Dark Waters Read Free

help bring a fellow soldier to justice for rape and murder. Some from his unit—the kind of men who laughed when human beings died—considered him a traitor and a coward. But he lost no sleep over that, or over their threats of vengeance.
    Now he tried to keep his thoughts on work, and not on the thing that he did lose sleep over: the aching loneliness he’d felt since Rachel Matre broke up with him. “Broke up” was probably an overstatement: They’d had one date, one night of amazing sex, and then she’d been kidnapped by Arlin Korbus. To help rescue her, Ethan had contacted her lake spirits, baring himself emotionally and physically to their ministrations. The whole experience had been overwhelming, and he still awoke sometimes in the middle of the night, rock-hard and sweating, as the intimate touch of that watery mouth returned in his dreams.
    Of course there was no one with whom he could talk about it. His father would simply tune him out. His brother Marty the cop would have him committed. And his former girlfriend Julie … well, the less he saw of her, the better. He did not trust her, or himself when he was around her.
    He looked at his appointment book and frowned. He didn’t remember seeing this on the schedule yesterday. He went to his office door and said, “Ambika, what’s this ten-thirty appointment?”
    “That would be Mr. Garrett Bloom,” his office manager said in her lilting Hindi accent. “The phone was ringing when I got here this morning. He was most insistent that he see you today.”
    Ethan’s stomach plummeted. “Garrett Bloom? Really?”
    “Oh, yes. The immensely important Garrett Bloom wants a few minutes of your time for something that might benefit the community as a whole. Those were his exact words, and all I could get out of him.”
    “Did he sound angry?”
    “Oh, no, he was perfectly charming. And he has the knack of filling up any silence so it’s hard to get a word in.” There was both annoyance and professional admiration in her voice; Ambika prided herself on keeping control of any verbal exchange. “I told him you could spare fifteen minutes. I have no doubt he can talk that long without pausing for breath more than once.”
    “He’s a local legend, Ambika. And he does a lot of good work.” And he gets in the way of lucrative projects like the ones I need to get , he added in his head. And he isn’t above showing up with a TV crew in tow to put “greedy profiteers” on the spot. Oh boy .
    “I have no opinion,” she said, her opinion coming through very clearly in her tone, “but he did not sound angry. Rather pleased with himself but not angry.”
    Ethan smiled. “Okay. Send him right in when he gets here.”
    He went back into his office and opened his laptop almost gratefully. Preparing for a last-minute meeting with someone like Bloom should certainly keep his mind off his broken heart. He typed Bloom’s name into the search engine. He knew Bloom’s background, of course, but wanted to be fresh on the details.
    He clicked through the splash page with the letters PBN in a Java logo. Then the man’s face popped up on his business’s main webpage: tanned skin, immaculate hair, tie knotted to perfection. His mustache was so even it looked as if it had been drawn on with a pen. He radiated trust and benevolence, which befitted the motto written beneath the image: This is our community, and we should have a voice in how it changes .
    Ethan methodically checked the links along the bottom: About, Projects, Comments, Contact. Bloom called himself a “community activist,” battling attempts to alter the basic nature of Madison’s downtown isthmus. He’d unsuccessfully fought the condo project Ethan’s company was now building, and succeeded in getting Walgreens to relocate its newest store to avoid tearing down a street’s worth of old buildings. There was a PayPal link that solicited donations, but Ethan knew Bloom didn’t hurt for working capital.