All Through the Night (Liar's Web) Read Free

of a serious bubble bath and a glass of Merlot. Can I holler at you tomorrow? It's been one hell of a day.”
    I know you're not going to desert me in my hour of need,” he responded in a whiny voice.
    “ If you're calling me again for money, I'm all tapped out. Like I told you last time, I am not your ATM machine or your personal bank. If you insist on gambling away your money, you need to make sure it's your hard-earned money you're throwing away. I work way too hard to throw good money after bad.”
    Darcel could hear the sound of sniffles over the phone. “Baby sister, it's serious this time. Real serious. I'm in the hole real deep this time.” A long pause ensued over the line. She heard him clear his throat. “Problem is…if I don't get the money into certain people's hands tonight, you may be singing at my funeral.”
    She laid her head on the steering wheel and began to massage her pounding temples with her free hand. It never failed. Her brother's phone calls always gave her a migraine. Time after time, she swore she wasn't going to let her brother pull her back into his sordid situations. Yet time after time, she found herself being dragged back into Lenny's messes.
    “ Sister? Are you listening, baby sister? They've made threats to kill me…to chop me up into small, unrecognizable pieces. They want their money tonight. Darcel? Darcel?”
    She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't manage to get the words out. At the moment, she was paralyzed by a feeling of intense, pulsing fear, and her hands began to shake violently in response. These scumbags weren't playing around. They were threatening violence, perhaps even death. She couldn't lose her brother!
    Beside her parents, Lenny was her closest living relative. For a brief time, she was swept up in a dark current of sadness and overwhelming pain. The feeling wasn't unfamiliar. Goosebumps tingled on her arms, and she willed herself to remember where and when she'd experienced these powerful emotions. She felt as if she could almost remember the smell of burning leaves on an icy-cold night. And then it was gone, along with her tidbit of memory.
    “ Are you still there?” Lenny asked in a teary voice.
    “ I'm here, Lenny. I'll always be here for you. You're my brother,” she responded, her tone full of emotion. “I love you.”
    She heard a loud sigh of relief on the other end of the phone. “So, you'll do it then? You'll meet Ronnie at the Sugar Shack with the two thousand dollars?”
    “ The Sugar Shack? That place is practically condemned. You know damn well Hangman's Wharf is a dangerous place even in broad daylight.”
    “ You'll be fine. You won't even have to get out of your ride. I'll let Ronnie know you'll hand off the payment to him from the driver's side window. Is 1:00 a.m. okay?”
    “ One in the morning? Lenny! That's crazy. I have to be at the office at seven.” A profound silence ensued on the other end of the line. Her mind started whirling with all the possible things Ronnie and his sketchy associates could do to her brother. After a few moments of silence, she found herself saying, “I guess that's okay, given the circumstances. Maybe I can ask one of my male friends to come along with me for protection.”
    “ It's safer if you go by yourself and make the payment.” He quickly added, “We don't want to rile them up by bringing along a posse.”
    Safer for whom? She had to be all kinds of crazy to show up at Hangman's Wharf at one o'clock in the morning to pay off Ronnie Devlin, a lowlife criminal who had an arrest record as long as her arm. Not that she hadn't done worse. Over the years her brother had asked her to save him from the fire more times than she could count. The worst incident had involved bail money, an emergency trip to Tijuana, and an under-aged stripper. She was no longer surprised at her brother's lapses in judgment, just profoundly disappointed. It was stressful enough trying to hide the situation from her