Page 77 of Deathtoll

Emma.

Had a mouth on her, that one. Pretty. Too bad it wouldn’t last. He was in a mood. The town brought out the worst in him, or the best…depending how one looked at it.

He’d found the perfect lair, one nobody would suspect, and it came with a built-in torture chamber. Did he believe in fate? He believed in himself, his brain, and his skills. Although, just this once, he felt as if maybe the universe was giving him a gift.

On the other side of the gap between the houses, Kate stepped up to her window and looked out, as if looking right at him.

Asael savored the tingles that spread over his skin.

She couldn’t see him. She wasn’t even really looking. She stared into nothing.

She was slim, strong, with lovely breasts, he noticed as she turned. A pretty pair of sisters.

He was going to enjoy them. He could do whatever he wanted. No specific instructions from a client.

This wasn’t a job.

This was a treat.

* * *

Murph

Murph drove east on the Turnpike, tearing himself apart over whether he was doing the right thing. Driving away from Kate went against all his instincts. But Emma was in mortal danger. And he couldn’t ignore that either.

Took him an hour to reach the right pull-off from the highway, a strip of bare dirt curled around a stand of bushes. He could see tire tracks, fairly crisp. Could have been from earlier that day, or from a day or two ago. They didn’t mean much. It was the kind of spot cops used for cover to catch speeders.

Murph jumped from his pickup and headed across the field to the stand of woods ahead, to the spot where he’d killed Mordocai and saved Kate. He swore as he went, hating to think about that day. He’d never meant to come back.

The twilight was giving way to dark. He picked up speed. He needed to be able to see.

The cursed water tower waited a few hundred feet into the woods. Higher ground. If Asael was up there, like Mordocai had been, if he had a better gun than his lover had at the time, say, a rifle with a scope, he could pick Murph off from a distance. Especially since half the leaves were off the branches.

Murph kept as many trees between himself and the tower as possible, looking for footprints on any bare spot of dirt.

He stopped behind the last line of bushes, the last line of cover. The tree Kate had been tied to stood straight ahead, twenty or so feet away. The memory made him want to shoot Mordocai all over again.

He waited and listened.

No sound. No movement.

He kept in cover and circled the tower at a distance.

Nobody up there.

By the time he approached the base, there was precious little visibility left.

Enough, however, to see the broken spiderwebs.

Somebodyhadbeen up there recently.

Asael.

Who else would come out to the middle of nowhere to climb a rusty tower? Murph had come for a reason. Whoever had come before him would have come for a reason as well.

To pay his respects to a fallen lover.

Murph circled the base again, this time looking down, using his phone as a flashlight. Stopped when he found a partial footprint. Not his. Deep. It had to have been left when the ground had been wet.