Excerpt: Ghostbox

Sam wandered into the tiny kitchen and began going through the motions of making another pot of coffee. She wasn't sure she even needed the stuff right now, but the mundane task of pouring water, pulling open a coffee bag and flipping the switch helped her turn her mind off a bit.

You did not just see that.

Sam had seen some very strange, sometimes even terrifying, things in her life, but nothing she'd ever experienced before could hold a candle to this. Despite her best efforts at blowing it off, something in the back of her mind refused to let go of it. It kept whispering to her, yes, yes you did see that. She wasn't about to admit it, though, especially out loud. She already had to be on her toes at work as far as her reputation was concerned, and she wasn't about to jeopardize things now. Not after she'd worked so hard to get where she was, and how far she'd had to crawl to get there.

If you say something now, they'll find out about you, and it will all be over.

She couldn't run that risk. She'd worked so hard, and hadn't had any problems in years. Her files had been erased once she was no longer a minor, and she was not at all interested in dredging things out of the closet and forcing them into public view.

She wasn't going to freak out in front of colleagues. She'd rather walk off the job, find a nice quiet corner to scream into and let it all out there. And she wasn't about to do that, either.

Hell with it. She hadn't seen a damn thing. Johnson's stupid stories had fired up an overly creative synapse in her brain, and that was it.

“Cops don't rattle,” she said to the coffee machine, “and neither do I.”