My heart was already beating way too hard and too fast, and I felt a spark of anxiety - the anxiety that was getting to be familiar since my surgery. I felt my way across the darkened room to the entrance hall. No, what there was, was the occasional flash of illumination as though someone was trying to balance a flashlight. There was no band of light beneath the door. If Guy had dropped by, he’d have turned on the light in the shop below. I’d been staying at my mother’s home in the Chatsworth Hills, but I’d checked myself out of the lunatic asylum that afternoon. I rolled off the sofa, dislodging the sleeping cat, and staggered to my feet, fighting the dizziness that had dogged me since my heart surgery three weeks earlier.

That furtive scraping wasn’t the sound of a key it was more like someone trying to…well, pick the lock. My first thought was that Lisa had called Guy, my ex, to look in on me. I had a furry heating pad on my belly, a crick in my neck, and - apparently - a midnight visitor. There had been a time when I’d thought I would never see home again. From where I lay, I could barely make out the motion of the draperies in the warm July breeze in the front room of the flat above Cloak and Dagger Books.

Moonlight outlined the pirate bookends on the bookshelf. It was dark, and it took me a second or two to place myself. Again.Įxcept…that boneless ball of heat on my abdomen was the cat. The scratching worked itself into my dream, and I deduced with the vague logic of the unconscious that the cat was sharpening his claws on the antique half-moon table in the hall. Somewhere in the distance of a very weird dream about me and a certain ex-LAPD police lieutenant came a faint, persistent scratching. Or to be precise, on the living-room sofa where I was uncomfortably dozing. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,Įlectronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Just Joshin' Publications

The Dark Tide by Josh Lanyon