3 TERRIFYING THRILLERS

by Jude Hardin

  “I think you handled it well,” Jason said.

  “I guess. But it wasn’t totally honest. The truth is, that lady doesn’t have very long to live. Not long at all.”

  “Well, we’re all going to die someday, right? It’s pretty much part of the deal.”

  Danielle nodded. “True. But would you want to know when? I mean, like, the exact date and time and everything?”

  “If I had a terminal illness, I would want to know. Now, if someone could somehow see into the future and tell me I was going to be pushed out of a sixth floor window three years from now and fall to my death, I don’t know. That’s a tough one. I guess I would still want to know. That way I could prepare, maybe knock a few things off my bucket list.”

  “So maybe we should live every day as though it’s our last,” Danielle said.

  “Maybe.”

  After dinner, Danielle cleared the table and then joined Jason in the living room. They sat side-by-side on the couch, sipping the last of the wine he’d brought.

  “Want me to go buy some more?” Jason asked.

  “Why, so you can get me drunk and take advantage of me?”

  “Yes.”

  Danielle laughed. “Well, at least you’re honest. You did say honesty is the best policy. I’m fine, really. I could make some coffee if you want.”

  “Maybe in a little bit. I still have some wine left.”

  “So tell me, Mr. Jason Powers. What’s on your bucket list?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Sure. Tell me what you want to do before you die.”

  “Everything?”

  “Just tell me one thing.”

  Jason paused. He drained the last couple of ounces from his wine glass. “Before I die, I want to fall in love with someone as beautiful as you.”

  Danielle’s jaw dropped. She didn’t know what to say.

  Jason leaned over and kissed her on the lips. It caught her by surprise. Her pulse quickened. She allowed it, loved it, wanted to open herself to more, but after a couple of seconds she turned away.

  “I never kiss on the first date,” she said.

  “You just did.”

  “Well, we could pretend that it didn’t happen.”

  “We could,” Jason said. “But that wouldn’t be honest.”

  Who was this guy? Why did he have to be so damn cute? Why did he have to be so charming and have such a sexy voice and smell so good? Why did he have to be such a good kisser?

  “You and your honesty,” Danielle said. “Someday all that honesty’s going to get you in trouble.”

  “How so?”

  Danielle didn’t have an answer for that. Her mind was still reeling from the kiss.

  “I just met you the other day,” she said. “And here you are in my apartment, sitting on my couch, drinking wine and trying to kiss me. Talking about how beautiful I am and falling in love and all. Don’t you think that’s just a little too fast?”

  “I’ll leave if you want me to.”

  “I’m not saying that. It’s just—”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It seems fast to me too. But what can I say? I wanted to kiss you, and it just felt like the right thing to do. Next time, I’ll ask first.”

  She thought about that. She looked him in the eyes and smiled. “You don’t have to,” she said.

  He smiled back, leaned in and kissed her softly again. This time she didn’t retreat. They started making out like a couple of high school kids in a car, kissing and hugging and breathing heavily. They went at it like that for ten minutes or so, and then Jason whispered in Danielle’s ear.

  “I better go,” he said. “If I don’t go now, I might never go.”

  A part of Danielle wanted him to stay. A part of her wanted to rip his shirt off and unbuckle his pants and straddle him right there on the couch. But that wouldn’t have been right. Not this soon. She barely even knew the guy, after all.

  But she sure did like him.

  “Will you call me?” she asked.

  “Of course I will. I can’t wait to see you again. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Unfortunately, I have to work tomorrow night and Tuesday night. But I’m off again Wednesday.”

  “I’ll call you Wednesday, then.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  They kissed at the door and Jason left, looking back and smiling as he walked away.

  Danielle cleaned up the kitchen, and then she sat down and went through her mail from the past few days. There were the usual bills and credit card offers and sale papers, but something else caught her attention right away. It was a plain white envelope, addressed to her in handwritten black ink but with no return address. She tore it open, pulled out the single sheet of white copy paper, and read the short note:

  Stay away from him. Or else.

  Lisa

  Mark

  Sunday Night, Key West

  Mark Taylor steered his BMW into the parking lot of the apartment complex he’d visited earlier. He pulled the .38 out of the glove compartment, checked to make sure it was fully loaded, stuffed it into the waistband of his jeans. He got out. The tails of his long-sleeve button-down shirt concealed the weapon as he mounted the staircase.

  Not that anyone was around to see it anyway. It was completely dark outside, and everyone seemed to be in for the night. Cocooned in their own little units. Watching TV, eating dinner, getting drunk, helping the kids with their homework, whatever. Whatever floated their boats. Danielle floated Mark’s boat, and he was determined to find out where she’d gone. He was determined to find out, if it was the last thing he did.

  He put his ear next to Smitty’s door, but he couldn’t hear anything except the music blaring from one of the apartments downstairs. He rang the bell, and when the door opened he pulled the revolver from his waistband and aimed it at Smitty’s face.

  “We need to talk,” Mark said.

  Smitty didn’t flinch. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “No, but you’re going to lose yours if you don’t take three steps backwards. Now!”

  Mark cocked the hammer.

  “All right,” Smitty said. “You win.”

  He stepped back and gave Mark the room he needed to cross the threshold. Mark walked in, kicked the door shut with his heel, kept the gun pointed at Smitty’s head.

  “Where’s Danielle Wise?” Mark asked.

  “I told you. She doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “I know that, asshole. But where is she? Where do you send the check for your rent?”

  Smitty swallowed. “She leased the place through a real estate agency,” he said. “I send the money to a post office box in Atlanta. Swear to God, man. I don’t know where she went.”

  “Get on your knees.”

  “What?”

  “Get on your knees, and lace your fingers together behind your head.”

  Smitty got on his knees, laced his fingers together behind his head. Mark pressed the barrel of the .38 against the area between his eyebrows.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” Mark said. “Where’s Danielle?”

  Mark stood there and waited for Smitty to answer.

  But he wasn’t going to wait all night.

  Danielle

  Sunday Night, St. Augustine

  Lisa.

  Who the hell was Lisa?

  And why was she telling Danielle to stay away from Jason?

  Did Jason also have a psycho ex trying to track him down? Or maybe he was still involved with this person. That was a possibility. The note Danielle had gotten in the mail was intriguing—and kind of scary—and it reminded her how little she really knew about Jason Powers.

  From her window, Danielle had watched him get into his truck and drive away. It was a Ford Ranger, black with a matching topper. She had no idea what year it was, but it appeared to be in good shape. She appreciated the fact that Jason didn’t have some kind of fancy, expensive vehicle. It me
ant he was smart enough to live within his means, and that was a good thing.

  Danielle had never dated another nurse before, and she wondered what that was going to be like. There would be problems trying to schedule days off together, for one thing, and it was a fairly long drive from Hallows Cove to St. Augustine, about an hour if the traffic wasn’t bad. And there was the fact that she would be traveling to another assignment soon.

  She liked Jason a lot, but she was starting to think that the timing to begin a relationship with him—or with anyone—couldn’t have been worse. She was only going to be in Florida for a few more weeks, so maybe it would be best to not see him anymore—especially if she continued to get threatening notes in the mail.

  It didn’t make sense to get romantically involved with anyone right now. It just didn’t. But as Danielle stared absently at the television and mulled everything over, she was forced to admit something to herself, something rather unsettling yet altogether exciting: Jason had only been gone for twenty minutes, and she missed him already.

  She missed his eyes and his voice and his scent and the way he kissed and his honesty. She missed everything about him. She was sitting there fantasizing about making love with him, getting worked up and thinking seriously about taking a nice hot bath, when her phone chimed and broke the trance.

  She hoped it wasn’t her loser ex-boyfriend again, and it wasn’t.

  The caller ID said Jason Powers.

  It was him!

  Danielle let it ring three times, and then she answered.

  “Hello?” she said, trying to mask the excitement in her voice.

  “Hey, sorry to bother you. Did you happen to see my wallet there anywhere?”

  “No. Wait, yep, there it is. It’s on the couch, stuck between the cushions.”

  “Great. I was afraid I lost it. You mind if I come back and get it?”

  “How about if I just mail it to you?” Danielle said.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m joking, silly. Of course you can come back and get it.”

  “Be there in a few.”

  They disconnected.

  Oldest trick in the book, Danielle thought. Leave something behind so you have an excuse to come back, and then move in for the score.

  Or maybe he hadn’t left it on purpose. He deserved the benefit of a doubt, she thought, suddenly hating herself for being so cynical. Just because Mark Taylor was a jerk, it didn’t mean that all men were.

  Still, it was way too early to let her guard down completely. Fantasies aside, she needed to get to know Jason a lot better before the relationship went any further, and it just didn’t seem that there was going to be time for that to happen. And of course there was that threatening note from that person named Lisa. She needed to ask him about that as soon as he came back.

  Danielle picked up Jason’s wallet and opened it. Curiosity killed the cat and all, but she couldn’t resist taking a peek. There were three twenties, two fives and a one in the money compartment. Seventy-one dollars. She looked at his driver’s license, which she noticed was due for renewal this year. Typical unflattering photograph, Hallows Cove address, birthday the same month as hers but a year earlier. Jason T. Powers appeared to be a legitimate human being. That, or he had a very good fake ID.

  There was a triple-A card and a library card and card that proved he had current Florida automobile insurance. She put everything back the way it was, closed the wallet and set it on the coffee table.

  A few minutes later, the doorbell rang.

  Mark

  Sunday Night, Key West

  The revolver discharged, and a spray of blood and skull and brain splattered on the wall behind the sofa. Smitty’s mouth opened and his neck went limp, and for a second he looked like some sort of giant PEZ dispenser, hung there in suspended animation, staring blankly at the ceiling as though an invisible force kept him balanced. He finally toppled sideways to the carpet in a bloody heap.

  Mark looked at the gun in his hand, a plume of gray smoke still rising from the hot barrel.

  “Shit,” he said. “That did not just happen.”

  But it did. It did just happen, and now Mark needed to get the hell out of there.

  He hadn’t touched anything on the way in, and he didn’t touch anything on the way out. He used his shirttail to grab the knob and pull the door shut.

  Sweat beaded on Mark Taylor’s forehead and trickled down his face as he drove away from the apartment complex. He still couldn’t believe what had happened, that he had actually killed another human being. Surely this was just a bad dream. Surely he would soon wake up in his own bed, in a puddle of sweat, as he had so many other times after nights of heavy drinking. That’s what this was. Just another hellish drunken nightmare.

  “Wake up, Mark,” he said to himself. “Wake up!”

  But he didn’t. He didn’t wake up, because he wasn’t asleep. This was real, and he knew it, and it was freaking him out.

  A traffic light stopped him at the intersection of Windsor and Truman. A right would take him home, a left back to Jake’s. He waited for the light to turn green, and then took a left. He needed to be around people. He needed a drink.

  He glanced over at the passenger’s seat, and there it was. The Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver. He hadn’t even had the presence of mind to put it back in the glove compartment. He’d climbed into the BMW and had tossed it right there on the seat, right there in plain sight if a cop happened to ride by.

  He opened the glove box and shoved the gun in and slammed the door shut.

  He wondered how many other mistakes he’d made. He wondered if anyone had seen him leaving Smitty’s apartment. Everything about the incident was hazy, a blur, as if he’d been wearing goggles smeared with Vaseline.

  If someone had seen him leaving Smitty’s apartment, they might have seen him carrying the gun. He couldn’t remember whether or not he’d concealed it on the way back to the car. Had anyone heard the gunshot? There was music blasting downstairs, but still. The .38 went off like a cannon. Mark’s ears were still ringing from it. The cops were probably on their way to the complex, or maybe they were already there. If someone heard the gunshot, it might have prompted them to look out a window. They might have seen Mark walking to his car, and then they might have written down his tag number. Shit. He needed to get rid of the gun. He needed to do it now.

  He thought about throwing it in the ocean, but he was afraid it would wash in with the tide. He pulled to the side of the road, next to a wooded area thick with a variety of trees and tropical weeds. He killed the engine and cut the lights off. Grabbed the revolver, climbed out of the car. He walked into the brush, far enough that he wouldn’t be seen by any passing vehicles, knelt down and started digging with his fingers. The soil was sandy, easy to dig. It didn’t take him long. In a matter of minutes he clawed a cavity about a foot deep, tossed the gun in, filled the hole back and covered it with leaves and twigs.

  That should do it, he thought. Nobody ever had any cause to walk into these woods. The gun would stay where it was forever and ever. Nobody would ever find it.

  Mark felt almost giddy with relief. The shooting had been an accident, pure and simple. There was no reason for anyone to ever know he’d done it, no reason for him to serve time for second-degree manslaughter or whatever they might charge him with. Smitty was gone, and there was no bringing him back. Mark felt bad about it, but not bad enough to risk getting caught. Certainly not bad enough to turn himself in.

  He trudged back to the BMW, climbed in, jammed the key into the ignition. He was about to start the engine and take off when a set of flashing blue lights appeared in his rearview mirror.

  He took a deep breath, tried to remain calm. With trembling fingers he grabbed the canister of breath spray from the center console and shot some on his tongue. He sprayed some into the air, hoping to mask any lingering beer and tequila fumes.

  The cop walked up with a flashlight and motioned for Mark to roll down the w
indow.

  “Good evening, officer,” Mark said.

  “Car trouble?”

  “No, I think the car’s okay. This is really embarrassing, but, I had to go. You know?”

  “There’s a gas station right down the road.”

  “It was really urgent. I have this bladder issue, and—”

  “You been drinking tonight?”

  “No sir. Well, I had a couple of beers with dinner. That’s all.”

  The cop shined the flashlight directly into Mark’s eyes. “Step out of the vehicle, please.”

  Mark squinted, opened the door and stepped out. “I just live right over on—”

  “License, registration, proof of insurance.”

  Mark pulled his wallet out, produced his driver’s license and insurance card. “The registration’s in the glove compartment,” he said.

  “What’s in that box on the backseat?”

  “Roses,” Mark said. “A present for my girlfriend.”

  “Get the registration.”

  The cop aimed the flashlight into the BMW’s interior while Mark reached in and opened the glove compartment.

  “What’s in that box?” the officer asked.

  “This?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s another present for my girlfriend. Well, I guess I should say my ex-girlfriend, seeing as how she kind of dumped me a while back. It’s a diamond tennis bracelet, cost me almost five thousand bucks. You want to see it?”

  Mark climbed out of the car and opened the hinged case from the jewelry store. The bracelet glimmered and sparkled under the cop’s flashlight beam.

  “Nice,” the cop said. “You want to show me that registration now?”

  Mark noticed a wedding band on the cop’s left ring finger. “I bet your wife would like something like this, huh?” he said. “Hell, I don’t have any use for it anymore. Why don’t you just take it? Here. My appreciation gift for the great public service you guys do.”

  Mark snapped the box shut, handed it to the officer. The officer took it.

  “Get out of here,” the cop said.

  Mark climbed back into the BMW, waited until the cop was well down the road, and then started the engine. He really did need to pee now. In fact, it felt as though maybe he had gone a little already.