Middle Of Nowhere

   "They make these books with fake leather bindings that aren't books at all, but hold videotapes in your bookshelf. His guys found it in the bedroom while I was out searching the garage. Lofgrin brought it to me, as lead on the search and seizure, and I had to tell him . . . tell him what I thought it was . . . before he put it onto the inventory. Lou, I've never done anything like this." She passed it to Boldt.

   He held the tape in his hand. His reputation. Possibly the end of his career on Homicide. He couldn't be sure. And then he handed it back to her. "We return it to Bernie right now while there's still time, and he puts it into the inventory," he told her. "I'll give him that album anyway . . . just because he was willing to go that far."

   Tears formed in her eyes as she looked up at him. She nodded. This was what she wanted to hear.

   He said, "It isn't us . . . doing something like this. And besides, Pendegrass will mention the tape . . . it's going to come out. The best thing we can do is stand up to it. Sheila Hill is ultimately the one to decide if our relationship compromises her department, and she's been in a few compromising positions herself. You don't need to know about that. She'll go light on us, believe me."

   The tears spilled down her cheek. Tears of joy, he hoped.

   "Am I allowed to say I love you?" she whispered.

   "Hell, no," he said, offering her his hand and extricating her from the chair, "but that kind of thing goes both ways, so you be careful."

   "Yes, sir."

   "That's better," he said, touching her in the small of the back and aiming her toward the elevator. He couldn't do the stairs in the cast. It would be a while until he could do the stairs again. "Look at us. A pair of gimps."

   "Yes," she said, laughing through her tears, "a pair of gimps."

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Middle of Nowhere,

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Ridley Pearson's

Newest Thrilller,

Parallel Lies,

Coming in

uly 2001

from Hyperion.

An excerpt, Chapters 1 and 2, follows.

C H A P T E R

1

The train charged forward in the shimmering after

    noon sunlight, autumn's vibrant colors forming a natural lane for the raised bed of chipped rock and the few hundred tons of steel and wood. The rails stretched out before the locomotive, light glinting off their polished surfaces, tricked by the eye into joining together a half mile in the distance, the illusion always moving forward at the speed of the train, as if those rails spread open just in time to carry her.

   For the driver of that freight, it was another day in paradise. Alone with his thoughts, he and his brakeman, pulling lumber and fuel oil, cotton and cedar, sixteen shipping containers, and seven empty flatbeds. Paradise was that sound in your ears and that rumble up your legs. It was the blue sky meeting the silver swipe of tracks far off on the horizon. It was a peaceful job. The best work there was. It was lights and radios and doing something good for people—getting stuff from one place to another. The driver packed another pinch of chewing tobacco deep between his cheeks and gum, his mind partly distracted by a bum air conditioner in the bedroom of a mobile home still miles away, wondering where the hell he'd get the three hundred bucks needed to replace it. He could put it on the credit card, but that amounted to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Maybe some overtime. Maybe he'd put in for an extra run.

   The sudden vibration was subtle enough that a passenger would not have felt it. A grinding, like bone rubbing on bone. His first thought was that some brakes had failed, that a compressor had failed, that he had a lockup midtrain. His hand reached to slow the mighty beast. But before he initiated any braking—before he only compounded the problem—he checked a mirror and caught sight of the length of her as the train chugged through a long, graceful turn and down a grade that had her really clipping along. It was then his heart did its first little flutter, then he felt a heat in his lungs and a tension in his neck like someone had pulled on a cable. It wasn't the brakes.

   A car—number seven or eight—was dancing back there like she'd had too much to drink. Shaking her hips and wiggling her shoulders all at once, kind of swimming right there in the middle of all the others. Not the brakes, but an axle. Not something that could be resolved.

   He knew the fate of that train before he touched a single control, before his physical motions caught up to the knowledge that fourteen years on the line brought to such a situation.

   In stunned amazement, he watched that car do her dance. What had looked graceful at first, appeared suddenly violent, no longer a dance but now a seizure as the front and the back of that car alternately jumped left to right and right to left, and its boxlike shape disintegrated to something awkwardly bent and awful. It leaned too far, and as it did, the next car began that same cruel jig.