Killing Katie (An Affair With Murder) (Volume 1) (31 page)

The hours of the day ticked by. I ate alone at Romeo’s, all the while imaging Katie sitting across from me.

No more sadness
, I told myself, forcing back a memory of when we were young.

The sun had dipped out of the sky and the crisp moonlight made me realize how late it was.

A drink. I was going to celebrate the end of this fine day with a drink. Katie would have approved. A shot of White Bear would have been my first choice, but from what I’d seen during my last drive out there, I thought it likely that the Feds would still have that place closed up.

I got in the car and started driving, crossing a bridge into a part of town I hadn’t visited since Steve and I were first dating. I passed our old movie theater, liking that it was still open, still had a line of teens waiting to buy popcorn and see the latest flicks. Their faces were filled with the nervousness of first dates and the eagerness of first kisses, and on some, I saw the hope of a little more.

I found the bar Steve and his friends frequented, the sports bar that nearly ended who we were, who we’d eventually become. The name had changed, and the outside wore a younger look, catering to a dance crowd more than to a sports scene. I parked my car and colored my lips and cheeks using the makeup I’d applied for my visit to the White Bear.

Just a shot,
I told myself, hoping they might carry a bottle of White Bear Whiskey.
Maybe two.

In place of sports commentators came the jarring thump of hard dance music, which thrummed against my body as sharp lights bounced off the walls and ceiling, skating over the tops of dancers jumping up and down. I made my way through a sea of sweaty faces, naked shoulders, and hard abs. Long hair whipped around as hands pawed at my arms and back, the dance crowd absorbing me into their pulsing, amorphic beat. Eager fingers pulled on my hands, inviting me to join them. I rocked my head and motioned that I’d be back, thankful that I had enough of a look to be accepted, to pass the test.

“Shot of White Bear?” I asked, dropping twenty dollars on the bar. I sat down on a round stool, catching my partial reflection in the mirror behind the bottles of liquor. I looked hot. I looked hotter than expected. “Well, Mr. C., you put
ten
years back. Congratulations.”

“What was that?” the bartender asked, bending over to hear me better. Tall and cute, sandy blond hair swept to one side, high cheek bones ridged above dimples. “Whiskey, got it. Rocks or neat?”

“White Bear, neat. If you’ve got it.”

He dipped below the bar, glass bottles tolling like bells as he searched. “You’re in luck. Last bottle,” he answered, reappearing. “And from the sounds of it, last bottle for a long time. With all the news coverage, we’ve been going through this stuff.”

He cracked the cap of the round bottle, set the glass in front of me, and poured my drink. The smell came next, rising to my nose, strong enough that I could taste it. I reached for the glass, but just then another hand touched mine. Slender fingers, painted nails—
and three tattooed hearts between the thumb and forefinger
.

“Can I try?” I heard in my ear, the smell of perfume reaching my nose.

“Aren’t you a bit . . . forward?” I asked, then turned to face a woman who was chasing youth, just like me. Beautiful. Her wavy red hair revealed to me a truth only fantasies are made of. I couldn’t believe my luck. But then again, maybe somewhere in the deepest recesses of my murderous mind I thought there was a chance that I’d run into Little Miss Three Hearts here. “Skank,” I believe my old friend had called her. Even after a decade and a change from a sports bar into a disco, she was still hanging out in the same sad spot. Here she was, within reach of my lips, touching my hand, clearly wanting to do more with me than drink my whiskey.

“I’ve never gotten anywhere without being a little forward,” she answered, lifting my drink and sipping it with her tongue on the glass. “Anyone ever tell you how hot you are? Your husband say that to you, lately?” I wanted to laugh when she asked me that, wondering if she’d even remember straddling my husband’s lap.

“He has,” I answered, calmly. And then I quickly added, “But we have an understanding.”

“Nice,” she said, raising her brow. “Bring him around next time.”

Her hand moved to mine again, soft and tender. It touched Needle, touched death.

I thought back to how we were going to pay for law school. I thought back to Nerd and the open offer I had made him.

“Things must be different this time,” I had said softly. “Careful this time. No mistakes.”

“Right, no mistakes,” she answered, thinking I was talking to her. “I love your ring.”

I watched as she played with the large stone, waiting to see if she would twist the gem, rotate it, release Needle’s syringe. For law school and for Steve, I decided that I needed to become who I was supposed to be. But first, I just needed a little practice.

Sometimes you have to kill a few to save a life.

Thank you for reading
Killing Katie
. I do hope you enjoyed my book. Want to know what happens next in the series? Pick up
A Painful Truth
,
where the story continues. As a treat, I’ve added its first chapter to the end of this book.

If you enjoyed reading
Killing Katie
, I would appreciate it if you would help others enjoy my book as well. How? Tell your friends and family about the great book you just read. Reviews are a great help too. Post on Amazon or Goodreads and let me know that you wrote a review so that I have an opportunity to thank you.

And don’t forget about the FREE stuff available on my site, writtenbybrian.com. Click the
newsletter
link on the landing page, or navigate to
http://writtenbybrian.com/sign-up
to subscribe to my newsletter and get some freebies.

Look for some of my other shorts and novels:

Naked Moon

An Affair with Murder

Superman’s Cape

An Order of Coffee and Tears

Going Gray — Gray Series Book 1

Gray Skies — Gray Series Book 2

Blinded by Sight — Gray Series Book 3

Union — Gray Series Book 4

Gray Series — Omnibus Edition

From the Indie Side

Silo Saga: Lottery

WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?

I’M A WALRUS!

Brian Johnson -
The Breakfast Club

Who am I?

I’m a resident of Virginia. I live there with my wife and children, along with three cats—sometimes more—a mouse, a parrot, a lizard and the funniest chinchilla on the East Coast.

Although I live in Virginia, my heart is still in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I was raised. And I hope that one day, I’ll be able to call Philadelphia home again.

Growing up, I liked to read short stories, but struggled with the words. You see, I had a secret, a sad little secret. Ashamed and embarrassed, I was the little kid in the back row of the schoolroom quietly moving my lips along with the class while everyone read aloud. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I hoped nobody would notice, but they did. They always did.

By the time I’d reached the fourth grade, my secret wasn’t a secret anymore. The teachers knew something was wrong.
Dyslexia
. Maybe that’s why I liked science fiction so much? All those crazy-looking glyphs on the screen, glowing, flashing.
The fix? Back to the third grade for me, and then special classes three days a week. It worked. Once I started reading, I never stopped. Stephen King, Piers Anthony, Dean Koontz, and even the Judy Blume books my sisters discarded.

I’m still one of the slowest readers I know, but school was never a problem again. I finally graduated the third grade, and then kept on going until I finished my master’s.

These days, I work as an engineer and spend my nights writing, editing, and thinking up the next great story.

Happy reading,

Brian

FROM AROUND THE corner, I saw my latest mark approach. A flutter came into my chest. My muscles grew rigid and my hands became clammy. I was going to kill again. He wore his black hair long, slicked it back with an oily sheen that glinted gray in the light from the overcast sky. Some of it hung loose around his ears and covered the front of his face. My mark was a stout man, square and bulky like a fire hydrant. I learned from his file that he was in his late thirties and that he’d never married. He also had no family to speak of.

I stepped closer to him, then stopped abruptly. He paused as though he knew I was there, that I was watching him. He shuffled his feet and pushed the thick frame of his glasses back onto his nose before turning around to face the street corner. It was the fifth time he had made that turn. But nobody else noticed. Nobody else counted his moves. Not like I did. He peered over his shoulder as a soft breeze caught the stray hairs above his eyes, revealing a furrowed brow, a near frown. He was clearly concentrating intently. He licked his lips. He was hunting.

With each turn, his eagerness brought him closer to me. He paced back and forth like a caged lion waiting to be fed. Only there were no bars holding him back. The man was free to seek out his prey, to seek out his next victim. And though he had an evilness inside him that I could never understand, it disgusted me that I could relate to him on one level—I knew how he felt. I knew what the hunt was doing to him. I knew the sour smell of sweat and the sting of it on the back of his neck. And I knew how his hands tingled, and his heart paced, and that he could never seem to catch his breath. After all, I was hunting too. I was hunting
him
.

I cleared my lungs as he closed the distance between us. He was near enough that I could hear him scrape his fingertips along the building’s brick facade. For a moment, I could smell the thick odor of his cigarettes. He nervously needled the brick’s pale mortar, picking at it briefly before pacing back in the other direction. As if he’d heard my thoughts, he pulled out a cigarette and struck a match. He puffed until the end was cherry red, and his head and face disappeared in a cloud of white smoke. When he reappeared, his eyes had wandered over to the playground across the street. I was certain he’d already selected his next victim.

A flurry of chaos erupted from the jungle gym, stopping him in his tracks. He closed his hand over his mouth, nervously wiping at nothing. Children squealed in delight, running and jumping, playing chase with one another in ignorant bliss, completely unaware of the dangerous man looking to feed on their innocence. A tiny child, no more than five by my guess, raced up to the edge of the street, her golden pigtails swinging and bouncing as she threw a twig onto the road. A car honked, blaring a threat before pummeling the stick beneath its heavy tires. The man’s eyes flicked wide and his body tensed. He leaned forward, waiting to see what Pigtails would do next. But a woman’s scolding voice interrupted the activity, and the man settled back onto his heels. The woman scolded again, yelling for Pigtails to come back immediately. The man stayed fixed like a statue, ingesting every second of the interaction, every detail, every nuance. He seemed to be recording it in his memory. I thought he was mesmerized by the little girl, but that wasn’t it at all. He was
memorizing
the little girl. My stomach lurched, turning with a sick twist, knowing what he wanted to do to her. If I had the opportunity, I’d kill him where he stood.

“Patience,” I told myself. I waited. He’d never broken his pattern before. Not yet, anyway. It had been more than a week since Nerd and I started working this case, and the man had only deviated from his daily patterns one time, when the early spring showers kept the children safe and indoors and out of his sight.

I’d read the police report and nearly retched when I learned what he’d done to a six-year-old girl. The man turned and paced back toward me. The smell of his burning cigarette grew stronger, the smoke caught in a short gust of wind, rising in a twirl, thinning above his head, and falling near me. I could see more of his face now. No taller than me, his chin stubbled in flecks of black, and his cheeks sunken deep beneath bulging eyes. The sight of him reminded me of a ghoul, but to the little girl who he had raped and murdered, he must have seemed a giant. A monster. And to her parents—the ones I’m nearly certain arranged for his murder—this ghoul, this man, this
thing
, was pure evil.

“The world’s not going to miss you,” I said. “Technicalities are meaningless in my world.”

This was our fifth case since Nerd and I had gotten back together. I know it’s murder, but I like to call them
cases,
as if I am some kind of doctor. Only I’m not fixing a broken bone or helping to rid the world of a crippling disease. Instead, I’m righting wrongs and bringing a sense of retribution to the minds and hearts of those in need. I know it’s still murder. I’m not trying to fool myself into thinking it is anything different. I am a murderer, and I’m the first to admit that I’m getting off on what I’m doing. But isn’t it the same for a scientist in the throes of a great discovery or a surgeon cutting into a body? Aren’t they getting off on what they are doing? And let’s not forget, I’m also getting paid a shit-ton of money for my work. And who doesn’t like that?

Since starting to work with Nerd, I have to say his technical abilities have gone beyond anything I thought was even possible. Sometimes I wonder if he’d been holding back before, and that now that he is really beginning to trust me—and us and what we’ve become. The favorite change he’s implemented? He optimized the yellow and green and red links used to navigate the Deep Web. To the endless depths of the Deep Web, he’s applied what he proudly calls our personalized taxonomy, helping us connect to those seeking revenge. Since then, we’ve had more customers than we can take on. Who knew there were so many willing to pay five or even six figures for a taste of vengeance? In our first months, I made more money than Steve had in all of his last year working as a police detective.