Now You See Him Read Online Free

the moment she realized how very sick he was. She'd been able to be a remote, gracious hostess to the other lost souls Daniel had sent her. Michael Dowd was another prospect altogether. For the first time in months she found someone whose needs superseded her own. Someone to concentrate on, ignoring her own helpless pain. From the moment she'd felt his weak clasp and looked into his pain-lined face, she'd known he wasn't really a threat at all. He was simply a sick man, someone she wanted to help.
    She drove with uncharacteristic sedateness through the narrow streets of the town, then headed up into the hills toward Belle Reste with only a decorous increase in speed. Driving was one thing she really enjoyed, and during the past few months of penance and mourning she'd been denying herself that pleasure. Now, suddenly, she felt like stretching her wings, but she knew that with an invalid beside her she had to be as demure as an old lady. Maybe tomorrow she would see about renting a car after all. A small sporty convertible, something with a little power beneath the hood. Her new houseguest would probably enjoy going for drives once his strength increased a bit.
    The road to Belle Reste was a series of three hills and three valleys, with the villa lying at the end of the final valley on a spit of land jutting out into the warm Caribbean. With Francey keeping a sedate pace and a companionable silence as her passenger rested, they made it through the first hill and valley, up the next hill, and were heading downward again when the car began gathering momentum.
    Francey pushed her sandaled foot down on the brake, but instead of slowing down the Jeep seemed to move even faster, and she glanced down, wondering if by some odd chance she was pressing the accelerator instead.
    The brake was all the way to the floor. Pumping was utterly useless—the speedometer was climbing past its well-bred thirty-five to something beyond fifty. Suicide, on roads like these.
    Don't panic, she told herself, still pumping the useless brake pedal. Keep steering and try to downshift.
    The gears ground noisily as she tried to push the stick shift into third, and the speedometer climbed to fifty-five. Her passenger turned his face toward her, opened his sleepy eyes and said in a tone of complete unconcern, "Brakes failed?"
    She couldn't help it—his mundane tone made her want to laugh. "It seems so."
    "You've tried pumping them, you've tried shifting down," he observed casually. "What about the emergency brake?"
    "It never worked." She allowed herself a quick glance over at him. She would have expected him to look even worse, paler, now that death stared them in the face. Instead his color had improved, and his eyes had something that might almost be called a sparkle in another man, another situation.
    "Then you're simply going to have to drive like hell," he said. "Or we're going to die."
    The speedometer had reached sixty. They were only halfway down the hill, and coming up was a series of S-curves worthy of the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo. "Maybe in a Ferrari," she muttered, "with decent tires. We have maybe a snowball's chance in hell of making it."
    Michael Dowd laughed. "Well then, Francey, it's been nice knowing you."
    "Nice knowing you, Michael," she muttered, concentrating on the steering. The
speedometer was edging toward seventy, the S-curves were approaching, and
Francey Neeley didn't want to die. Patrick Dugan was dead, cut down in a hail of bullets, and she didn't want to run the risk of ever seeing him again, even in some nebulous afterlife.
    She took one last glimpse at her passenger before they headed into the curves. At least he didn't seem to mind dying. That should have made two of them. But she didn't want to die. She didn't want to take the easy way out, the coward's way out. There was too much left to do, to accomplish.
    "For heaven's sake put your seat belt on!" she shrieked at her passenger, just noticing he hadn't bothered to