Hale's Point Read Online Free

heard her call the old man “Mr. Hale,” he
thought she might actually be some new half-sister from a second wife. Or even
the second wife herself. Rather young for a stepmother, he thought. And
rather… Well, he would have had a hard time calling her “Mom,” that’s for
sure.
    She was very pretty in an offbeat kind of way. Not a classic
beauty, but she did have classic lips. Wide, full, naturally red lips.
Incredible. Great hair, too—bronze shot through with gold, thick and shiny, a
sexy, sleep-tangled mane. She had a sweet, all-American voice. It was hard to
pin down her origins, but he doubted she was a native New Yorker.
    She had guts, too, facing him down with that bat. She’d been
scared, but that hadn’t stopped her. Too bad she was such a martinet. He sensed
in her the kind of officious, regimented thinking that had driven him away from R.H. and Hale’s Point two decades ago. She really did
remind him of his father: everything by the book, nothing left to chance.
    He wasn’t only soaked to the bone, he was chilled to the
bone, as well. God, his legs hurt—both of them now, not just the one. Every
step made his right shin throb and sent a jolt of fire up to his left hip. Why
hadn’t he stayed in Hale’s Point? Or at least let Harley drive him, or better
yet, called a cab? It was that old bolting instinct. That urge to flee.
    He shook his head. What was the matter with him, anyway? Kids
hitchhiked—kids too broke to get around any other way. He had no business being
out here. He was thirty-seven years old and far from broke. His net worth
probably exceeded that of his father at this point, and none of it, he reminded
himself proudly, was inherited.
    It was beginning to look like he’d be spending all night out
here. Cars were few and far between, and in this downpour, he’d be invisible.
    Headlights. The hell with it. He wrapped his arms tightly
around his chest, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.
    Could you sleep standing up in a rainstorm? He tried to
remember all the worst places he had slept. The hospital was pretty bad, with
his leg in traction. But that wasn’t half as bad as that roach-infested oven of
a cell in D-Block, with a 320-pound bunkmate who’d murdered his brother-in-law
by suffocating him with a pillow while he slept. And then there was the time
his pals had talked him into climbing that mountain in the Canadian Rockies and
they’d had to rig up their sleeping bags so they hung vertically off the cliff
face. That had been a trip.
    A horn honked somewhere…. Funny thing was, he’d slept like
a baby that time. He could still remember the feeling, suspended high above the
Rockies in the sharp, cold air, drifting, drifting….
    Honk. “Tucker!”
    He opened his eyes and raised his head. A car had pulled
over. Its door stood open. Inside, it glowed with light.
    She was there, beckoning to him.

 
 
 
    Chapter 2

 
    Tucker began stripping the moment the front door closed behind him. Leaning
on the hall table for support, he tossed his cap, cane, duffel, and denim
jacket onto the tiled floor. Then, in one swift motion, he whipped his sodden
sweater and T-shirt over his head and flung them on top of the jacket.
    Harley’s eyes grew wide at the sight of his bare chest—more
in horror, he realized, than in appreciation. The ragged gashes carved into his
flesh between his left shoulder and the bottom of his rib cage were an alarming
sight—even to him. His back, on that side, was almost as bad.
    He took the towel she handed him, quickly dried his face,
hair, and upper body, and draped it around his neck. Then he undid the button
fly on his jeans. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve got to get out of these.”
    She turned around and headed toward the back of the house. “I’ll
make up your bed.”
    “I can handle that. Don’t worry about it.”
    “I don’t mind.” Clearly Harley just wanted an excuse to get
away from him while he undressed. That was okay. Still, he