Excerpt from Nine Days by Minerva Koenig, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By the time I got to the church, I was giving serious thought to just telling Guerra, straight up, that I didn't want the job. The Amazon wouldn't like it, but what could she do? Tattle on me to WITSEC, I guess, but surely they'd prefer I not make an incompetent spectacle of myself. I was supposed to blend in.

A couple of the church's granite fence piers were in the shade, and I stopped to sit down and let some sweat dry. As I did so, the DeVille I'd seen parked in the ditch down the road from the Amazon's house appeared on the other side of the cemetery. It had dark-tinted windows, so I couldn't see who was driving. The back of my stomach went cold when it slowed and then stopped, watching me across the tombstones like a sheet-steel animal of prey.

My brain snapped off and I dropped into a high, cold landscape of pure-body survival that slipped on like a familiar custom-made garment. The government shrinks had decided this was some kind of psychological damage from the shooting, but it's a trick I've always had up my sleeve, and no way was I interested in being cured of something that's kept me alive for thirty-eight years and made me a damned successful criminal. The split seconds I save by not having to run everything through my prefrontal cortex are probably the reason I'm still here and Joe isn't.

I wasn't sure how long I sat there before the DeVille finally gunned its motor and sauntered insolently away, turning toward downtown on the other side of the church. It was still early afternoon, but it could have been a year later. I waited until my thought processes were working again, then got up and crossed the graveyard, putting some speed on it.

V

When I came into the northwest corner of the square about ten minutes later, the Cadillac was parked in front of a shopworn department store half a block straight ahead. I stayed on the sidewalk in the shade of a tall stone building on my right, keeping my eyes open while I decided what, if anything, to do.

In the daytime, the square looked almost monochromatic, most of its color bleached out by the hard white light. Some of the buildings had wood awnings that hung out over the sidewalk, but the sun seemed to blast right through them, sucking all the visual detail out of the window displays. The ones there were, anyway. I counted up the number of vacant properties: eighteen of twenty-four. Still showing signs of life were the department store, a corner store directly across the street from where I was standing, the courthouse, the bar, an indeterminate business a couple of doors down, and a large stone building diagonally across the intersection from that. Everything else seemed coated in graveyard dust, still and blank, like blind mice. The marquee above the theater on the other side of the courthouse still advertised a first-run matinee of Pulp Fiction, the plastic letters yellowed and crooked.

While I was thinking about Uma Thurman taking a needle in the chest, the old lady who'd talked to me at the fire the night before came out of the department store, a package under one arm. She got into the DeVille and drove off, in no hurry.

I stood there flat-footed for a minute, trying to decide whether I had something to worry about, or if I were overreacting to a normal level of local curiosity because of my circumstances. After ten minutes passed with the radar liking neither answer, I walked down and went into the department store. Bells hanging from the inside handle jangled as the door swung shut.

"I'm coming!" a faint voice called from somewhere out under the fluorescent lights.

The place smelled a thousand years old, even though it was probably only eighty or so. The mannequins in the front window were plaster, with hairstyles from the early '60s. I fingered a rack of blouses near me. They had a slick, plastic feel.

Excerpted from Nine Days by Minerva Koenig. Copyright © 2014 by Minerva Koenig. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Minotaur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.