Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,113
purse again. Passing by the three Slim Jims she had left, she went straight-up Hershey this time, and the efficiency with which she stripped that mass-produced chocolate of its clothing was a sad commentary on her diet. When she was finished, she was still hungry, and not because there wasn’t food in her belly. As always, the only two things she could eat failed to satisfy her gnawing craving, to say nothing of her nutritional needs.
Putting up her window, she took her backpack and got out. The crackling sound of the treads of her running shoes on the shoulder of the road seemed loud as a concert, and she wished she wasn’t getting over a cold. Like her sense of smell could be helpful, though? And when was the last time she’d considered that possibility outside of a milk-carton check.
She really needed to give these wild-goose chases up.
Two-strapping her backpack, she locked the car and pulled the hood of her windbreaker up over her red hair. No heel-toeing. She left-right-left’d with the soles of her Brooks flat to quiet her footfalls. As her eyes adjusted, all she saw were the shadows around her, the hidey-holes in corners and nooks formed by the doorways and the benches, pockets of gotcha with which mashers could play a child’s game of keep-away until they were ready to attack.
When she got to a heavy chain that was strung across her path, she looked around. There was nobody in the parking lots that ran down the outside of the flanks. No one in the promenade formed by the open-ended rectangle. Not a soul on the road that she had taken up to this rise above Route 149.
Jo told herself that this was good. It meant no one was going to jump her.
Her adrenal gland, on the other hand, informed her that this actually meant no one was around to hear her scream for help.
Refocusing on the chain, she had some thought that if she swung her leg over it and proceeded on the other side, she would not come back the same.
“Stop it,” she said, kicking her foot up.
She chose the right side of the stores, and as rain started to fall, she was glad the architect had thought to cover the walkways overhead. What had not been so smart was anyone thinking a shopping center with no interior corridors could survive in a place this close to Canada. Saving ten bucks on a pair of candlesticks or a bathing suit was not going to keep anybody warm October to April, and that was true even before you factored in the current environment of free next-day shipping.
Down at the far end, she stopped at what had to have been the ice cream place because there was a faded stencil of a cow holding a triple-decker cone by its hoof on the window. She got out her phone.
Her call was answered on the first ring. “Are you okay?” Bill said.
“Where am I going?” she whispered. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s in the back. I told you that you have to go around back, remember.”
“Damn it.” Maybe the nitrates had fried her brain. “Hold on, I think there’s a staircase over here.”
“I think I should come out.”
Jo started walking again and shook her head even though he couldn’t see her. “I’m fine—yup, I’ve got the cut-through to the rear. I’ll call you if I need you—”
“You shouldn’t be doing this alone!”
Ending the connection, she jogged down the concrete steps, her pack bouncing like it was doing pushups on her shoulders. As she bottomed out on the lower level, she scanned the empty parking lot—
The stench that speared into her nose was the kind of thing that triggered her gag reflex. Roadkill… and baby powder?
She looked to the source. The maintenance shed by the tree line had a corrugated-metal roof and metal walls that would not survive long in tornado alley. Half the size of a football field, with garage doors locked to the ground, she imagined back in its heyday that it housed paving equipment as well as things like snowplows, blowers, and mowers.
The sole person-sized door was loose, and as a stiff gust from the rainstorm caught it, the creak was straight out of a George Romero movie. And then the panel immediately slammed shut with a clap, as if Mother Nature didn’t like the stink any more than Jo did.
Taking out her phone, she texted Bill: This smell is nasty.