Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller)

by Tim Kizer

  He pounced on Stevenson the moment he saw him: the surgeon was standing between the door and the desk, with his eyes fixed on the cell-phone in his hand. Zack slugged the man on the head with the butt of his pistol as hard as he could, rendering him unconscious.

  As he severed Stevenson’s Achilles tendons (there was hardly a better way to ensure that a person wouldn’t be able to run or walk away), Zack noted to himself that it had to hurt pretty badly. For a moment, he felt a chill in the pit of his stomach when he imagined his own ankles getting cut with a knife. Yeah, he would have definitely hated it if something like that happened to him.

  On the other hand, it was possible that Stevenson didn’t feel pain while unconscious. Wasn’t that how anesthesia worked?

  13.

  “Oh, you’re up. How is it going, man?” Zack waved at the surgeon and rose from the chair.

  With a stunned expression on his face, Stevenson looked at his bound legs, then moved his arms, confirming his guess that they were bound, too. As Doc had drunk his coffee this morning, could he have even imagined that he would get knocked out and tied up in his own house today? Judging by Stevenson’s bewilderment, Zack reckoned that he could not.

  When the surgeon shifted his eyes to Zack, the boy winked at him.

  “Who are you?” Stevenson asked. His helplessness and poorly hidden fear made Zack’s stomach feel warm and fuzzy. “What are you doing in my house?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t recognize me. I came here to ask you a few questions.”

  “What questions?” Stevenson winced with pain. “If you need money, I’ll give it to you, just please don’t hurt my family.”

  “Do you remember doing a surgery on a boy with six fingers fourteen years ago?”

  Stevenson spent fifteen seconds digging in his memory and finally nodded. “Yes, I do remember that.” His high forehead was glistening with sweat; there was a mixture of terror and hope in his tired eyes. It occurred to Zack that the doctor must have still believed he had a chance of surviving this encounter if he played his cards right. He was probably one of those undying optimists. What a fool!

  “Ask him what they did with your finger,” Jeremy said.

  “Why? I don’t think there’s much of it left after so many years.”

  “Don’t be so sure, man. I know what I’m talking about. It should still be alive unless they incinerated it. Wouldn’t it be cool, if we could find the little guy?”

  “I guess so.”

  Stevenson, who was silently observing Zack with a petrified look on his face, muttered, “Who are you talking to, son?”

  Zack waited a few moments to see if Jeremy had anything to add and then replied to the doctor, “It’s none of your business, man. And I’m not your son, okay?”

  “I’m sorry, I apologize.” Stevenson took a deep breath and continued, “I can help you. I’ll give anything you want. You don’t have to kill me. I’ll keep my mouth shut, I swear.”

  Zack had no doubt that the doctor had just concluded his young guest was a nutcase because he appeared to talk to himself. Under different circumstances, Shep Stevenson would have definitely made a tactless comment about it; he was smart enough to say nothing now although he was probably itching to refer Zack to his psychiatrist buddy—that’s the power of the gun for you, ladies and gentlemen.

  “I want to know what you did with my finger. The one that you cut off.”

  “The hospital must have disposed of it. I had no control over that.”

  “How did they dispose of it?”

  “They probably cremated it. Most amputated parts are cremated.”

  “Just what I thought,” Jeremy said. “Let’s wrap it up, Zack. We’re done here.”

  Zack nodded. Then he wrapped his hand around the knife that lay in his left hoodie pocket and stepped over to Stevenson. “Okay, man. I guess I have nothing else to say to you. I think I’ll get going.”

  Zack had thought about giving the doctor a false hope by making it seem as if he had decided to spare his life—he could step out of the room, say ‘Oh, one more thing,’ and then shoot the guy from the hallway while grinning—but eventually chose to do without the theatrics.

  Stevenson kept silent, looking at him with pleading eyes.

  “I’m going to kill you now, man,” Zack added and stabbed the surgeon in the chest, aiming for the heart.

  As he walked downstairs, he found that Stevenson’s son (or nephew) had woken up and now was standing in the middle of the living room. To Zack’s astonishment, the boy was holding a revolver in his hand. Needless to say, the gun was pointed at Zack.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Zack asked indignantly. “Give me the gun.”

  The doctor’s son did not respond. Instead, he pulled the trigger, and the next second a sharp pain cut through Zack’s right thigh, a few inches above the knee. As the thunder of the gunshot rang in his ears, Zack touched the hole made in his jeans by the bullet—its edges were already wet with blood—and dashed after the boy. Unfortunately, his sprint ended once he put his weight on his wounded leg: the pain was far worse than he had anticipated; it felt as if he had stepped into a tub full of boiling water. Flailing his arms, Zack collapsed to the floor and lost consciousness.

  14.

  A nasty surprise awaited Zack when he came around several minutes later: he could hear police sirens approaching the house. The little fucker had called the cops! Apparently, Mister Stevenson had taken the time to teach his offspring what to do in case of emergency. Too bad he hadn’t instructed the kid to never touch his gun.

  Thank God the boy hadn’t had the guts to stay inside and shoot the intruder in the head.

  “Now I’m going to do a little magic here, buddy,” Jeremy said. “It looks like we’re surrounded, so we don’t have much time.”

  “Maybe I should jump out the window in the back?”

  “No, let’s not take any chances. With a wound like this, you won’t run very far. I have a better idea.”

  “Okay, go ahead.” Zack felt ashamed he was almost panicking at this moment. Of all his fears, the idea of losing a leg was the most horrifying to him.

  “I want you to trust me, Zack. In a few minutes, you’ll be completely paralyzed and your heart and breath rate will become extremely low. The paramedics will rush you to the hospital, and once you get there, you’ll have no pulse at all and the docs will pronounce you dead. We need to go through this charade with the ambulance so you won’t have to lie here for hours, waiting for the cops to take you to the morgue. “

  “Why do you want me to go to the morgue?”

  “I’ll explain it later, but I hope you’ll figure this out on your own soon enough. By the way, please don’t panic and don’t try to open your eyes or move—you won’t be able to do any of that until I decide that the coast is clear. Your ears will still work, though.”

  “You’re going to stop my heart? It sounds kinda scary. I don’t want to die.”

  “You’ll be fine, buddy, I promise.” Jeremy paused. “Okay, the cops will break in here any minute now. I need you to drop dead before they get a chance to arrest and fingerprint you.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to try and shoot them all?”

  “It’s the wrong time to be arrogant, man. You don’t have a prayer against them, believe me.”

  “Okay, I trust you.”

  “It won’t hurt one bit, buddy. Just relax and wait for my signal. Hopefully, they won’t take too long to get you to the morgue.”

  15.

  “Are you going to just lie there and waste the precious time? Get up and get the fuck out of here, man.”

  Jeremy hadn’t been completely right saying it wouldn’t hurt: there was quite a bit of pain as the paramedics attempted to defibrillate Zack’s heart with an electric shock. But that was okay with Zack.

  They got lucky—or maybe that was the typical way it worked: the cops hadn’t fingerprinted him before he got carted away to the hospital morgue. They
must have believed that he wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.

  “I guess you learned a valuable lesson today,” Jeremy said when Zack was three blocks away from the hospital. “Never spare a life, no matter how young they are.”

  “I’m going to cut this ungrateful asshole’s head off.”

  “That’s the spirit, buddy!”

  “I wish I hadn’t gone through this, though. My leg hurts like hell. Why didn’t you warn me about this kid back at the house? I thought you love giving advice.”

  “It’s all part of your education, Zack. You need to harden up in order to move on to bigger things. You won’t survive for too long if you’re soft.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Are you ready to make a dent in history, buddy?”

  “I sure am.”

  Yes, he sure was.

  THE END

  Hello Dear Reader!

  Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter so I can drop you a line when I have a new release.

  I have a strict NO SPAM policy, which means that you will hear from me no more than once every two months.

  Let's keep in touch!

  Regards,

  Tim Kizer

  Click here to subscribe to the newsletter

  The following is a sample of Tim Kizer’s horror novel “Days of Vengeance” (about 106,000 words).

  “Days of Vengeance” description:

  Frank Fowler, a man suffering from amnesia, suspects he may have murdered his wife Kelly, who vanished three days before he lost his memory. The bad news is Kelly's family has the same suspicions.

  As memories trickle back to him, Frank is still unable to figure out why he slaughtered his wife and what happened to his accomplice. He is not even sure he has nothing to do with the disappearance of his young daughter, who went missing a few months earlier. Things take a darker turn when he realizes that his in-laws will stop at nothing to make him remember what he has done to their beloved sister. The situation gets even more complicated as an anonymous blackmailer accuses Frank of the murder and demands money to keep his mouth shut.

  Frank's search for answers becomes a fight for survival after he rediscovers that his wife's relatives are a clique of bloodthirsty serial kidnappers serving a mysterious one-legged man. His chances of prevailing are slim: one of the in-laws is a cop and another is a multimillionaire.

  However, the question still remains: Why are these people so hell-bent on getting hold of Kelly's dead body?

  His options are limited: he either finds his wife--dead or alive--or dies. In his race against time Frank has all the clues to the puzzle, he just needs to remember them before it’s too late.

  The novel is currently available on Amazon Kindle http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006SPQRFS.

  Please visit Tim Kizer’s website www.horror-suspense.com for more news.

  Click here to subscribe to my newsletter

  Tim Kizer

  Days of Vengeance

  Chapter 1.

  DREAM

  1.

  The note read: “Dear Frank, I know you killed your wife, and I can prove it. You are a reasonable person. I’m sure you don’t want to go to prison. All I need is a $20,000 loan. Please think about my request very carefully.”

  But before this, the last six years had been wiped from his memory.

  Then there were darkness and dreams...

  2.

  Owl. Owl. Owl? This word flickered at the edge of his mind for a few seconds and then vanished. Frank somehow knew that it was not the word he’d been trying to recall. His very life depended upon this important word buried deep inside his memory, and he had to fish it out as soon as possible if he didn’t want the one-legged man and his people to cut his throat. He had no idea who the one-legged man was. Sometimes he doubted this man actually existed.

  The word sounded similar to ‘owl.’

  He would give it another shot later. Right now, he would like to focus on something else. Those dreams. Yeah, on those amazingly vivid dreams.

  Frank had been having bizarre dreams while he was in a coma. When he regained his consciousness, he did not remember their contents. As a matter of fact, he was not even sure he’d had any dreams at all.

  Very hard. Really damn hard! It was so hard to open his eyes. To unglue his eyelids, which, as he had begun to suspect, must have been sewn together, otherwise how could one explain the fact that he had been trying to put them in motion for ten minutes now (or maybe ten days), and they had not budged one bit?

  Then two flashes of recollection lit up his mind. First, Frank remembered that there was a steel-plated safe holding a body the one-legged man’s people would love to get back. He had no clue where he’d hidden it. Within seconds, this memory disappeared into the ether.

  The second flash was one of those strange dreams.

  Frank remembered seeing a man who stood by the bathroom door, collecting his thoughts. The man clasped a nine-inch long knife in his right hand, but Frank knew he was nursing a hope that he would not have to use it. Strangle... He would prefer to strangle her.

  Frank could also see a woman in the bathroom. She was in the shower cabin, carefully rubbing soap on her shoulders, forearms, and breasts, firm jets of hot water massaging her back, her hands sliding smoothly on the soft lather. The man wrapped his fingers around the knob, turned and pulled it, swore at himself—this door opens inward, idiot!—and then began pushing the door slowly until the gap became wide enough for him to see the woman.

  The woman’s progress was easy to observe since the bathroom fans had been doing a great job of venting most of the steam out. The man asked himself if he should wait until she finished showering. The answer was no.

  The woman turned around towards the showerhead and remained in this position for a while as the water rinsed the front of her body. Then she grabbed the shampoo bottle and squeezed some of its contents into her palm. She seemed preoccupied with the task at hand and would have hardly noticed if someone had sneaked into the room, especially with all that mist on the shower door. After gently lathering the top of her hair, the woman poured more shampoo into her palm and applied it to her hair in the back.

  The man gathered his courage and finally stepped over the threshold. He quickly shut the door behind him so as to prevent the draft of cold air from breaking into the bathroom and thus alerting the woman. Frank still couldn’t discern both the man’s and the woman’s faces—they were the only blurry spots in this vivid dream—but at the same time he had a feeling he knew these people very well. The man stood mere feet away from the shower cabin, watching his target massage the shampoo into her scalp. He was excited she didn’t see him enter the room. Lucky for him, the woman usually closed her eyes when lathering up her hair, which meant he had the surprise factor on his side, just like he’d hoped. Now there was a chance he wouldn’t have to hear her ear-piercing scream after all.

  With a pleased smile, the woman breathed in the hot steam, letting it warm up her nasal passage and lungs, as her hands slowly moved from her forehead to the back of her head, her fingers digging into the shampoo foam in circular motions. She obviously enjoyed taking shower.

  Hiding the knife behind his back, the man made the first step towards the cabin. Through the water jet noise, he heard the woman start humming some tune, and he froze for a second to shake off the momentary doubt that he would be unable to yank that bitch out and accomplish what he had planned. She’d better shut up and quit distracting him! He inhaled through his nose and exhaled through his mouth and quickly calmed down.

  The tune reproduced by the woman was Dancing Queen by ABBA. Like millions of other people, the woman loved singing in the shower, where there were no critics or gawkers.

  With her eyes still shut, the woman stepped closer to the showerhead, allowing the water to rinse her hair. As the shampoo lather streamed down her naked body, she kept humming Dancing Queen, while running her fingers through her locks. She was enveloped in puffs of steam, the wat
er noise drowned every other sound in the bathroom; oblivious to the world outside the foggy shower door, she didn’t see the man approach the cabin.

  3.

  The memory expired as abruptly as it had come to his mind. A few seconds later, he only had a vague idea of what the dream had been about. And the memory of the one-legged man had vanished completely.

  So, one, two, three. He was summoning his strength. Summoning his strength. He had to open his eyes. And here was the light. His eyelids finally opened. Focusing, and...

  A woman's face. Perhaps he should go to the bathroom and wash his face and brush his teeth. He also did not want to be late for work. By the way, where did he work?

  “Mister Fowler,” the woman said in a low voice, putting her warm palm on his hand.

  Lying in bed was pleasant. The woman’s palm was very warm, as if it had rested on a hot towel for a while before landing on his hand. He had no desire to get up. It felt as though he had grown into the bed, become part of it. The woman was apparently kind. Kind as a mother.

  He moved his lips apart and forgot to register how difficult this action was because all of his attention was drawn to the face of the kind woman clasping his hand. His right hand. Or was it his left hand? Damn, which hand was she holding?

  “Mister Fowler, if you can hear me, move your right thumb.” A pause. “Move any finger if you can hear me, Mister Fowler. Hang on a second. I'm going to get the doctor.”

  Yes, sure, he could hear her. He moved (or so it seemed to him) his right index finger. Yes, it was the index finger on the hand the woman was squeezing. He wagged it with sufficient amplitude so that the woman would easily notice the movement.

  “Hang—” the woman fell silent after seeing his finger twitch, which meant he had actually moved it. “Very good, Mister Fowler. I'll get the doctor.”