Page 1 of In Cold Blood

PROLOGUE

Friday, June 3, 2022

Adirondack County, Upstate New York

Was he trying to kill her?

Terror shot through her mind every time a loser like him pushed their luck.

Trinity Westwood didn’t wait to find out. She’d dealt with his kind before. Just because they flashed some green, they thought they could do whatever they pleased. Her instincts were to knee him in the jewels. It was effective. It would buy her enough time to fish under the cover and extract the pepper spray. It was always there. Out of sight but not out of mind. She’d used that handy device more than once. But with rent overdue, and her dealer no longer carrying her, she couldn’t afford to lose another customer.

One chance, that’s all he got.

Going against her rules, Trinity gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Behind the haze of heroin used to block out an evening of shame, she pried the john’s fingers away from her throat and forced his hand onto her breast, hoping that would distract him.

It didn’t.

Within seconds his hand snaked back up, claiming her larynx as his nostrils flared above her. A smile danced at the corner of his lips. He was enjoying this, she wasn’t.

“I’m not into that,” she said, slapping his hand away, hoping he would crumble back into the nervous shell he’d arrived in. After two years of doing this, she liked to think she was pretty good at sizing them up. If they carried themselves a certain way, drove a particular kind of car, or even dressed in a style unbecoming, she had no qualms about nixing the evening.

But new clients were always a wild card.

Trinity ran her fingers and thumb around his lips, hoping to distract him. He sucked in her thumb like a greedy child then bit down. She screamed, yanking her hand away. It was bleeding.

“Did you not hear me? I said I’m not into the rough stuff.”

“I never asked if you were,” he shot back.

“Get off me!” Speaking with authority could sometimes snap them out of it. It was a last-ditch effort to gain control before she shifted gears.

“Shut the hell up.” A hard slap across her face revealed his true intent.

There was no point screaming — out here, no one would hear, especially after midnight. New York State Route 73 was a desolate stretch — twenty-seven miles of meandering highway that snaked through a mountainous region of Adirondack Park. It was only frequented by hikers and the likes of her. Trinity had parked at her usual spot — Round Pond parking area, one of several entrances to trailheads along the highway. It was a tradeoff, one problem for another. She used to frequent nooks around town but patrolling officers became a problem.

But here, there was no fear of that.

Only fear of this.

As the brute bore down on her, one hand around her throat, fumbling at the thong beneath her skirt with the other, he called her all manner of vulgar names. Whore. Slut. Dirty bitch. They were all the same. Unoriginal.

Working off muscle memory, her hand slid under the blanket and latched onto her trusty OC can. Seconds from now the enclosed space in the back of her F-150 was about to become hell on earth but she was prepared for the burn.

He wasn’t.

The way she saw it, it was better that than to suffer what hell he had in store for her.

As the sicko grunted, struggling to maintain control, he released his hand from her throat to pull at the other side of her thong. Trinity blasted a large enough wave of the irritant in his face to lock up his eyes, mouth, throat, and lungs and make his skin feel like it had been doused in flames.

It happened so fast.

Following up, Trinity wielded the can as a weapon. She cracked him in the jaw and shoved him off as he screamed, writhing in agony.

With her eyes and mouth closed, Trinity pushed open the back window on the LEER topper, unlocked the tailgate, and scrambled out, falling to the asphalt and scraping her knees. Yanking up her panties and coughing hard, she unleashed another heavy spray into the fray as the asshole clambered out, cursing like a madman.

“You bitch, I’m going to…” He lashed out but couldn’t see a damn thing and every attempt to clear his eyes only made it worse. Experience told her to avoid touching her eyes. She’d exposed herself to the spray multiple times, learned her lesson, and now knew what to do. A hard kick to the groin from behind and he went down, groaning and crying hard. Trinity skirted around to the driver’s side, hopped in, and fired up the engine, crushing the accelerator as she reversed out into the road.