Under the wad of bills she found a fancy-looking cell phone and under that a wallet. Inside, a Maine driver’s license issued to Tiffany Stoddard. An Eastport address. Date of birth April 26, 1987. She memorized the information. Glanced at a photo of a smiling Tiffany Stoddard standing behind a chubby little girl with glasses who looked to be about ten years old. Returning the wallet, she noticed a clear ziplock bag lying at the bottom of the pack. Inside were small greenish tablets. At least a hundred. Maybe more. Emily looked closer and recognized them. Oxycontin 80s. Canadian manufacture. Sometimes it seemed like half the population of the county was addicted to the damned things. But this kid couldn’t be just an addict. She had to be a dealer. Judging by the number of pills, a fairly major one.
Emily re-zipped the bag, put it back where she found it and hurried to the outer office. She closed the door and picked up the phone. Because at 8:30 on a Friday night the Washington County Sheriff’s office would already be closed, she tapped in Sheriff John Savage’s home number. No need to look it up. John’s daughter Maggie was Emily’s closest friend and Em had spent a significant portion of her childhood hanging out at the Savage household. Even now, with Maggie down in Portland working as a detective with the Portland PD, her mother dead and John remarried, Emily occasionally dropped by to share a glass of wine and sometimes have dinner and listen to the gossip. John and Maggie had even given her shelter on the awful night three years earlier when Emily finally walked out on her abusive and unfaithful ex-husband Sam.
Em turned and faced the window to minimize any chance of being overheard. The phone rang once. Twice. Three times.
‘C’mon, John, pick up,’ she muttered to herself.
But it was the voice of John’s second wife, Anya, that came on. ‘You’ve reached the Savages, please leave a message.’
Shit. ‘John, this is Emily. Please call me back. ASAP. It’s urgent. I’ll try your cell.’
‘Who’s John?’
Emily turned.
‘Who are you calling?’
The girl stood in the open door of the examination room still dressed in her jeans and t-shirt. She was holding the backpack by its straps in one hand. She held a urine-filled sample bottle in the other. She walked across the room to the farmhouse table where Emily stood, holding the phone.
‘Who’s John?’ the girl asked, her voice tight and angry. ‘Who are you calling? It was the cops, wasn’t it? You’ve been poking around in my bag too. Don’t lie. I looked. Stuff wasn’t how I left it.’
Emily sighed and nodded. ‘Yes, Tiffany, I looked in your bag. I saw the drugs. I know your name. I was calling someone who can help you,’ she said in an even voice.
‘You stupid bitch,’ the girl said, her voice barely more than an angry whisper. ‘You really are going to get me killed.’
Emily didn’t respond.
‘Is John one of the locals?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe a pal of yours with the state police? Hell, half the troopers in the county are probably on their way here right now, aren’t they? All hot to catch the druggie with her stash before she gets away. Lady, you have no fucking idea what you just did.’ She put the urine sample on the table. ‘Here. I think you wanted this.’
The girl left. The screen door banged shut. Emily’s first irrational thought was that she had to fix the door to stop it banging like that. She went out on to the porch. The door banged again. She watched her now former patient half-walk, half-jog down the darkened driveway to the road. She turned left toward the state park.
Emily heard a series of electronic beeps and realized she was still holding the cordless phone. ‘If you’d like to make a call please hang up and try again,’ said a computer voice. She hit the off button. Hit talk and punched in Savage’s cell number. Five rings and another message request kicked in. ‘John, Emily. Get here as soon as you can. It’s urgent.’
As a last resort Emily thought about calling 911. But on a summer night in Washington County it could take forever for a cop to arrive. She figured the hell with it. She’d have to handle Tiffany Stoddard herself. Em left the phone on the porch and jogged out to the road. She peered in the direction the girl had gone.
At first she saw nothing. Just black tarmac stretching out before her in the growing darkness. No cars. No Stoddard. Nothing moving at all. Weird. The kid had only left a couple of minutes earlier. Even a world-class miler couldn’t be out of sight yet. So where was she?
Seconds later the girl emerged from an opening in the woods a few hundred yards ahead, hoisted the pack on to her back and started walking again toward the park. Then she broke into a jog.
Emily started down the road after her. When she reached the opening in the woods, she stopped and wondered if the girl might have hidden the pills in there. They were the only proof Em had of what had happened tonight. She decided she needed to find them and give them to Savage before the girl came back and got them herself.
As Emily pushed into the darkness of the woods, a little more than a mile away in Machias State Park, hidden behind Tiff Stoddard’s rusty green Taurus, a man waited, patiently picking his nails with the tip of a long, thin-bladed knife.
About the Author
JAMES HAYMAN spent more than twenty years as a senior creative director at one of New York’s largest advertising agencies. He and his wife now live in Portland, Maine. This is his third novel.
www.jameshaymanthrillers.com
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Also by James Hayman
Darkness First
The Cutting
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2010 by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
Excerpt from Darkness First copyright © 2013 by James Hayman.
THE CHILL OF NIGHT. Copyright © 2010 by James Hayman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780062363008
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062363015
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