She stared at me, the book on her lap, the music playing that stupid song, the gun in her hand resting on her leg. The woman, the mother, so tired. At the end of her life.
“Let’s work this out,” I said. The secret was to just keep it going. “We can make a trade. You can call the police or whatever after. That’s about as fair as it can get. And I’ll tell you what she had to say.”
She just stared at me. I knew I had her now, and I think she knew it as well. I looked at the book and chuckled. “Pretty smart, this whole ‘killing Harry’ thing. Quite brilliant. Let me ask you this: How did you know I’d come over and see what was wrong with you?”
“You’re a predator,” she said calmly. “I was just a little bird with a broken wing. Of course you would.”
She was really quite good. I said, “You lied about somebody killing your whole family. That was good, I must admit. I bought it.”
“That wasn’t a lie. My daughter was my whole family at that point.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I know I do bad things. You need to understand what happened to me as a kid. You know about me, you’ll think different.”
“Actually, I don’t care,” she said. “I want a picture with the book. I’d really like that. Then we can talk.”
She held it up tighter to her chest. “Take the damn picture, please. That was part of our agreement.”
The woman’s dying, and she wants a picture of her with the Harry Potter book, and then she wants to know what her daughter said. I could see where her daughter got her attitude from.
I set the lens, got a good focus, and clicked the shutter. I looked at what I’d gotten. “Let me take another. Little too dark.”
After a minor adjustment, I clicked again. This time, there was a spot of light, and it hit me somewhere in my face and for a brief moment, I was actually outside my body, seeing myself get shot…and then seeing those eyes, remembering those eyes in a much younger girl, then nothing….
***
Julie shot him three more times.
Then she made a phone call. And after that, she sat there with her eyes closed and listened to the song that was a favorite of her daughter’s, all the while clutching the final Harry Potter book.
She opened her eyes once just to look at him. Her daughter’s killer.
She stared at him for a time and then shot him again just for the hell of it.
About the Author
Crime and thriller novelist Richter Watkins threw away his rose colored glasses a long time ago. He writes with a jaundiced eye and a passion to see justice done one way, or another.
Contact:
http://www.richterwatkins.com/
Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank my sweet wife, Mary Leo, for all that she gives me.
Other Works by Richter Watkins
Lethal Redemption
Betting on Death
Books Written Under Terry Watkins
The Big Burn
Trophy Kill
Contents
Main Menu
Start Reading
About the Author
Other Works
Copyright
Killing Charlie
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Killing Freddie
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Killing Harry
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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.
The Murder Option
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.
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