This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Published by Second Wind Publishing at Smashwords Published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC. Kernersville Second Wind Publishing, LLC 931-B South Main Street, Box 145 Kernersville, NC 27284 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations and events are either a product of the author’s imagination, fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any event, locale or person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright 2009 by J J Dare All rights reserved, including the right of commercial reproduction in whole or part in any format. This book is free for personal use. Running Angel, and all production design are trademarks of Second Wind Publishing, used under license. For information regarding bulk purchases of this book, digital purchase and special discounts, please contact the publisher at www.secondwindpublishing.com Cover design by R ‘n J Designs Manufactured in the United States of America She watched her neighbor's house through the venetian blinds in her dining room window. She had learned if she opened them only part-way and closed her left eye, she could follow the movements of the people going in and out of the house. When she tried to watch them with both eyes opened, it gave her a headache, so she sat there day after day with her left eye closed and her head cocked slightly to the right. Her neighbor had died a month ago. He had been old, but he had been healthy. His sudden death from a heart attack had taken everyone by surprise. She knew him like she knew all her neighbors: more than casually, but less than close. Her neighborhood was not one where people dropped in for coffee or had large barbecues in back yards for everyone or had a committee that decided how tall your fence could be or what color the trim on your house should be. You minded your own business and kept to yourself, for the most part. Not out of rudeness, but out of necessity in the world of today. The face one showed the world could easily hide the face of a monster. Caution ruled and everyone kept to himself. Her front window faced his driveway, so everyday she saw his car, sitting there like an obedient dog waiting for a master who would never come and take it out again. She wished his family would take the car away; he was dead and his car was a constant reminder that he would never again go outside and sit in the driver's seat and honk at her as he passed slowly by and saw her sitting in her front window. She remembered the time he dropped his cigarette while reversing out of his driveway and backed into her mailbox. When she rushed outside, he was staring at her mailbox, laughing. She looked at her mailbox and laughed, too, when she saw that he had accidentally straightened the damn thing she had tried for months to get her son to fix. She felt the loss of her casual compatriot. They had been as close as neighbors these days could be. He sat on his front porch swing and watched her troubles just as she sat in the front window and watched his. Now she was watching the plants and flowers slowly wither and die, the ones he had lovingly doted on like a father caring for his children. She should have at least tried to water them so some living reminder of him would survive, but she couldn't bring herself to cross the street and pick up the hose. She hated the fact she couldn't even go to his funeral. She knew some of her neighbors had gone, but she had feigned illness to avoid the final closure. She could not face the fact that he was lifeless and cold; she could not face her own mortality. So, she sat and watched through the venetian blinds as her neighbor's house slowly followed its owner into death. The first night after his funeral she had seen the lights come on in his living room and on his front porch. She knew he had an automatic timer set to turn them on when darkness approached, but all the same, it spooked her to see the farce of life in his house. Every night, she sat by her front window and waited for the lights to come on in his house. In the middle of the night, when she couldn't sleep, she would go downstairs and look out and see lights still shining across the street. She wished someone would turn the timer off, but then the impenetrable darkness in his house might be worse than the eerie lights that came on without the touch of a living hand. She was watching the day they finally came and began packing up his possessions. It was taking them a few days to organize everything, to see who wanted what and where to send the things that meant nothing to them. She sat rooted to her post as the procession of a lifetime marched out of his house. She watched as they casually piled odds and ends by the side of the road for the garbage truck to pick up. The things he may have treasured had now been deemed trash. She saw one of them carrying the old bullet lamp out to the road; she remembered him telling her how he had saved a mortar shell from the war and his brother the electrician had made it into a lamp. He had brought the lamp out to her on his front porch when she had made one of her infrequent stops to see how he was doing. She never went inside his house and he understood her trepidation in entering his domain. When she would stop by, he would make a point of coming outside with a couple of cool glasses of tea and inviting her to sit with him on the front porch. She missed the fact that he would no longer be watching her as she had watched him. They had taken almost all vestiges of his life away. She wished someone would take away his car. J. J. Dare self-published a book for a second grade project. She looks back on that 10 page, A+ success as the beginning of her love for the written word. Career, marriage, children and a divorce have not stopped this author from writing. In addition to penning numerous short stories, Dare is currently working on several novels in different genres. Other books from J J Dare available at Second Wind Publishing http://www.secondwindpublishing.com/JJDare.html False Positive: A tale of murder, war, espionage and vast conspiracy. Joe Daniels, thought he had at last escaped his brutal past. His placid world begins to unwind when his lovely wife Beanie is involved in an inexplicable accident that leaves her changed in every way; then ghosts from his past begin to emerge. False World: The second book in the Joe Daniels' trilogy continues where False Positive ends as Joe continues his mission to destroy those who have destroyed his life. As the world changes, Joe's search for justice takes on a global urgency and he races to find answers before deadly answers find him. The world is not what you see. And neither is Joe.