by Sara Wood
Mystery:
A MASS MURDERER:
Tear for the Dead
Sara Wood
2
Copyright © 2016 Sara Wood
All rights reserved.
Table Of Content
Copyright
Summary
Excert
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter3
Chapter4
Chapter5
Free Book
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Copyright 2016
All Right Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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DESCRIPTION:
Burying their dead wives who were brutally murdered by some unknown men was no easy task to bear for ex-cop Roy Klyne and his friend Bill Bates. With tear filled eyes they got about the task with grit and determination.
Known as ‘Klyne the Hunter’ The ex-cop Klyne’s face was expressionless, A sleeping Tiger in him has just awakened and it certainly seemed deadly for anyone who crossed his path. Just as he was cool and collected his friend Bill Bates was an impulsive man who wanted quick action and revenge.
Clueless on how to tackle the situation the two men embarked on a mysterious mission of tracing their wives killers. For all this they had just one flimsy clue that of a severed decomposing finger with a signet ring, gold, studded with an opal. Armed with this clue they are on their way to trace the fugitive killers. Whether their mission would yield positive result or not is yet to be seen.
EXCERPT:
Unhurriedly, Klyne cocked and aimed his gun, squeezing the trigger, feeling it buck in his hand. Seeing the red rose of bright blood blossom in the centre of Nathan’s forehead, right between the eyes, making the skull bounce and judder with the force of the bullet’s exit through the back of the head.
“Now why did you do a thing like that for, Roy? He’d have been better alive.”
“I know that. But I want revenge. I want to see all seven of those men dead in front of me. That’s one.”
He reached over and tugged a sheet off the bed, throwing its snowy whiteness over the ravaged corpse, noting with a passing interest the way it stuck to the place where blood still flowed. The redness seeping through the linen like ink through blotting paper.
TEARS FOR THE DEAD
Clueless Pursuit
It was a hot day outside, but the office was quiet and cool. Yet the brow of the clerk had broken out in heavy beads of sweat. His voice trembled as he looked pitifully up at Klyne and Bates. “Don’t let on I told you, sir, please don’t. The man who hired the special train and a lot of the others are very rich and powerful, and if they ever knew…..”
“Sonny,” said Klyne, “We aim to go and talk to each and every one of those fine citizens, and I don’t figure that any of them will be round here after that to bother you.”
“Let me see,” said the clerk, getting up and walking to a dark green filing cabinet. He rummaged through some sheets, until he found a buff folder. Klyne noticed that his hands were shaking as he looked through the folder, finally holding up a single sheet of paper.
“Here we are. Special train. Ran from New Orleans up to San Francisco. Got held up just outside town here for a couple of days by that snow. Two coaches and an engine.”
“Most of this we know. Who hired it? And the list of passengers. It must have been cleared all along the line through here.”
“Yes, sir. Hired by….you won’t tell?”
Klyne leaned over him, smiling thinly, and rubbing his knuckles. “Hurt like a bastard, was all he’d ever say about it.”
Joe Nathan, from San Francisco. He’s the son of Senator Nathan. Very important.”
“He’d be the leader, then,” commented Bates.
“Come on with the rest of those names. Quickly. We got things to do.” Klyne said.
“Barry Barton, from Memphis. The reverend Charles Smith, from Yuma.”
“The card sharp and the preacher,” Klyne said as he remembered the name.
Larry Hailey from Carson City. Patrick Shelton from out at Gila Bend. And the Stanley brothers….Luke and Mark. They give their addresses as Lone pine. That’s up in….”
“The Sierra Nevadas,” interrupted Klyne. “I know it. That’s all you can tell us?”
“As God is my witness, mister!”
“Thanks a lot for your time. You’ve been a lot of help.”
After the door was shut behind the two men, the clerk staggered out the back to the bathroom and was very sick.
The Blue Leopard welcomed the two men, and they sat at a quiet table behind the piano….covered in dust so early in the day….and ordered drinks. Bates drank three quick whiskies straight off, while Klyne nursed his first one.
“Now we know who, and we know where they’ve gone. So we go after them. Is that your way of thinking as well, Roy?”
Klyne was toying with the gold ring that he’d taken off the severed finger. “Yeah that list on the waybill is a real break. If it had been an ordinary scheduled trip, they wouldn’t have had that kind of information. I just wonder about the guy who lost this finger….”
At that moment the fat, balding figure of Doc Newton breezed into the bar, sending the yellow doors swinging and creaking. Both men looked up at him, expecting the usual smile and joke. Newton had been their doctor, as he was for most of the folks of the small town, for years, and had attended Klyne’s wife during her miscarriages and for the still-birth.
But when he saw Klyne and Bates sitting there, his jaw dropped, and he spun round on his heel and bustled out again, sending the doors rattling for a second time.
“Now why in Hell did Doc do that?” wondered Bates, reaching again for the bottle.
Klyne clicked his fingers, tossing the ring up in the air so that it gleamed. “I got me one bright idea about that. Bill, come on.”
He was quickly up on his feet, striding out of the bar, hand moving under his jacket from the reborn habit to slip the safety catch off the gun he carried in his shoulder holster.
“Roy! Where are we going in such an all-fired hurry?” Bates asked his friend.
Klyne still held the ring, and he tossed it again in the air the sun catching the glittering gold. “The man, who lost this, lost his finger too. Man who looses his finger needs to get to a doctor real fast. That old gun of mine would take away a lot of bone too, so it wouldn’t be a lot of good to try and stop it with a bit of cloth. Have to go to a doctor.”
“Doc Newton!”
“Could be. You ever seen him so damned nervy and spooky like just now?”
“Come on, Roy. He would never….I mean, he’s been a good friend to us. He wouldn’t shelter this man….what’s his name?”
“Nathan. If it’s the one we think.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Folks said that the train stopped at the station for a few minutes. Just time for a man to get off and hide up somewhere. Find him a doctor when the heat slipped off a bit. Leave a wound like that in hot weather and you give yourself a whole heap of pain and trouble.”
Doctor Newton lived alone in a house on the north side of the small town. Flowers draped themselves up round the door in normal Spring, but this hadn’t been a normal Spring. Blighted by the late frost and crushed by the weight of the snowfall, the flowers lay flattened along the narrow path
.
Not looking back and hurrying so much that he kept breaking into a strange little half-skip, half-run the doctor paused at his front door and fumbled for a key, finally disappearing inside.
But by then the two pursuers were so close behind that they heard a very odd thing. They heard Newton call out to someone inside the house. And he lived alone.
“Who was he calling to?” asked Bates. “Looks to me like you could be right.”
Klyne nodded. “Which way we play it, Bill? I reckon we just walk right on up and knock at the door. If this Nathan man’s there, then he’ll be holed up in the bedroom. He’ll maybe think we’re just paying a social call on the doctor and stay put. If he runs, then he’s going to find there aren’t many places he can run to in this small town.”
Friend or Foe
Bates nodded agreement, and they strode up the path, and rapped firmly at the brass knockers, carved in the shape of a lion holding a cat. They heard feet shuffling along towards them, and both stood back a little, hands hovering over thir gun butts, in case they were right about that first of the killers being there and in case he tried to make a break for it.
But the face that peered round the door was Newton’s. his eyes opening wide in shock at the sight of the two grim faced men, his mouth starting to open.
“Well. A good morning to you, Doc,” said Klyne loudly, immediately hissing under his breath: “One wrong move or sound and you’re dead.”
Newton tried to paste a smile of welcome in place, but it immediately slipped off, and the horror and fear oozed back, confirming their suspicions better than anything could have done.
“We were passing by, and we just figured it was time we came in and had us a talk about a few things, Doc. That’s all right with you, I guess?” Bates didn’t wait for an answer, pushing past the doctor, into the living room of the small house.
Klyne took Newton’s arm in a friendly-looking grip that felt like steel bands drawn tight, and propelled him in next, following up and shutting the door behind them.
“There now. You sit down there, Doc, while Bill and I help ourselves to a drink. You got something tucked away somewhere? Maybe in the other room?”
Klyne was deliberately keeping his voice low, so that nobody outside the room could hear clearly what they were talking about. Through the half open doorway he could see into the neat kitchen, and there was only one other room in the house. Presumably Doc’s bedroom, its door shut. Away to the right.
Lips working with panic, the words tumbling over each other, Newton started to gabble out what had happened. He was sweating, constantly mopping at his forehead with a handkerchief.
“Listen, Klyne and you Bill,” Bates raised a finger to his lips, warning him to keep his voice down. ‘I didn’t have no choice in this. He was brought here a couple of days back, and he said that if I betrayed him to the law, or to you, then his father would make sure I never worked again. And that his friends would kill me if anything happened to him. I didn’t want to help. I swear that boys. I’ve known you two and your wives for…..”
“You make me sick,” said Klyne calmly, drawing his gun and smashing across his face, and running over his worn carpet. Eyes closed, he rolled on his back and lay still, his breathing ragged and uneven.
“Now,” said Klyne, simply running at the closed door, hitting it a solid blow with his shoulder. It burst open with a splintering and tearing of wood, its lock flying across the room.
The man had been standing close behind it, obviously trying to work out what was happening, and the door sent him spinning away, to land on his back against the far wall.
Bates and Klyne both stood in the doorway, looking down at him, guns ready in their hands.
“Joe Nathan, if I don’t miss my guess. And this,” throwing the ring to him, where it tinkled on the wooden floor, rolling like a child’s top, “is yours. Maybe you’d better try and find another finger to put it on.”
“You must be Klyne and Bates,” said the man on the floor, grinning up at them.
“Bates and you’re Nathan.”
“I have that honor, sir. May I rise from this undignified and uncomfortable position?”
“Sure. But try anything and you’re dead,” said Bates.
“My my! How very dramatic. I’ve heard about how hot-tempered you small town folks are, but I hadn’t realized it was true. Really.”
With a grunt, Nathan got up off the floor, dusting down his elegant clothes. He looked about twenty-five years old, with a chubby, puffy face, that spoke of too much food and too little work. He wore a smart suit, with a brocade waistcoat and a shirt with ruffles of lace to the front. Leaning easily against the wall, Nathan seemed totally unworried by the threat of the two guns.
“You and your murdering bastards of friends mutilated, raped and killed our wives.”
“They should have been pleased with the honor that I and my friends did to them. The poor looking women. Both of them, indeed, and living in such conditions. I can hardly imagine that the authorities permit such things to happen in our fair and decent country.”
The room seemed filled with the click of Bates easing back the hammer of his gun. “You lousy, stinking bastard!”
“Really, Mister Bates. I can hardly be held responsible for your wife’s death, as I was….Err, occupied, in the other room at the time. And as for your wife, Mister Klyne, then you should be pleased that she chose to rid herself of the painful affliction of such a squalid life. If she had lived I would have taken action against her for causing me this painful wound.”
He waved the bandage at them. It was unbelievable to Klyne and Bates that the man….hardly more than a boy, should be self-possessed. In his arrogance, it never seemed to occur to him that he and his friends had done a deadly wrong, nor that the two men in the room with him might kill him.
“My father….you’ve heard of Senator Nathan from San Francisco….knows of my accident, and is sending his own physician here to this one-horse town to attend to me. Your local man is about as much use as a barrow of horse-shit, and not much more congenial as company.”
Nathan was astoundingly indifferent to his own danger, seeming as though he was trying to insult them and anger them. Yet, could he be that stupid? Time was that Klyne ‘the Hunter’ would have relied on his sixth sense to guess that there was something dangerously wrong in the man’s manner. But it had been there years since he last faced a man in anger, and he had even holstered his gun, confident that Bates had the rich boy covered.
“Even the food was appalling. Look at that…..” casually pointing over to their left, and a little behind them.
Bates turned and stared where Nathan was pointing, the barrel of his gun wandering way off target. Klyne half-turned, his head beginning to move, but something of old skill still remained, nearly buried beneath the years of easier living, and his eyes didn’t leave their enemy.
Like a snake flicking out its head after a mesmerized jack-rabbit, so Nathan moved like a flash as soon as they were distracted. First angering them, he had then thrown them completely off guard, and now made his move. A small Derringer, with an over-and-under barrel, appeared in his unwounded left hand. So fast that Klyne had a moment to wonder if he was wearing some kind of trick rig with a spring release.
Bates cried something out, firing, even though his gun wasn’t pointing anywhere near Nathan. The bullet tore a chunk out of the far wall, burying itself in the scsrred white wood.
The Conflict
Klyne himself started to dive to his right, reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster as he fell. But the old speed had gone, and his fingers fumbled, dropping the gun as his elbow hit the floor. He saw Nathan hesitate for a fraction of a second, wondering which target to take first.
He decided to take Bates, who was cocking the gun ready for his next shot. There was the vicious snap of the little pistol, firing its .33 bullet from its three and a quarter inch barrel, with its Damascene swirl and gold engraving.
&n
bsp; And he missed.
The bullet ripped through Bates’s trousers just above the knee, flattening itself in the leg of a chair. That gave Klyne the chance he wanted, picking up his gun, sighting and firing, before Nathan could loose off a second shot. Bates had been thrown off balance by the near miss, and had flung himself to the floor.
Klyne fired three times, squeezing the thin trigger. The first shot snapped by Nathan’s face, making him jerk back his head in a reflex action. The second bullet went feet wide to the right as Klyne tried too hard for speed. The third shot struck home, smashing into the young man’s shoulder. Blood splattered out of his back as the bullet exited, but it was only a slight flesh wound, and Nathan was still on his feet, still holding the lethal little gun.
