Invasion of Privacy Read Free Page B

you.”
    “Hal!”
    “I’m out of here.” Stark took a step toward his car, then hopped back toward Joe. “Hey,” he said, “I got it. Where that line about the gum came—”
    Stark’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brain and he dropped to the ground.
    Joe caught a muzzle flash from inside the tumbleweed. No rifle report. A sniper like him.
    Desperately he slammed the Tahoe into drive. The windshield shattered. He threw himself flat onto the seat and a second bullet struck his headrest. He drove blindly for a few seconds, then raised his head. A bullet hit the steering wheel, cracking it. Another hit the engine block. Steam escaped from beneath the hood. The car ground to a halt.
    Joe lay still. His phone had fallen into the footwell. He picked it up and dialed. “Answer,” he whispered feverishly. “Pick up. Please.”
    He heard a car stop behind him. Doors opening. Male voices. The unmistakable metal crunch of a clip being loaded into an automatic weapon.
    Joe held the phone to his ear. “Come on. Pick up.”
    The phone answered. “Hi. This is Mary. I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day.”
    Joe closed his eyes. “Babe…where are you?”

2
    “Not today,” Mary Grant whispered, grasping the steering wheel harder. “Do not make me late today.”
    It was four o’clock, and traffic on Mopac was blocked solid as far as she could see. Rush hour started early in Austin.
    “Everyone doing okay?” she asked, looking over her shoulder.
    Grace gazed out the window, sipping her Sonic limeade, her thoughts a million miles away. Jessie sat beside her, headphones on, eyes glued to Mary’s phone, fingers ferociously tapping away.
    “Jess, hon, what are you doing with Mom’s phone?” asked Mary.
    Jessie didn’t answer.
    “She can hear you,” said Grace. “She just doesn’t feel like answering.”
    “What’s she doing?”
    “I don’t know. Probably Instagramming.”
    Mary watched Jessie’s fingers go
pat-pat-pat
on the glass surface. More like writing an article for the encyclopedia, she thought. She could feel the throbbing bass of the music assaulting her teenage daughter’s eardrums, an angry voice shouting something she knew she’d rather not understand. “Jessie?”
    The cars in front of them began to move, and Mary forgot about the phone. She drove fifty yards before traffic came to another halt. At this rate they’d be lucky to make it home by five.
    Today was her and Joe’s seventeenth anniversary. Mary couldn’t quite believe it. All those clichés about the years going by too fast turned out to be true. She glanced in the mirror. Her eyes were a little more tired, her skin not as taut as it once was, but if she smiled and kept her features alive, she did a pretty good job of keeping the years at bay. She’d even managed to lose six pounds so she could fit into her favorite little black dress. One hundred twenty-five pounds wasn’t bad for a five-foot-four-inch, thirty-nine-year-old mother of two.
    She began to think about the night ahead. A dirty martini at the hotel bar to get things started. Dinner at Sullivan’s. There was nostopping her once she set foot in a good steakhouse. She couldn’t just have the steak. She needed all the trimmings. Creamed spinach, garlic mashed potatoes, and a big ol’ wedge of chilled iceberg lettuce with plenty of blue cheese dressing. She wondered how she would fit into her dress after eating a bone-in cowboy rib eye.
    After dinner they’d head back to their room at the Westin, overlooking Lady Bird Lake, a reservoir on the pretty green river that snaked through downtown. She and Joe needed the night. He’d been preoccupied with work lately and away even more than usual. There hadn’t been any arguments, at least not any big ones. Still, the tension that came from not being able to share each other’s lives adequately was building between them. Tonight was