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

The Amazon got back into the car, saying to the uniform, "Keep everybody here, will you, Benny? I'll be right back."

We bumped over the fire hoses crisscrossing the street and passed along the front of the courthouse. The Amazon nodded toward the row of buildings facing it and said, "You've got a job interview there tomorrow afternoon."

The buildings she'd indicated were all dark except for a two-story place with a row of Harley-Davidsons parked at the curb in front and a neon sign in the window reading GUERRA'S. Open at this hour, it could be only one thing.

"Get bored halfway through?" I asked the cop.

She cut her eyes at me. "What?"

"If you'd read my whole file, you'd know that I was just stop-gap help in the bar, as a favor to my father-in-law. Construction is my field, not slinging booze."

She made a face and started shaking her head before I'd stopped talking. "You're not in California anymore. Girls don't do that kind of work around here."

I gave her back the face. "But they're allowed to run the police department?"

"I'm not in hiding from a bunch of neo-Nazis who want to kill me," she pointed out. "I can afford to be weird. You can't."

Fucking cops. Everywhere you go, they're the same.

Away from the square, there didn't seem to be much of a town. We drove maybe half a mile on a curbless, pitted strip of asphalt apparently unrelated to the sporadic buildings in its vicinity, some of which might have been houses. After we turned right at a small church with a big graveyard, signs of habitation disappeared entirely except for a big white house up ahead on the right.

The Amazon stopped to let a car coming toward us exit the narrow gravel driveway before turning in. There was a young woman at the wheel, too busy keeping her beige four-door out of the ditch to acknowledge us. I felt a little zap of something come off the Amazon as we passed, but it didn't last long enough for me to classify.

We parked on a bare patch of dirt under a low-hanging tree, and I followed the Amazon up onto a long screened porch facing the driveway. She unlocked a door and flipped on the lights, illuminating an antique kitchen with a Formica dinette against the wall, between two tall windows.

"I've gotta go deal with this fire situation," she said, twisting a brass skeleton key off her ring and handing it to me. "I'll come by in the morning so we can get each other up to speed. Call me on my cell if anything needs attention before then." She scribbled on the back of a card with a green ballpoint. I took it, and she disappeared down the porch steps.

In addition to the kitchen, there was a bathroom with an Olympic-sized claw-foot tub, and a room barely big enough to contain the queen-sized bed shoved sideways against the wall under a high window. Another door faced me across the narrow space alongside the bed, but it was locked and didn't open with the key. I decided I could survive the night without seeing my living room, and tossed my stuff into the closet. Then I went out to sit on the porch steps and take another look at that sky.

III

The heat woke me late the next morning. I lay there listening to the unfamiliar silence, wondering if I'd gone deaf in my sleep. Then I remembered where I was.

Wrapping myself in the bedsheet, I got up and went into the kitchen to forage. A rattle at the apartment door sounded before I could get the refrigerator open. Figuring it was the Amazon, I opened up and found a man standing there instead.

"Sorry," he said, taking a step back. "I didn't know Teresa had rented the place already."

He was whip-thin but expansively framed, big bony shoulders pushing at the seams of his snug-fitting T-shirt, with frankly dyed black hair and light eyes that didn't quite connect with mine. He gave off sex like church incense, and I felt myself remember that a few of my favorite condoms were still floating around in my bag somewhere. I'd just started thinking about asking him in when the Amazon appeared from a door at the far end of the porch.

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.