Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (33 page)

Reluctant to return to bed, Susan turned the other way out of the bathroom, slipped past the linen closet, and creaked open the door of Emma’s new room. Looking down at the peaceful, sleeping figure of her daughter, Susan felt almost unbearably in love with her. Emma’s little chest rose and fell, rose and fell. She had her father’s thick dark hair and big brown eyes, but her small frame and sometimes-playful/sometimes-hesitant spirit were all Susan.

“Oh, sweet pea,” she murmured. Gingerly she eased the covers down from where Emma had tugged them up under her chin. She insisted on being tucked in so tightly, even in the late-summer heat.

Then Susan glanced at the window and gasped. “Oh God!
Oh my God!
“ she said, loudly, scaring herself in the quiet dark of the bedroom.

Emma stirred but didn’t wake. Susan stepped closer to the window and gaped, wide-eyed, at where a person, or the shadow of a person, was standing in the backyard, leaning against the rickety back fence and staring up. The man was massive. In his hand was the long barrel of a gun, or some kind of club, or …
something …
in the darkness, from this distance, it was impossible to say.

“Alex!” Susan shouted, but he didn’t answer. Susan’s heart was knocking at her ribs, and she clutched at the windowsill.
“Alex!
God damn it,
Alex!”

Emma shifted and moaned in her sleep. Susan opened her mouth to scream again—she would have to go in there and shake him awake. But then she looked again, and there was nothing—no one—in the yard.

Whatever Susan had seen, or thought she had seen, it was gone.

End of this excerpt.

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