Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries) by Matthew Storm Page B

of my personal space was duly noted. “Junkies will say pretty much
anything when they get desperate. I should know. I was one.”
    I shifted
my arm away from Jason’s hand, doing it gently enough that it wouldn’t seem
like I was reacting as if he’d dropped a spider on me. One had to maintain the
appearance of a person who wasn’t totally crazy. Or had he been hitting on me?
I’d never been sure with him. If he was, that story wasn’t going to have the
ending he was hoping for. “She’d never lied to me before,” I said. “Maybe she
was this time. It’s just a weird play, though. She calls me after all these
years, out of the blue, hoping I’ll give her money for drugs? I mean, that’s a
longshot.”
    “At
best,” Miranda nodded. “I’d guess she was on the level. I just don’t see how
Homicide wouldn’t know about this.”
    “The
connection won’t be obvious,” I said.
    “It’s
too bad you can’t get a look at their files,” Jason said.
    “Yeah.
Too bad.” I hadn’t mentioned Sarah Winters was already doing that for me. I
didn’t think either of them would slip up and tell someone they shouldn’t, but
there was no reason to take the chance.
    “Anyway,
I should go,” I said. I stood up. “I’ve got a lot of important sitting around
to do.”
    “You
free for dinner?” Jason asked. “We should catch up.”
    An alarm
went off in my head. Now I thought the hand on my arm had been deliberate.
“Another time,” I said. “I scratched at my stitches. “This is really starting
to bother me. I’m going to take some Advil and lie down.”
    Miranda
stood up and hugged me again. Why did people always feel the need to do that?
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “And go see Paul. He likes the company.”
    “Yeah,”
I said. “I will.” But realistically, what were the odds I was actually going to
do that?
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 12
     
     
    I checked
my mail when I got home. There was a catalog from a company I’d never shopped
at, a flyer from Pizza Hut, and a green envelope roughly the correct size to
hold a greeting card. It didn’t have a return address, and the writing on the
front looked like it had been done by someone using their wrong hand. It
probably had been. I knew who the card was going to be from. The Laughing Man
was saying hello again.
    I waited
until I was inside and had the doors locked and the security system on before I
opened it. Inside I found a cheerful card with a depiction of puppies at play
on the front. The Laughing Man had written, “Thinking of you,” on the inside. And
he’d drawn the face, of course. The face was on everything he’d sent me over
the years. That horrible, laughing face. It was a simple drawing, but it never
failed to give me chills.
    I turned
the card over, but he hadn’t written anything on the back. Thinking of you?
That was it? He normally only sent cards on my birthdays and holidays. Maybe
he’d been lonely. If that was true, I could probably expect to hear from him
again soon.
    After a
moment I took the card to a hall closet and tossed it inside. That was where I
kept all of the things he’d sent me over the years. Well, except the flowers he
occasionally had delivered. I wasn’t going to store dead flowers. Technically I
was supposed to turn over everything that came from him to the crime lab so
they could go over it for fingerprints and traces of DNA, but I never bothered.
The Laughing Man wasn’t going to lick an envelope and hope we couldn’t match
his DNA to a database somewhere. To be honest, I didn’t know if the police
department even had that capability, anyway. I was pretty sure the FBI did,
though, and they also wanted a shot at him. That was just too bad. He was mine.
    I ended
up microwaving a bowl of instant noodles for dinner. I wasn’t hungry. I had a
lot on my mind, and that tended to kill my appetite.
    About an
hour after I woke up the next morning my phone rang. It was Abercrombie. “I
need