Spectre Black Read Free

surprised as she would have thought. Jolie disciplined herself to clamp down on the adrenaline, use her head. She knew the car. She knew the owner.
    The car was now right in front of her. Virtually invisible. But then she saw something— a diffused red glow, possibly the interior of the vehicle, barely there. She couldn’t see the car but she could see negative space: what resembled a cutout of the inside of the vehicle, dim but there. Just enough light to illuminate some of the driver inside.
    As the car came abreast of the Circle K she could see the ghost of the door strut, the shape of the window, one or two shapes reflected off the dash inside.
    But nothing else.
    Jolie was ninety percent sure the car belonged to the kid, but there were plenty of black muscle cars in this town. She could be wrong. She needed to expand her horizons, think of who else might have a car like that. She couldn’t assume anything at this point.
    Think! Who did she know who owned a muscle car? Plenty, at the sheriff’s office. It seemed every other guy she knew had bought into the muscle car dream: late model Mustangs, Chargers, Challengers, Camaros. Many of them black, silver, or charcoal gray. Mean machines.
    And the sheriff’s department was full of practical jokers. Their favorite victims were the women cops in the department, which was probably the way it was everywhere.
    Maybe that was it, one of the guys playing a practical joke on her, but she didn’t think so.
    Whoever had come to her house meant business.
    The car slid past like a shark cruising through murky water. No light delineated its shape except for the inner cherry glow, so faint she sometimes didn’t see it at all and the whole thing just . . . disappeared except for the noise. She could track it better with her ears than her eyes. Past the Circle K, the car picked up speed and hit the afterburners, the red glow turning into a thin trail as the car accelerated.
    Then it was gone, rumbling off into the distance.
    Now you see it, now you don’t .
    The moon had broken through the clouds; it was bright enough to see where she was going now. Jolie broke for the fallow field behind her, hoping for an undulation in the ground, a fold that would hide her—
    And found it. A quarter mile away, after a hard run, she landed stomach-down in a small ditch.
    Cold out here.
    Minutes dragged by.
    It seemed like hours.
    Just as her heart rate returned to normal, she heard the noise of the engine again.
    The muscle car cruised back the way it had come. Almost as if the thing were an entity unto itself, patiently stalking her. The loud engine reverberated. She knew from that sound that if push came to shove, it would scream like a catamount. She peered over the hump of earth and grass and looked.
    The ghost car turned in to the Circle K.
    At least she thought it did—
    Keep your head down!
    Jolie realized she’d squeezed her eyes shut. It took every trick she knew to open them. She was that scared.
    The driver cut the engine. Jolie heard the creak of a car door opening, then the stealthy click of the door latching shut. The sound of shoes on gravel. Sound carried out in the boonies.
    Voices. She couldn’t understand what they were saying.
    She recognized one of them, though—
    The man shouted, “Jolie! I know you’re out here. Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk?”
    Don’t move .
    “Jolie? I just want to talk to you. Don’t play games.”
    She heard someone else talking on a phone, but couldn’t hear what was being said. Then: “Where the hell did she go?”
    Another voice said, “She could be in the next county by now.”
    Jolie recognized this voice, too. For a moment she was stunned, but then she realized she’d been expecting it all along.
    “If she knows what’s good for her, she’s already gone.”
    The car door opened and clicked shut again. The engine gunned. The car pulled out onto the highway. Jolie couldn’t help but look at it—
    What she could see.