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

"You coming or what?" the Amazon called across the empty parking lot.

Two and a half years cooped up in various secure locations with cops and lawyers had made me a stranger to the outdoors. I shook off my vertigo and made tracks for the burgundy four-door Pontiac. We buckled up and pulled out onto a narrow two-lane road. She eyed my sweater. "You want the air?"

Before I could answer, a burbling chirp sounded, and she brought out a slim black rectangle with a glowing blue face. I glared at it, irritation crawling up the back of my neck. I'm not a fan of the telephone, in any configuration. For my money, Bell attached his invention to the wall so you could get the hell away from it.

The Amazon listened, her lips compressing. "Fire there yet?" More listening, then, "Did she get a look at the guy?"

A green and white sign flashed by: AZULA, TEXAS. POP. 5,141.

"I'm about five minutes out," the cop continued into her phone. "Yeah. OK, Benny. Thanks."

She beeped the thing off and put it away, seeming to forget that I was there. I didn't remind her.

We hummed along in silence for maybe half an hour, the sparse ghosts of small houses sliding by out in the landscape; then the Pontiac slowed and rattled over a low bridge into a town square. A stone courthouse held down the patch of dry grass at its center, a couple dozen weathered storefronts huddled around it like campers around a fire. The place could have done time for cuteness if half the buildings hadn't been boarded up or vacant. I felt the thing between my ears boot up the automatic cost-benefit analysis it always runs through when I lay eyes on derelict real estate. My mood started to lift. Maybe this exile to the sticks didn't have to be the end of life as I knew it.

A thick plume of gray smoke twisted up into the sky from a building on the far corner, to our left. Two fire trucks were parked at the curb in front, and a couple of guys in full hero regalia stood on the courthouse lawn, one with a radio pressed to the side of his face. A short way off, closer to us, a uniformed cop was talking to a tiny old woman at the open driver's-side door of a police cruiser. They shaded their eyes against the headlights and stepped back as the Amazon pulled up alongside.

"Hey, Chief," the uniform said, walking over and laying his arm on the Pontiac's roof. He was maybe thirty-five—small, dark, and wiry—with a bristle of black hair growing low on his forehead. Second generation, I bet myself.

"Anything?" the Amazon asked him.

He shook his head. "911 caller gave the same description as Silvia did—Caucasian, blond, red gimme cap—but he was long gone by the time we got here." He jerked his chin at the firefighters. "First-in found point-of-origin indicators that look fishy."

"Damn it," the Amazon growled. She put the car in Park and got out.

As the cops strode toward the firefighters, the old woman—Silvia, I presumed—inched over and peered in at me. Her face was lined and folded like one of those dried apple dolls, with shiny black raisin eyes. Thin braids the color of sheet metal lay down the front of her patterned housedress.

I gave her the eyebrows, and she said, in a surprisingly deep voice, "What did you do?"

I considered telling her I'd just killed somebody's grandmother, but decided it was a little early to go off script. I hadn't even been in town for fifteen minutes.

"Nothing," I said. "I'm a friend of Teresa's."

The raisin eyes moved off my face to the suitcase in the backseat. "From where?"

"Boston," I said.

She smiled as if at a joke, and my radar went off.

"What's funny?"

The cops were back before she could get an answer out, the Amazon asking her, "Silvia, you sure you didn't recognize this runner?"

"All them white boys look the same to me." She shrugged.

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.