Last Breath Read Free Page B

guy must be loaded.
    There was a brief lull in customers just then and a sudden, chill spray from Sawyer’s garden hose on her left ear caught Cassidy by surprise, distracting her from the vanished TransAm with its generous, unseen driver. Using her own hose as a weapon she took up the challenge. Others armed with hoses and buckets joined in. Arcs and streams of water cascaded down upon the already-puddled parking lot, soaking jackets and jeans, hair and hands, faces and feet.
    “Enough, enough!” Cassidy finally shouted, her own clothes dripping. “Lay down your arms!” A new line of cars had formed, snaking around the parking lot in a semicircle. “Back to work!”
    There were groans at an end to the horseplay, but everyone obeyed.
    It was much harder working in wet clothes, Cassidy promptly discovered. The sun had disappeared behind the thickening clouds, turning the air chilly. Her sweats clung to her like tissue paper, and her hands felt like ice. Dumb idea, getting wet, she told herself as she approached the third car in line. I don’t have time to get sick again. Dumb, dumb, dumb!
    She saw the two red plastic hearts before she noticed the car idling next to her.
    The black TransAm.
    In line again, and for good reason. Although it had been spotless when it raced from the parking lot twenty minutes or so earlier, it was once again coated with a thick layer of dirt.
    Cassidy peered more closely at the car. Couldn’t be the same one. That guy had paid ten bucks. He wouldn’t have gone right out and gotten the car filthy again so fast, would he?
    But there were the red plastic hearts, dangling from the driver’s door handle.
    What were the chances that there were two black TransAms on the campus of Salem University with dark, tinted glass and a pair of red plastic hearts tied to a door handle?
    The TransAm honked impatiently.
    Cassidy washed the car again. As she moved around it, hose in hand, she thought how eerie the tinted glass made the car look. It gave her a weird feeling to glance at the window and see nothing but darkness, as if there were no one in there, no one at all. Like, she thought as she wiped the hood dry, a futuristic car that drives itself.
    Creepy.
    It occurred to her as she gave the driver’s door one last, quick swipe with her rag, that the car might belong to a benefactor. Someone who wanted them to make tons of money and was willing to go through the car wash repeatedly to help out. And didn’t want to take credit for his generosity.
    Nice guy.
    The window slid open a crack. The bill that slid through the opening was a crisp, new twenty.
    “Please wait for your change this time,” Cassidy said quickly, delving into the pack at her waist. But her fingers were so cold, they moved slowly. Too slowly.
    The TransAm didn’t wait.
    It was gone in a splash of cold water before Cassidy’s fingers had closed around the correct change.
    She stared after it for a long time, absent-mindedly fingering the crisp twenty.
    “Pretty dumb, if you ask me,” a voice said from behind her.
    Travis. In the same blue plaid flannel shirt and blue windbreaker he’d been wearing the first time she ever saw him. With the same intense expression on his lean, bony face.
    Cassidy turned around, zipping her pack closed. “Dumb? Oh, not waiting for his change, you mean? Yeah, I guess it is. I think the guy is just trying to help us out. With a car-like that, I suppose he can afford it.”
    “I wasn’t talking about a car,” Travis said, his voice as cold as Cassidy’s hands. “I didn’t see any car. I was talking about someone who just got out of the infirmary fooling around out here in the cold in wet clothes. That’s what I meant by dumb.”
    Cassidy bristled. So he had known she was sick. Well, not really sick , the way Travis was making it sound. Just an asthma attack. You didn’t get those from being soaked on a chilly day. Anyway, if he wasn’t going to help with the car wash, he should keep his