Thr3e Read Free Page B

for the police once he explained his story. Surely they would believe him. Kevin stopped. The car tipped into the dirt with its left rear tire off the ground. From here it all looked kind of stupid.
    “You said bomb?” someone yelled.
    Kevin looked back at a middle-aged man with white hair and a Cardinals baseball cap. The man stared at him. “Did you say there was a bomb?”
    Kevin looked back at the car, feeling suddenly foolish. “I thought there—”
    A deafening explosion shook the ground. Kevin instinctively crouched and threw his hands up to protect his face.
    The bright fireball hung over the car; boiling black smoke rose into the sky. The red flame collapsed on itself with a soft whomp . Smoke billowed from the charred skeleton of what was only a moment ago his Sable.
    Kevin dropped to one knee and stared, dumbstruck, wide-eyed.

2
    W ITHIN THIRTY MINUTES the crime scene was isolated and a full investigation launched, all in the purview of one Detective Paul Milton. The man was well built and walked like a gunslinger—a Schwarzenegger wannabe with a perpetual frown and blond bangs that covered his forehead. Kevin rarely found others intimidating, but Milton did nothing to calm his already shattered nerves.
    Someone had just tried to kill him. Someone named Slater, who seemed to know quite a lot about him. A madman who had the forethought and malice to plant a bomb and then remotely detonate the device when his demands weren’t met. The scene stood before Kevin like an abstract painting come to life.
    Yellow tape marked a forty-yard perimeter, and within it several uniformed police officers gathered pieces of wreckage, labeled them with evidence tags, and stacked them in neat piles on a flatbed truck to be transported downtown. The crowd had grown to well over a hundred. Bewilderment was fixed on some faces; other spectators wildly gestured their version of the events. The only injury reported was a small cut on a teenage boy’s right arm. As it turned out, one of the cars Kevin had clipped in his mad dash across the street was none other than the impatient Mercedes. Once the driver learned he’d been following a car bomb, however, his attitude improved significantly. Traffic on Long Beach Boulevard still suffered from curiosity, but the debris had been cleared.
    Three news vans were in the lot. If Kevin understood the situation correctly, his face and what was left of his car were being televised live throughout the Los Angeles Basin. A news helicopter hovered overhead.
    A forensic scientist worked carefully over the twisted remains of the trunk, where the bomb had clearly resided. Another detective dusted for prints on what was left of the doors.
    Kevin had spilled his story to Milton and now waited to be taken down to the station. By the way Milton glared at him, Kevin was sure the detective considered him a suspect. A simple examination of the evidence would clear his name, but one minor fact haunted him. His account of events omitted Slater’s demand that he confess some sin.
    What sin? The last thing he needed was for the police to begin digging into his past for some sin. Sin wasn’t the point. The point was that Slater had given him a riddle and told him that phoning the newspaper with the riddle’s answer would prevent Kevin from being blown sky-high. That’s what he’d told them.
    On the other hand, willfully withholding information in an investigation was a crime itself, wasn’t it?
    Dear God, someone just blew up my car! The fact sat like an absurd little lump on the edge of Kevin’s mind. The front edge. He smoothed his hair nervously.
    Kevin sat on a chair provided by one of the cops, tapping his right foot on the grass. Milton kept glancing at him as he debriefed the other investigators and took statements from witnesses. Kevin looked back at the car where the forensic team worked. What they could possibly learn from that wreckage escaped him. He stood unsteadily, took a deep breath, and