If You Can't Stand the Heat (Kit Tolliver #1) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read Free

and the need had in fact been an urgent one; satisfying it had shuttled her right off to sleep.
    Back in Hawley, her mother’s kitchen had held every kind of knife you could imagine. A dozen of them jutted out of a butcher-block knife holder, and others filled a shallow drawer. Sometimes she’d look at the knives, and think about them, and the things you could do with them. Cutting, piercing. Knife-type things.
    “You’re my little soldier,” her father used to say, and she felt like a soldier the night of her high school graduation, marching when her name was called, standing at attention to receive her diploma. She could feel the buzz in the audience, men and women telling each other how brave she was. The poor child, with all she’d been through.
    She never touched her mother’s knives, and for all she knew they were still in the kitchen in Hawley. But a few weeks later she left her apartment in St. Paul and went bar-hopping across the river in Minneapolis, and the young man she went home with had a set of knives in a butcher-block holder, just like her mother’s.
    Bad luck for him.

    She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she made her way down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.
    Time to think about moving.
    Not that she’d established a pattern. The man last week, in the posh loft near the Javits Center, had smothered to death. He’d been huge, and built like a wrestler, but the drug rendered him helpless, and all she’d had to do was hold the pillow over his face. He didn’t come close enough to consciousness to struggle. And the man before that, the advertising executive, had shown her why he’d feel safe in any neighborhood, gentrification or no. He kept a loaded handgun in the drawer of the bedside table, and if any burglar was unlucky enough to drop into his place, well—
    When she was through with him, she’d retrieved the gun, wrapped his hand around it, put the barrel in his mouth, and squeezed off a shot. They could call it a suicide, even as they could call the wrestler a heart attack, if they didn’t look too closely. Or they could call all three of them murders without ever suspecting they were all the work of the same person.
    Still, it wouldn’t hurt her to move. Find another place to live before people started to notice her on the streets and in the bars. She liked it here, in Clinton or Hell’s Kitchen, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a nice place to live, whatever it may have been in years past. But, as she and Jim had agreed, the whole of Manhattan was a nice place to live. There weren’t any bad neighborhoods left, not really.
    Wherever she went, she was pretty sure she’d feel safe.