Girl With The Flat Tire (sneak peek)

The working title of my third novel is GIRL WITH THE FLAT TIRE. Here is how it begins...

The policeman finished searching the house and approached the woman sitting on the sofa. He stopped a few steps away watching the paramedic as he inspected the wound on her head. Blood was oozing from a three-inch gash over her left ear. The paramedic carefully parted her dirty blonde hair away from the wound and dabbed at the blood with a wad of cotton. The woman appeared to be in her late twenties and might have been pretty at one time.

"What is your name, miss?" the policeman asked, taking out a pen and notepad from his front pocket.

The woman glared at him like she wished he wasn’t there. He was used to that. Battered wives often resented cops. Her eyes were red and swollen, and he could see the pupils were dilated. She was on something, he suspected.

"Angel," she muttered.

"That's your name?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes.”

"Sometimes Angel is short for Angela, or Angie."

"Just Angel, like I said.”

Last name?" he asked. She said it was Hopper.

He looked around the room, noting it was sparsely furnished like the rest of the small house. The linoleum flooring was worn and split apart in gaping cracks, and the walls were smudged and filthy. The sofa was covered with a soiled blanket, and there was a pillow at one end like someone had been using it for a bed. A low-watt bulb burned from a shade-less lamp on an end table next to the sofa. The whole place reeked and it was all the policeman could do to keep from holding his nose.

"What was his name? The man who did this to you."

"John Brookner," she said.

"Your husband?"

She scoffed. "No. But he's been sleeping here for almost a year and eating my groceries, the draft-dodging piece of crap."

"How did he...?" The policeman pointed at her head with his pen.

"He beat me with his fist like a punching bag, then hit me with that." She pointed to a broken picture frame on the floor near the far wall. Shards of glass and a photo of Angel and a small child lay beside it.

"Was there a child here in the house?" the policeman asked, picking up the photo.