Holly Lisle Last Girl Dancing

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pulled harder, and the air began to thicken around her again.
She was not free.
Had not earned her way free.
She yanked and hammered and tried to shout for someone on the other side to
let her in, knowing, believing that freedom lay on the other side if she could
only reach it, but something on the other side fought against her, would not
give her safe haven, and she tried to scream, but no sound would come out of
her mouth, and then whatever was on the other side of the door released its
hold on the knob, and the door flew open and brilliant blue-white light
focused like a spotlight on a girl on the other side. Lovely and young, with
long pale hair and
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pale full lips, until the pretty peeled away, fell in sheets and clumps and
clods to leave a dead girl standing. Long dead, blue and white as the light,
her blond hair lank and matted, her eyes gone, turned into sunken dark holes
that still saw. Dressed in the ballet dress made by her mother, facing her
still living mirror image.
Jess screamed, "Ginny!"
In a voice at home only in hell and nightmares, Ginny answered, "Run!"
Hank shook her. "Wake up, wake up!" Jess lay rigid beside him, growling in the
back of her throat. "Wake up. It's a dream."
Jess opened her eyes and stared at him, not seeing him. His fingertips fed him
her pain and her guilt and her grief just as they'd filled him with the
bloodred shapes of the nightmare.
"What the hell was that?" he asked her.
"I found Ginny," she told him, her voice as hoarse as if she had spent hours
screaming.
He pulled her close and held her.
Jess said, "All these years she's been calling to me to find her. In my
nightmares, she's always close but always out of reach. She's been begging me
to fix everything, to find her, to bring her home."
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"I know," he said. "You told me."
"You don't understand. In all the years I've been looking for her, even in my
dreams, this is the first time I ever found her
. And she told me to run. Not to save her, not to take her home. All she said
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was, 'Run.'"
He pulled her tight against his chest and murmured something in her ear.
And her phone rang. She hadn't even shaken off the cobwebs of nightmare that
still clung to her, and the caller ID
on her cell phone told her that Charlie was already tracking her down. She'd
had two hours of sleep.
He said, "Hey, Jess, I'm the bearer of bad news. We need you to work right
away. It's crucial."
"You're kidding," Jess said. Hank raised eyebrows at her.
"Not kidding," Charlie said. "Your car, your apartment, that stuffed animal
forensics said the killer left nothing. But this is the first time Lenny
hasn't had an alibi when something like this was happening. He lost his tail,
and we have no idea where he was until he showed up at his place around three
a.m. But we shut down the club. And a minute ago, Ten got here. She's upset.
She's packing up her office right now. We need you in here as fast as
possible. See if you can get her to connect him to anything
anything
related to this case. We're waiting
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Holly%20Lisle%20-%20Last%20Girl%20Dancing%20(v1.0).html outside the judge's
office; if you can get her to give us something solid, the judge will give us
a search warrant on Lenny. Find out why she's scared of him. Tell her what
happened to your place last night. See if she'll connect the dots."
"All right," she said. "I'll come out from undercover?"
Jess listened to the long pause at the other end. "No. Not yet. She looks like
she's edgy around cops today stay in character for a while yet. Take your
badge and wear your sidearm out of sight in case there are still parts of this
we're missing.
If someone else in the club poses a danger, you may need to break cover. And
tell Hank to come, too. When we get the go-ahead, I'm going to need him up in
Lenny's office."
"Got it."
When Jess got off the phone, she gave the rundown of the conversation to Hank,
and said, "I need to have you drive me to my condo to get my badge and my
service weapon." She grinned a little when she said it. "I think we have our
guy.
The judge is willing to work with us this morning that might mean Lenny's
friends have decided he's too much of a liability to keep protecting."
Hank frowned. "You think Teri actually knows anything that will give you
Lenny?"
"I'm not sure. She knows more than she's admitted to up to now. Whether it's
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Jess shrugged.
They dressed quickly Jess in running shoes and jeans and a loose shirt that
would cover her handgun without leaving a line. It felt so good to be back in
her regular off-duty clothes again. Her feet were practically singing.
Hank kept staring at her as they dressed. "You seem so& different."
"Same old me," she told him.
"No. In spite of everything that's been happening to you over the last couple
of days, you seem really happy."
"We're going to get him," she said, smiling. "I have this gut feeling that
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we're about to get our break."
Hank walked her down to his car her personal was in the police parking lot as
evidence, and she couldn't drive the Crown Vic and stay undercover. She'd pick
up her work car as soon as she could. She had no idea when she'd get her own
car back, though.
She watched Hank while he drove. Something was wrong. He wasn't saying
something.
"What's bothering you?"
He started the car, then glanced over at her. "Not sure." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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