Cast the First Stone (The True Lies of Rembrandt Stone 1)

The room spins and as I crumple to the floor, strange ringing sounds echo through the shop, almost like an alarm. Or, maybe sirens.

A loud wind bullies the room and finds my bones, thundering through me. Drowning me. Time, spinning up. I close my eyes, letting it take me.

Then everything around me shatters, and I’m falling.

Voices sound a short distance away, but muffled, and when I open my eyes, I half expect to see paramedics, or even the glare of an ER.

It takes me a long moment—blinking into the fading sunlight cascading across a desk, leather chair and credenza—to realize I’m back. In my office.

Back to the life I worried I might never return to.

I’m still clutching my side, and now sit up, expecting the pain to tentacle around me, cut off my breathing, blind me.

But it’s vanished. I’m fine.

Not sitting in a pool of my own blood.

Not holding a satchel that contains a thermos filled with ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, and antimony sulfide.

Not watching Burke cuff Ramses Vega, the Coffee Shop Bomber.

My legs shake as I climb to my feet, my entire body trembling with the force of the dream. It had to be a dream, right? My empty whiskey glass sits beside my keyboard and I pick it up.

Smell it.

I don’t feel drugged.

On the contrary, every nerve is lit, the layers of my subconscious alive and vivid in my mind.

I remember the smell of the night seeping into the Camaro, the salty taste of Eve’s skin, the burn of Ramses’s fist in my gut, the explosion of my knuckles against his face. I can describe in detail my old apartment, along with Eve’s, and the expression on Booker’s face as he watched the second bombing. I even remember Laurie Stoltenberg, the witness from the first bombing.

Rich, vivid details to an event that feels as if it happened yesterday.

The kind of details that belong in my book.

My muse is back with a fist pump, and it’s lit my brain with what-ifs and twists.

An ending that just might work.

Voices draw me to the door, and I open it, listening.

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The television. I picture Ashley, curled up on the sofa, where I left her, playing a video game, or maybe now she’s watching one of her kids’ shows. I debate going to her, pulling her into an embrace, but I know it’ll lead to tickles and my hunkering down with her to watch something animated and I’ll forget the muse for something richer.

I have a deadline, promises to keep.

I softly close my door.

I don’t hear any of Eve’s footsteps creaking across our bedroom above me which means she’s probably out on her run. I check my watch.

Booker’s watch. The hands are unmoving, stuck at three and seven, like before. I fiddle with the dial, but they remain lifeless.

Maybe it was all a dream.

My screen saver is spinning, so I return to my desk. I cap the whiskey bottle and shove it back into the drawer.

Powerful stuff, that Macallan.