 Penguin Presents. Two evils by P. J. Tracy. Red by Sarah Borges. Chapter 1 Sometimes the water was glassy and still, and the boat sat on it, like a piece of paper on a flat table, motionless, utterly silent. Other times, particularly when they were tied up in port, the tide would push in a wave that made the boat hump over the water like a roller coaster topping the big hill. But on the rarest of nights, the ocean off the keys was like a cradle, and on those nights it was safe to anchor a few miles offshore where the gentlest of swells rocked you to sleep and the water made kissing noises against the hull. Grace McBride liked listening to that. It reminded her of the sounds Harley's koi had made when they took food from your fingers before they'd all been butchered by some serial killer raccoon. There were no human serial killers in the keys that she knew of, and the proof was evident. She'd been living here for months now, without benefit of riding boots, black jeans, black duster, or a gun on her hip. And here she was, still alive. The heat and humidity had sent her to a boutique on her second day here, put her in a sundress and sandals for the first time in over a decade. And something about that change of outfit had changed her head, gobbled up the fear she'd lived with forever as if bare toes and legs were the one antidote to paranoia she'd never thought to try. Poor McGotsey. The Minneapolis homicide detective was the only man she'd ever opened her heart to, if only just a tiny bit. And he'd worked so hard to get her to the point where she could walk outside her house without a gun and, as it turned out, a sundress accomplished the goal in a single day. You can't wear a shoulder harness with a sundress, it just looks bad. Grace McBride hardly knew what to make of this new life, where the elements ruled and people simply went along for the ride. There was no choice but to cede control when a sailboat was running in front of the wind, and at first that had terrified her. For all her life, control had always been the key to her survival. Excruciating attention to every detail of her surroundings had been the only security. Sailing had taken all that away. There were no startling noises out here, no muggers, no killers, no sudden movements caught in the corner of your eye that made you want to run for cover. There was the endless expanse of water and sky, and the constant smell of salt on the wind. She wakened every morning without a single thought of the myriad dangers she would face simply by leaving her house, and fell into a dreamless sleep in her tiny birth-below decks each night, untroubled by nightmares of terror and murder, and blood flowing down the bare legs of innocent women. John Smith had given this to her, this exotic experience of living without fear, as if she were a normal person living a normal life. He was FBI, twenty years her senior, a solitary, humorless agent who lived for the job in little else. Three months ago he'd been assigned to work with Monkey Wrench, Grace's computer software company, and the Minneapolis PD, on a series of internet murders. They hadn't bond it in any serious way, even defining each other as friends would have been a stretch at that point. And yet when John had asked her out of the blue to go sailing with him in the Caribbean, Grace had said yes. To this day she didn't fully understand why she had done that. The way he'd delivered the imputation hadn't even been particularly persuasive. I have a boat. When I get back to DC I'm going to get on the boat and just sail away. You want to come along? It had been a ridiculous question. What kind of person would walk away from her life and sail off with someone she barely knows? And yet the moment he'd asked it, one of the very few happy moments she'd had in an otherwise frightening childhood popped into her mind. The night when a weary, distant foster mother had relented long enough to read a bedtime story to her. The owl in the pussy cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. They sailed away for a year and a day to the land where the boundary grows. To an unhappy child the image of sailing away from her life had been magical. Maybe it still was. Maybe that was... Sample complete. Ready to continue?