—Blogcritics
“In Blood on the Tracks, Barbara Nickless delivers a thriller with the force of a speeding locomotive and the subtlety of a surgeon’s knife. Sydney and Clyde are both great characters with flaws and virtues to see them through a plot thick with menace. One for contemporary thriller lovers everywhere.”
—Authorlink
ALSO BY BARBARA NICKLESS
Blood on the Tracks
Dead Stop
Ambush
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Barbara Nickless
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542092869
ISBN-10: 1542092868
Cover design by Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design
To Kristin Mueller, Leslie Alpin Wharton, and the Wonderful Waldo Women.
We helped each other rise from the ashes and find our wings again.
And most especially to Susan Ruane McConnell:
my dear friend, you flew all too briefly.
CONTENTS
THE COMING DARK
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE COMING DARK
He loved that the room was always cold.
He loved that down here, far below the cheer of man’s normal haunts, the air carried a bite like the bright edge of a knife. Down here, his fingers turned clumsy, snot dripped from his nose, his breath hung in the air from the bellows of his lungs.
Sometimes, the room seemed alive. As if he stood inside a beast of stone and steel. Water seeped down the concrete walls. Pipes groaned overhead. Bare bulbs cast a weak light, while the walls gathered shadows to themselves. A rusty drain in the middle of the floor emitted a sharp stink that caught in his throat and made his eyes water. Far below, something long dead still lay rotting in the dark, dense earth.
Here, in this room, anything felt possible.
Here, everything was right.
And so he made the room a shrine.
Taped to the walls: newspaper clippings, articles from the internet, files from hacked databases. There were illegally obtained service records and transcripts from phone calls. He’d spent months collecting every scrap he could.
So he could take her in.
So he could inhale her.
He’d arranged everything in chronological order. From her late teens—sporting events, prom, graduation—through her Marine career and into her time with the railroads. A life recently made public in the Denver papers, which had made his job easier.
Dynamic Duo: Missing Girl Found by Railroad Cop and K9 Partner
Heroes Ride Again: Railroad Cop and K9 Partner Solve Wartime Mystery
Our Heroes: Railroad Cop and K9 Partner Leave the Rails, Join Denver Police
Rising Heroes: Railroad Cop and K9 Partner Join Denver Major Crimes Unit
Then there were the photographs. She gazed at him from every surface.
Some pictures were from the papers. Another was her boot-camp photo. He had pictures from the media announcement when she’d been plucked from the obscurity of the rails and promoted to the Denver Major Crimes Unit as the chief’s golden girl.
But most of the photos were from his private collection. The ones he’d taken.
Those were his favorite.
Here she was, sweaty and breathless, returning to her fuckboy’s house from a run in the park. A few photos showed her dining out, others caught her sitting on her deck, and in another picture, he’d snapped her as she exited her police-issued Chevrolet Tahoe. He had two from when she’d walked nude past her bedroom window. And he had a single picture from the party the railroad had thrown for her just the night before, taken from his dimly lit place at the end of the bar.
He breathed with the room. With the drain and its stench. The thrum of the pipes. Lust raged inside him. He understood that hunger as clearly as if it had come straight from God.
Take. Use. Destroy.
Hers was a life on the rise. And the higher they flew . . .
“Like Icarus.” He nodded to himself. “And we all know how that turned out.”
The room swallowed his words. The shadows rustled, disturbed.
The dog was a problem. He was still working on that. But for every problem, there was a solution.
He stepped into the middle of the room, straddling the drain with its putrid stench, and turned in place. Dreaming. Imagining.
In the far corner he’d placed a cot, a large, easy-to-clean plastic bucket, and a storage tub with assorted tools—screwdrivers, pliers, clamps, duct tape. He also had power tools. His favorite was the Craftsman twenty-volt half-inch drill. His mind lingered over the word craftsman. He was a craftsman. He was an artist.
He also loved the portable band saw. For when they reached the end together.
He had handcuffs welded to the ceiling, plastic sheeting on the floor. An industrial hose.
It was all so perfect.
His eyes came to rest on the media photo of her standing behind a dais next to the chief. She was smiling, even if something in her eyes suggested she wasn’t entirely certain about her change in affairs.
“Crash and burn, baby,” he whispered. “Just like Icarus. Crash and burn.”
CHAPTER 1
To hell with their laws and restrictions. You have a great and wise heart, Sydney Rose. And that makes for a much better guide to what’s wrong and what’s right.
—Effie “Grams” Parnell.
