feed store for that long unless they were interested in buying animal feed, and if they were buying animal feed, it stood to reason that they had animals nearby. Had we found the mysterious Edwin’s hidey-hole? Nobody thought it was a coincidence that the fixer shared a forename with the dude who’d painted Red After Dark, and who was up to his eyeballs in dodgy art?
Dyson.
I’d agreed to travel to Penngrove with Alaric when he was set to go. Maybe it would lead to something and maybe it wouldn’t, but we had to try. Black was gonna be pissed about me taking off, but if today’s parachute experiment went the way I feared it would, he had no right to feel upset.
“Are you ready?” Ana asked.
“Nope.”
But Sam was. He’d checked and repacked his parachutes in the ballroom at Riverley Hall, put on his jumpsuit and helmet, and strapped a camera to his chest to record what he said was possibly the dumbest thing he’d ever done.
The plan called for Ana to sit in my bedroom at Little Riverley while I flew Sam overhead in the Pitts Special I kept in a hangar beside our grass airstrip. I rarely used the little plane. I’d bought it years ago for aerobatics, but life was all work and no play at the moment. We’d make several passes, going higher each time, and when Ana told me over the radio that she could no longer hear the noise from the engine, Sam would jump.
Of course, skydiving from a Pitts Special was a challenge in itself. To prepare, we’d consulted YouTube, which suggested the best approach was for Sam to hang onto the framework by the top wing while I inverted, then drop away. That way, he wouldn’t strike the tail. I was beginning to understand his “dumbest thing I’ve ever done” comment now.
Fortunately, Sam was an experienced skydiver. He threw himself out of planes on the weekends for fun, a concept I struggled to understand. Sure, I jumped out of planes too, but only when it was absolutely necessary.
After a final briefing beside the plane, Ana hefted her and Sam’s daughter, Tabby, onto her hip and headed for the house. The lack of a babysitter meant we were training her young. I strapped myself into the pilot’s seat, and Sam climbed into the back.
Was it too late to drive to the airport instead? A last-minute break in New South Wales seemed remarkably appealing.
An hour later, it was all over—the experiment, the jump, and quite possibly my marriage. Sam had landed on the very edge of the guest house roof and cracked his shin on a stupid weathervane—another of Bradley’s additions—but he’d still hit the target. I’d deactivated the rooftop sensors, and it had only taken three minutes after landing for him to descend into the guest house basement and hobble through the tunnel to Little Riverley. None of the cameras or the other sensors caught his entrance. We’d found out how the pay-off could have been stolen, but the question was, did it go down that way?