The End of Never Read Free

call screen. “Oh boy,” she sighed, and she let the call go to voicemail.
    When the phone stopped ringing, a photo of her bulldog, Jack, came on the screen. He is going to be so mad at me , she thought, frowning with guilt at the moping brown-and-white face cocked to the side, a giant, red Christmas bow stuck to his forehead.
    The screen door cracked again and Callahan emerged. Throwing a white undershirt at Kraven, he laid Alexandra’s school bag across her shoulder and ushered the pair toward a gate in the wooden fence that closed in the backyard.
    Parked at the curb on the street of the towering Victorian was Alexandra’s rusty Jeep, waiting for her patiently. “I made sure you have enough gas to get home,” Callahan informed her and kicked an empty plastic gas can in the driveway.
    â€œI don’t trust myself to drive right now. My nerves!” Alexandra said, throwing the keys to Kraven as she climbed in the passenger seat and pulled her seatbelt around her chest.
    â€œI’m sure you remember where I live,” she said, smiling anxiously and waving goodbye to Callahan as Kraven turned the key in the ignition.
    I am still alive, and she is reborn , Kraven thought as he revved the engine. The warped hoses and loose belts strained beneath the hood. They would be lucky to get down the street without breaking down.
    Sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat of her beat-up Jeep, Alexandra pinched her lips. They felt dry, parched from thirst.
    Her mother was calling again. What she does not know won’t hurt her , Alexandra thought, staring down at the cell phone screen.

2

Heat
    The fingerprint-smudged glass doors of the bustling hospital emergency room slid apart for the woman in the gray pantsuit as she stepped outside into the muggy Miami morning. Thawing out from a chilly night in the tenth-floor quarantine ward, the sleep-weary woman, Angela Peyton, wobbled on her four-inch heels as her head swam in the tropical heat.
    A wailing ambulance siren roused her senses as she leaned against a cement pillar and unbuttoned the collar of her white silk blouse. Wiping beads of sweat from the top of her lip, she stumbled backward from the curb while a mustard-yellow taxi cab sped toward her, shrieks of pain pouring from the open windows.
    In the sticky and tattered back seat, the left ankle of a six-foot-tall platinum blonde was perched up on the seat, swelled to the size of an orange. She screeched like a lost kitten. The driver lunged over the speed bumps as if the driveway was a ski-slalom course. The wounded blonde’s equally statuesque red-headed friend scrounged a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill from inside her bra.
    Lurching to a stop in front of the emergency room, the pale-skinned, bearded driver yelled at the girls as the back door of his cab flew open. They stumbled to the pavement. “You getting out now, crazy witches,” he shouted. His English had much improved over the time he lived in warm Miami, far away from the Russian tundra.
    The woman in the gray pantsuit overheard the commotion and decided any cab was a good cab in the strangling heat. As she approached the idling mustard-yellow car, the smell of stale cigarettes and French fries assaulted her nose and her empty stomach heaved.
    â€œVamoose, girlies!” the heavily breathing driver shouted as he pocketed the sweaty twenty-dollar bill in his pants.
    â€œPig!” the redhead hurled back at the driver as she shouldered her friend’s weight and helped her toward the emergency room doors. Passing the somberly dressed woman in the gray pantsuit, the redhead, her white mini-skirt stained with booze and ketchup from the previous evening, rolled her eyes to the sky.
    â€œI wouldn’t get in there if I were you,” she hissed in warning to the woman in the pantsuit. “He drives like an animal and smells like one, too.”
    â€œShut up, Maxine,” the blonde advised, her seven-inch heels