The Last Straw (The Jigsaw Files #4) - Sharon Sala Page 0,1
story as she ate.
She was about halfway through her meal when she heard the sound of laughter coming from the back of her apartment. It sounded like it was in her bedroom, which made no sense, because she lived alone.
Frowning, she put down her spoon and got up to investigate. There was no hesitation or fear as she walked into her bedroom. But she was surprised that her television was on.
“What in the world?” she muttered, and began looking around for the remote to turn it off.
When she finally spied it on the shelf below the television, instead of the bedside table where she always kept it, she assumed the cleaning crew had moved it, but it still didn’t explain why it had suddenly turned on.
Focused solely on getting to the remote, she didn’t hear the soft sound of a footfall behind her. Then the stabbing pain at the nape of her neck was shocking, and caught her unawares. She screamed, thinking something had just stung her, and was reaching for the back of her neck when the room began to spin, and then everything went black.
* * *
It was five minutes to 4 a.m. when Charlie Dodge’s cell phone signaled a text. He rolled over in bed, saw the time and groaned. Who would be texting him at this time of the morning?
Then he saw it was from Wyrick.
“What the hell?” he muttered, then threw back the covers and sat up on the side of the bed as he pulled up the message.
Stay off the beltway this morning. There’s going to be a massive pileup.
“What the hell, again?” he muttered.
Frustrated and sleepy, he forgot he was only wearing gym shorts as he got up and strode across the hall to her bedroom, then pounded on the door.
There was a long moment of silence, and then he pounded again, and got a very cranky response.
“Are you bleeding?”
He rolled his eyes. “No.”
The tone of her voice had not softened. “Then what the hell? It’s 4 a.m.”
“Why, yes, it is. So why are you sending me random texts at this hour?” he shouted.
There was another, even longer moment of silence, and then the door swung inward, and Wyrick was standing in the shadows wearing pink flannel pajamas with little white lambs on them—a complete dichotomy to the red-and-black dragon tattoo beneath.
He’d seen her in those pajamas before, and was always surprised by how vulnerable she looked without the war paint she wore in public.
As for Wyrick, she’d seen Charlie’s bare chest, hard abs and long bare legs before, and was still struggling to pull out of the nightmare she’d been having when he knocked.
“I didn’t send you a text!” she snapped.
Charlie shoved the phone in her face.
She turned on the light and then looked at the phone, and as she did, the color faded from her face. That was when he realized she was as startled by the text as he’d been.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She turned around and went to get her phone off the charger, then brought it back to the door, pulled up his number with their message history and handed it to him.
“Look for yourself. The last text I sent to you was yesterday...from the office...telling you what I wanted for lunch.”
Charlie frowned. “But this is plainly from you. So unless someone has hacked you, this doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s impossible to hack me. I need to sit down,” she said, and dropped onto the side of her bed.
Charlie followed, and sat down beside her, waiting in silence.
Finally, she took a deep breath and started talking.
“I can’t believe this happened. I was dreaming this. It was a thought in my dream. Not an awake thought. A dream thought. I am going to have to think about this a bit, but the bottom line is, I think I just bypassed the need to use a phone to send you messages.”
In that moment Charlie felt the world shift beneath his feet. He didn’t know what to say, but he’d long since given up being shocked by her growing abilities.
“Leave it to you to find a way to beat a monthly phone bill,” he muttered. “So is this text true? About the imminent crash?”
She nodded.
“Is there any way we could notify someone to prevent it?”
A muscle jerked in the side of her jaw.
“No. It is what it is,” she said.
“Then we take backstreets to work. Thanks for the heads-up. I’m going to shower.”