Cut and Run читать онлайн

couldn’t see them ending this now-not before they tested the boundaries. He’d attended the seminars on avoiding emotional attachment with the witness. Brother bonding with the male witnesses was as dangerous as what he and Hope had stumbled into. It screwed up everything, risked everything, and he well knew it. It could not possibly have a happy ending. Still, he encouraged her to stay with him while he looked for some way around it all, a way that he suspected wasn’t there. At this moment, after what they’d been through together, letting her go was not an option.“Lars,” she spoke, yet again in a hushed whisper, the crisp sibilance rolling off the s and causing a ripple of gooseflesh down his left side. It snaked into his groin and lodged there. But rerouted by a synapse, it suddenly sparked across a gate in his brain that translated it differently, albeit a beat too late: This was nothing short of the sound of panic.“Hope?”“Oh, my God.”The line went dead.The bus.Larson dropped the receiver and ran, losing his balance as he took a corner too quickly on wet tile, ignoring the yellow sandwich board written in Spanish and English with an icon of a pail and mop and a splash of water. He went down hard. He scrambled to his feet, knocked over a corn chip display, and hurried out the truck stop’s main door, the cashier’s cry of complaint consumed by the high-pitched whine of highway traffic.“Rolo?” This came from Trill Hampton, a member of his squad, a fellow deputy marshal. Approaching footfalls of shoes slapping blacktop came on fast. Larson’s running had sent a signal. Hampton was in full stride, already reaching for his piece.Larson’s arrival into sunlight temporarily blinded him. They’d stopped at far too many truck stops