Vengeance to the Max (Max Starr, #5) by Jasmine Haynes
Prologue
There were many things she didn’t remember, things she didn’t want to, things she’d forced herself to forget for survival’s sake, and things that had simply faded away. This, though, was the one moment in her life she could never forget, that even her will had failed to erase.
It was the moment she would live and relive in her nightmares for all eternity.
She’d parked her car next to her husband’s, and now stood with her palm on the handle of the 7-11’s open door, gray metal turned icy by the late October night. The chill rose to numb her arms, traveled to the muscles of her face, and froze the thump of her heart mid-beat.
Inside, five men, including her husband, turned to her, then stilled like the arrested frame of an old movie. Bright florescent overhead lights leached the color from the scene and left their faces ashen. The acrid scent of burnt coffee wafted from the pot on its hot plate. Overdone hot dogs, cardboard hamburgers, and burritos ripened in their warming bins.
A grimace distorted the young clerk’s face as he stood paralyzed behind the counter.
Her husband, legs spread, knees bent slightly, arms away from his sides like a gunslinger ready for a shoot-out, hovered by a wire stand of snack chips.
Three men, faces hardened by evil to a similarity, grouped in huddle formation. The tallest held a gun in twitching fingers.
She would take the image of those faces to her grave.
A scar marred the cheek of the shortest. Slashing down from the ridge of bone to the corner of his mouth, it stretched his lips in a caricature of Batman’s Joker. A tattooed snake coiled on the arm of the second, the one closest to her. Following the fist already bunched, the snake’s bite would kill as easily as the real thing.
And the third. His blond hair brushed his shoulders and long lashes rimmed eyes the blue of a crisp cloudless fall sky. The smile of an angel creased full lips on a face that could have graced a movie screen and fluttered the hearts of teenage girls and old ladies. Except for the gun in his hand leveled steadily at the clerk. And his boots. Scarred black leather and steel toes that could crush ribs with a single kick.
She would remember the scar, the tattoo, and those boots.
The frozen moment, in which she saw everything and felt nothing, ended. The clerk reached beneath the counter. An alarm screeched in the night. The gun exploded, ghostly fire flashing from its muzzle. Her husband yelled.
And the gun went off again.
Someone screamed, the pain of it raging in her own throat.
Her husband slid to the dirty linoleum. Bags of Cheetos and Doritos fell to the floor with him and covered him like a blanket.
The sudden profusion of color almost blinded her. The leaf-green of his sweater, bright orange and yellow potato chip bags, the red dot of blood blossoming from the tiny hole in his forehead. Her knees cracked against the floor as if it were concrete. She crawled to him on elbows and knees, then gathered him to her.
His eyes turned from light brown to the deep color of freshly turned earth, and his breath bathed her wet cheek. When his lips moved, she could only read his final words over the clamor in her ears.
“Find my sister.”
Chapter One
“Head wounds bleed like a sonuvabitch, Max. That wasn’t exactly the way I died.”
How could Cameron speak with so little emotion? Perhaps because he’d been the one who died while she’d lived with the aftermath the past two years. Live with it, sleep with it, ache with it.
Listening to her dead husband’s unaffected voice, Max Starr curled into a ball in the center of her twin-size bed, wrapping her body around Buzzard the Cat. Her thrashing had terrified the black stray she couldn’t seem to get rid of.
“Not a dream, a nightmare,” she murmured into the warm fur. Cameron could read her mind and invade her dreams, and he was right. The night hadn’t happened that way. She hadn’t gotten close to him, hadn’t held him in her arms as he died, hadn’t breathed his last breath with him or heard his last words.
His killers had hauled her from the store before she’d had a chance to touch him. And he’d been dead before he hit the floor.
Dead but not gone. Not the night he’d been shot. Not for the two years since his corporeal death. Cameron haunted her. Either that or she’d lost her mind. Call it a little quirk she had. Some people kept pictures and mementos. Max pretended her dead husband talked to her. And made love to her.
Max hugged the cat, rubbing her face in fur fragrant with eucalyptus and dirt, the scent not quite easing the ache in her bones.