by Scott Blade
The light was bright, but with a small cone of light that lit up the carpet in front of her first.
She used it to see where she was stepping, not to search the room.
She walked deeper into the living room, passing the TV, the sofa set, and the coffee table. But she stopped short of the armchair just before the kitchen because it looked like someone was sitting in it.
A second later, she was certain that someone was sitting there because she kicked a man’s shoe. She twisted and turned to aim the cone of light onto the shoe and kicked it again. There was definitely a foot inside it because it was heavy to her kick, but the person did not respond. No reflex response at all.
She kicked it again.
“Jo? Is that you?”
No answer.
Abruptly she was attacked by panic and then fear.
The light shook in her hand as she moved it up the leg of a familiar pair of shoes and then a familiar pair of pants and then to a familiar white shirt, only it was not white anymore.
She saw his hands. They were duct-taped around the chair. The duct tape reflected the light with a blurry shine. It ran all the way around the man’s lap in thick layers of tape.
There were violent waves and ripples in tape like the man had struggled hard to get free.
Martha moved the light upward. Next, she saw trickles of red, dried fluid that were more accurately garnet red in color, and most certainly blood.
The garnet-colored blood became more voluminous and syrupier and thicker as the beam of light shook in her hand, moving up from the man’s lap to his shirt until there was no more white left in the shirt. That was when she saw only the garnet red color of blood.
Martha gasped at the sight of the neck that was also familiar and then the face that she knew better than her own. It was her husband.
His neck was well past the point of gushing blood because the blood he had had in his body had gushed out much earlier. All that was left was a vicious-looking wound. It looked like someone had tried to decapitate him with a rusty hacksaw. Only he had not been decapitated. He had been strangled all the way to the bone.
Martha looked on at her husband’s face. While she had known that face for many years, there was something brand new about it. His expression. She had never seen that expression on his face before. No one had.
His eyes were wide open, staring into the darkness behind her. Only not staring because there was no life in them. Not even a sign that life had once occupied his body. There was no sign of anything but utter terror on his face. It was unlike anything that she had ever seen before.
He was complete stone, like a marble statue made by some twisted sculptor.
The whites in his eyes were completely bloodshot, but not with the garnet color that she had seen a second earlier on his shirt. This was a shade of purple that was almost eggplant. They looked like they were about to burst out of their sockets.
It was horrifying.
The phone trembled harder in her hand. She slowly reached out with her free hand. The tips of her fingers touched her dead husband’s forehead. Immediately, she recoiled because his skin was so cold that it felt like touching ice.
Martha jumped back, but she was stopped dead in her tracks by a brick wall.
No, not a brick wall, a man. A powerful man.
She heard a subtle voice say, “Where are your children?”
A question that he already knew the answer to, but he liked to be reassured.
As if she were answering a game show question in the lightning round, Martha said, “They don’t live here.”
The man smiled.
She didn’t turn around.
The man behind her asked, “When was the last time you spoke to them?”
Martha trembled even harder, which the man in black knew because the light from her phone danced across the wall, across McConnell’s lifeless body.
“It’s been at least a week. They’re busy.”
The man in black smiled in the dark. He did not really need to ask her that question. He would know soon enough when he checked the phone log in her cell phone.
He just liked the feeling that he felt just before she died. The anticipation before he killed her. It was the best part. Other than the struggle his victims gave him, of course.
In a fast, violent, well-practiced exertion, the man in black whipped out a garrote that he had been holding, pulling it tight until the wire rippled and echoed lightly in the stillness. The wire went over her head to her neck and jerked straight back. The sharp edge of the wire nearly cut through the skin on her neck without much force. A second later, it did break the skin and blood misted out as she tried to scream.
No sound escaped from her lips. No breath came out of her lungs.
Martha instinctively dropped the phone and grabbed at the wire around her neck with both hands. Desperately.
She fought violently to pull a fraction of slack out of it. But there was none to be had.
The man in black was too strong. He remained still, like a tree planted in the ground with roots dug down deep. Nothing would move him. Nothing would budge him.
She struggled and struggled. When that did not work, she drummed on his gloved hands. And she gagged and retched and heaved, dryly. She made all the faces imaginable under the circumstances and then she duplicated her husband’s dead expression.
The man in black still did not move. He was much, much stronger than her. He breathed in, calmly. This was his favorite part.
She fought and fought until she felt weak and suddenly, feeble. She fought until fighting turned into barely moving.
The pain was beyond anything that she could imagine. It was worse than childbirth. It was worse than that time she’d nearly drowned at Lake Mead, a family trip, a better time.
She continued to struggle weakly against him until she was blind, until she could no longer move.
It made no difference.
CHAPTER 3
THE MAN IN BLACK used his burner phone to call, but first he dropped his garrote in the McConnells’ kitchen sink. He ran cold water over the wire and the dual handles and watched as blood and skin and even bits of sinew washed off the razor-sharp wire.
Plenty of evidence was left all over the living room floor that the McConnells had been brutally murdered. It did not take a forensic technician to see that, but he was not concerned with any of it. None of it would lead to him. And even if it did, it would not matter after Sunday.
One thing that might lead to him, eventually, was the security gate that he had had to pass through just to get into the neighborhood. They had him on camera at the gate where he pretended to be visiting someone who lived in the neighborhood.
The man in black had infiltrated maximum-security installations all over the western world. A minimum wage crew of security guards and the low tech of a rising boom gate were not going to stop him.
The security camera had his face because he had to raise the visor on his helmet so the guard could match the photo on his fake driver’s license with his face.
Normally, he would destroy the video from the camera somehow. But that did not matter.
Once the operation that he was protecting went off, none of it would matter.
The man in black finished cleaning the garrote and then called the Listener, the person who had sent him to kill the McConnells. The Listener was the boss.
After he dialed the number, the phone did not ring even once. The time counter for the call showed two seconds of connecting on his end but there was already a voice on the other line.
The man in black said, “He’s dead.”
The Listener asked, “The wife?”
“Also dead.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You wanted her dead.”
“I know.”
The man in black said nothing, but wondered how close the Listener had been to the McConnells.
The Listener said, “Get out of there.”
“What
next? How are we going to get to Karpov?”
“Farmer has found a way.”
The man in black had no opinion on the guy named Farmer. He barely knew him. They ran in the same covert circles, with two very different occupations.
The Listener said, “It’s actually quite brilliant. And simple. And a total act of fate.”
“How so?”
“We found Karpov’s daughter.”
“Daughter?”
“She’s in New York,” the Listener said, and chuckled, which was audible enough for the man in black to hear him.
“Really?”
“And get this. She’s a local operator for the FSB. She’s been here under our noses.”
The Listener had used the word “operator” which did not mean the telephone kind. He had meant that she was a spy.
The man in black said, “You’re kidding?”
He smiled and almost caught himself joining in the chuckle. It was quite a stroke of luck.
“Get to New York. We don’t need you here anymore. We might need you there.”
“Of course. I’ll leave now.”
“Good,” the Listener said.
“What is Farmer’s plan?”
“I’ll explain when you get there. You’re only going to be there for disposal and backup.”
Which was exactly what the man in black wanted to hear. Disposal was what he did best. All that espionage, intelligence gathering, and talking to people, making friends, earning trust, he was more than happy to leave to the career schemers like Farmer. It did not interest him in the least.
The man in black listened a little longer. The Listener spoke, telling him where to go and what to wait for.
The operation may not even need his services anymore, but it was better to have him around as a backup in case something went wrong.
After the Listener was done explaining things to him, the man in black said goodbye and hung up the phone. He took one more look over the McConnells’ house, saw nothing left that needed doing, nothing left that needed his attention, and he walked out, down the drive and down the street to where he had parked his motorcycle.
He looked around casually until he was satisfied that no one was watching him. He slipped on his helmet, lowered the darkened visor, started the engine, and in a burst of exhaust, rode away into the darkening night.
The Author
Scott Blade has written five bestselling books, two of which reached the top 100 on Amazon.
He isn't a traditional writer who spends his time stuck behind a computer in a dreary office.
The dealio about Scott Blade is that he is a real-life drifter, who writes books and hitchhikes or uses public transport from place to place, normally from Starbucks to Starbucks. What started as an experiment inspired by Jack Reacher, wanderlust, and others things, became a real-life habit.
And now he writes a bestselling book series based on the drifter hero, Jack Widow.
Scott takes characters, places, and plot elements from the towns, seashores, lonely roads, and busy cities across the globe. He travels the planet, sometimes with his Black German Shepard puppy, Django, carrying a MacBook and the bare essentials, going from place to place, and solving mysteries. Not real mysteries, only the ones in his head.
Currently, Scott is based out of Miami, but often travels North America and is working on his next Jack Widow book.
If you liked this book, then please leave a review, go to his website, and sign up to receive previews, communications, and free content, which sometimes includes exclusive Jack Widow stories.
Check out other books in the Jack Widow series. www.scottblade.com, www.facebook.com/authorscottblade, www.twitter.com/iamscottblade
or email at [email protected].
