SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) Read Free Page A

at the lake. It had been a long drive and I was beat. The late burger and bourbons did the rest. I fell into a virtual coma. If it hadn’t been for the dream, I probably would have slept until noon.
    I don’t dream often, and usually don’t remember much of them. Just as well, since the few I do recall more vividly tend to involve someone trying to kill me and I wake up in a cold sweat.  A few years back, the dreams — OK, they were nightmares — featured a lot of thumping helicopters, men with turbans and, for some reason, hissing hand grenades that I couldn’t seem to get away from because my legs weren’t moving fast enough.
    I suppose they were tangled in the bed sheets. At least that’s what the shrink at the Veterans Administration suggested. She had heard every kind of Post-Traumatic Stress dream in the book and didn’t think mine rose to the level of disability. That was fine with me, since my occasional heavy drinking and prescription-pill popping seemed to be working as I self-adjusted back to society. The doc was a very attractive woman and I tried to string her along by claiming I had a recurring dream about getting a Dear John letter from a camel, but she wasn’t buying.
      My rare bad dream nowadays usually concerns someone trying to carve me up or poisoning me. I don’t need a shrink to tell me where they come from. I’ve had some interesting cases recently. But my legs still never seem to work.
    Of course, I occasionally have what you might call an erotic dream. Not the embarrassing teen-age kind where you avoid your mother’s eyes when she does the laundry. Just a run-of-the-mill pleasant dream invariably involving a gorgeous woman, who usually, but not always, looks something like Alice Watts. Or, I’m ashamed to say, Eleni Rahm. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t ever tell a shrink I was dreaming about the daughter of Marat Rahm, the head of the local Russian mob.
    But like even the scary dreams, I quickly forget them by my second cup of coffee, and it might be three months before I have another one.  
    The dream I had on Friday night at the lake wasn’t pleasant. Not exactly a nightmare, because there was an erotic undertone. But neither Alice nor Eleni made an appearance.
    Ronnie Frost did.
    Clear as a bell. Looking as she did 20 years ago, floating in water with her hand outstretched.
    We were swimming in the Silver Lake reservoir on Staten Island. She was sinking and I was trying frantically to reach her. I’m a good swimmer and for once my damn legs were working fine, but she kept drifting just out of reach. Then she disappeared and I woke up.
    It’s not unusual for a face from the past to pop up, seemingly unbidden, in a dream. It doesn’t even have to be human. Hell, Scruffy the wonder dog, the best mutt I ever had, once made a brief appearance.
    But this was different. There were no grenades involved, but I still woke up in a cold sweat.

CHAPTER 3 – LOOSE LIPS
     
    I was sitting in my office on Wednesday when my cell phone buzzed. The caller I.D. said “Narrows Medical.”
    “Arman would like to see you.”
    It was a voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a Ukrainian coal mine.
    “Is he sick?”
    “No. Why? Oh, the phone. I’m calling from the office.”
    “What office?”
    Maks Kalugin gave me an address in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn.
    “You have GPS. We’ll be here all day.”
    “I’m a little busy, Maks.”
    I wasn’t. I was all alone, reading The New York Times on the web. I didn’t have a client.  Abby Jones, my office assistant, had taken the day off to bone up for her private investigator’s exam. I didn’t expect her to have a problem with it. She was super-sharp former Army military policewoman who had also worked security in my building before I shanghaied her. When she passed the test, we would have a decision to make about her future.
    “It’s about Mrs. Capriati,” Maks said. A pause. “Not on the phone.”
    He hung up. I got