Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (127 page)
Authors: Cathy Perkins,Taylor Lee,J Thorn,Nolan Radke,Richter Watkins,Thomas Morrissey,David F. Weisman
This is how it has to be, Leon told himself.
He said, “Great view, sweets.”
As he began to pull the automatic from behind his leg, Kora
smiled at him. Such a beautiful, evil face.
Then, as he was raising his weapon to end the life of this
danger, this evil destroyer, he saw something in her hand.
Small.
He had forgotten.
Next thing, he heard a bang and saw a flash. A flash that
was partially obscured by the bright glow of the midnight sun that was Vegas
behind her.
The bullet from the Derringer slammed into his chest with
shocking force. And he thought with bewilderment,
The bitch shot me with my
present!
The icy smile stayed on her face, and the words that came
out of her mouth slapped him as he sank slowly, stunned, to his knees, his
weapon slipping from his fingers.
Kora said, “You nasty little scorpion. You were going to
shoot the one you love, you psycho piece of trash.”
He rolled over. He felt her take his wallet and keys. The
bitch was robbing him!
She pushed him over the edge of the hill. And, as he toppled
over, he heard her say, with a great sense of release, of vindictive triumphant,
“Bye, dude. Thanks for this beautiful gun. I love it. You like to quote movies,
big shot, well I got one from
The Godfather
for you. Like Michael
Corleone said, ‘If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us
anything, it is that you can kill anyone
.
’”
***
Kora North stood holding the Derringer and waiting to see
how she would react to having just killed her psychopath partner. She remembered
that night when he was unconscious and she’d held the gun to his head and
wondered. Now she knew.
What she felt was neither joy nor some form of misery. It
was just a kind of curiosity and a little amazement at how easy life could be
snuffed out when bringing it into being was such a labor. Just as Booth had
killed Lincoln.
She thought of how Leon came into this world and how he’d
just left. Nine months after getting screwed by some jerk, a woman had carried
this cold-blooded bastard in her womb. Then had to let him suck the milk from
her breasts. Had to clean his dirty-diapered ass. And what did she give to the
world? A killer.
Wow, Kora thought. How crazy is this life and death thing?
Kora walked back to the car, put her CD back on, turned it
up high, and was about to drive off to Vegas. But there was something she had to
do, and it took her a moment before she realized what it was. One thing Kora’s
alcoholic mother had taught her, maybe the only thing, was the idea of
gratitude. People who take things for granted, who don’t show gratitude when you
do something for them, are the worst. Always be grateful.
That damn cop had come through for her. She owed Sydney
Jesup and that cute badass boyfriend of hers.
She took out her cell phone and texted a message. Then she
headed off, hammering down the twisting black ribbon road in her beautiful
Mercedes, trunk full of millions, the future looking very bright ahead.
Life,
she thought,
is a damn funny thing the way
it works out sometimes.
All the shit she’d taken. Men using her like some
jackoff toy since she was eight. Making her hate herself.
“I’m rich,” she yelled out at the gods of night, holding up
the arm with a new diamond bracelet on it, triumphant. “I’m free, rich, and now
it’s my turn!” Tears of joy came to her eyes.
A smile plastered on her face, she raced on into the fierce,
icy effulgence that was the beginning of her new life, her much deserved new
life—her first stop, Vegas…
64
When the text message from Kora North came late Sunday
evening, Marco and Sydney were in the Shelby cruising around the lake.
The Tahoe basin was as balmy and beautiful under the full
moon as any place on the planet.
The guests were all but gone from Thorp’s, and the cleanup
crews were being supervised by Rouse. He’d made the payout to the poker winners.
The death of Thorp wouldn’t be reported until Monday, when the body would be
discovered.
Sydney stared at the text message, then held the phone over
to Marco. “You believe this?”
Scorpion drowned. I swim alone…thanks.
He shifted gears, slowed, and glanced at the smartphone.
“Sounds like a short honeymoon.”
Sydney shook her head and emitted a dry chuckle, saying, “I
thought they’d at least get a day or two. Talk about a nasty honeymoon.”
“You think she planned on killing him all along?”
“I don’t know.”
They rode in silence.
Later that night, they went out on the lake in the Shaws’
boat and skinny-dipped under a full moon. They were as quiet as secret Washo
Indian lovers a thousand or so years ago on a night just like this.
***
At that moment, four hundred fifty miles to the south in a
ravine, Henry Craven Lee, aka Leon, known to himself and a few others—some of
them dead—as the Urbanwolf, rolled again. This time, he rolled about halfway
down the hill before a piece of flat ground and some bushes stopped him just
above the floor of the narrow desert canyon. The bullet had passed through his
jacket into his right chest. He didn’t know how deep.
He was still amazed that she’d done what she had. But he
appreciated it on some level. She was a serious bitch, no doubt.
Then he began to hear the sounds of night in the desert.
Small sounds of creatures that come out of their holes, from under their rocks.
Predators of the night.
And Leon, a man who’d often wondered how and where and when
he’d die, never thought it would be in a place like this.
So he decided he couldn’t die here. No way he wanted to be
food for the scavengers. He grabbed a handful of dirt and bush and pulled. No.
Not here. Not now.
He envisioned the big birds would come and land and squawk
and peck his flesh, his eyeballs, clean his bones. Nature being nature.
That bitch.
And if he died at the hands of that
woman, shot with the second gun to the one that had killed Lincoln, he’d be
famous forever if the world knew. But the world wouldn’t know. And that
aggravated him all the more.
There were plenty of ways the Urbanwolf could die, but as a
dog kicked off a hill, that couldn’t be. Anger inspired him to crawl, to fight.
Had he the capacity to laugh at his misfortune, and his
choice of women, he would have, but it hurt too much and he needed every bit of
energy he could muster just to move a few feet at a time…
The End
About the Author
Richter Watkins currently lives in Southern California with
his romance writing wife and a cat that thinks it’s a dog.
Contact:
http://www.richterwatkins.com/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the kind folks at the Lahonton Fish Hatchery and the
best reporter at the Tahoe Daily Tribune.
Other Works by Richter Watkins
The
Murder Option – Box Set: 3 novellas to thrill
Books Written Under Terry Watkins
Stacked Deck
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is
entirely coincidental.
Cool Heat
Copyright © 2013 by Richter Watkins
Published by Pryde Multimedia, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means—electronic, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for
brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the author
and/or publisher.
In Search of the Sacred Word
Book 1
The Sacred Search Series
by
Tom Morrissey
Praise for
In Search of the Sacred Word
…
“Jeremy Storyteller comes back from the dead—with company. He faces a challenge never before offered to anyone. Bursting with surprises and startling events, Jeremy’s tale will make your head spin in many different directions.”
~ KLM Reviews
“Old friends and associates reappear in strange ways that are both eerie and unsettling. This story will grab you by the throat and take you places you might fear.”
~ KingsWord
“Mystics, apparitions and visitations abound… I dare you to read this alone at night.”
~ The Adviser
“Everyone dies, and some come back. I wonder why that happens.”
~ Curious Georgia
“We the living are as aware of the land of the spirits, the same way fish are aware of the land of the humans.”
~ Sister Anna Joseph
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CHAPTER ONE
Floating, I was floating, as if in water or in a craft rolling through space. But then again, it had an otherworldly feeling about it. I was above a group of people moving around a room that I was looking down upon. There was a man lying motionless on a table, being poked and prodded on different parts of his body by several people in the room. There was a din caused by equipment and rapid conversation… but there was also a growing presence of this glorious music, oh it was so beautiful. I felt no conflict, just a sense of tremendous peace. And then there was a sudden voice that conflicted with the moment and the peace of it, ordering me in a very authoritarian tone, “Back… back… you must go back into your body, Jeremy. You must do so now.” The voice had a somewhat distant familiarity to it. “Now, Jeremy… NOW!!!!!”
BAM
and
BAM
again. I felt the life coursing back through my body, as my lungs struggled for the breath they had been denied for the past several minutes. My eyes flung open with a stare of amazement and desperation as I gasped for breath. The lights of the ER room were suddenly blazing into my eyes and then my mind.
“What just happened?” I asked in a very raspy voice of anyone who could hear me. A nurse with red hair, and a face covered by a mask looked at me but didn’t answer. She was part of the hustle and bustle of activity which was all around the table I was lying on. “What just happened to me?”
“You died. That’s what
happened
to you,” said a young black man who was also in a mask, as he leaned into my face deep into my eyes. “We got you back… and just in time, my man.” He winked at me as he spoke and backed away from my face.
