A Kiss Gone Bad by Jeff Abbott Read Free Book Online

the reedy Beach Boys tape that had been the player’s sole occupant for the
     last three years sputtered into life and the Boys, volume turnedlow, demanded he be true to his school. He prayed that his Darling would be true to him, singing along under his breath,
     taking the harmony line.
    Mosley and Velvet went into the police station, and the Blade waited. A few minutes later, Mosley sauntered across the street
     to the courthouse.
    You dirty little freak. You’re nothing, not worthy to touch her, know her tears. I’m not the nothing. You’re the nothing.
    Mosley fiddled with the courthouse door and ducked inside the darkened building. A light flickered on a few minutes later
     in a first-floor office behind lowered blinds.
    Perhaps Judge Mosley didn’t lock up after himself.
    He ran to the courthouse steps and tried the door: locked. Damn.
    But no, he told himself. Not now. He shivered. One death by violence in Port Leo tonight was remarkable. Another the same
     night would bring the police out in droves. He walked away from the courthouse. Let Whit Mosley continue to breathe – for
     now – and let him rule that Pete Hubble died a suicide. He congratulated himself on his self-restraint.
    The momentary pride evaporated when he saw the flyer hanging in the bookstore window. Only the dim shimmer from the streetlight
     illuminated the girl’s face, printed on light blue paper taped to the inside of the window. The Blade blinked, his guts coiling
     like a frightened snake.
    The eyes of his last Darling watched him from the flyer. She was smiling broadly. He had not seen her smile, from the time
     he had abducted her from a faraway parking lot to when he’d laid her in the shallow dirt behind his house.
    HAVE YOU SEEN HER? the flyer asked, with MARCY ANN BALLEW written below the question. It gave the young woman’s statistics of age, description, height, andweight, and when she was last seen: leaving work at the Memorial Oaks Nursing Home in Deshay, Louisiana, September 30. Her
     car had been recovered from a nearby Wal-Mart.
    He read on, his throat feeling coated with sand. Her wallet had been found two miles outside Port Leo, along FM Road 1223,
     a week ago. Anyone with information as to her whereabouts was requested to call the Encina County Sheriff’s Department or
     the Port Leo police. A reward was mentioned.
    The Blade mentally replayed his time with his most troublesome Darling. When could her wallet have gotten out on the road?
     he wondered, and with a sick wrench he remembered. As he approached his enclave hidden away from the eyes of other men, she
     roused from the stupor he’d forced on her with the Valiums and she kicked open a window. He’d veered off the road, whirled
     to grab her, and belted her hard four times in the face, breaking her cheekbone and nose and knocking her unconscious. He
     was furious, having to hurt her before his fun; and the broken bones meant he’d never gotten to see her smile. He traced her
     smile on the paper with his finger: lovely. He missed her.
    She must have thrown her wallet out the window before he punched her, trying to leave some clue of her passage. Now the police
     in Louisiana – and here – must know that she had come through off-the-path Port Leo, Texas.
    He swallowed the swell of panic. The police would no doubt be questioning everyone who lived along FM 1223, between here to
     the county line. How hard would they look, and how hard would they look at him? Capture always lingered in the back of his
     mind, an unwelcome companion but one as steady as his shadow. Now it loomed as a distinct possibility, and he had not claimed
     his most precious Darling yet.
    He could not take her now. The police would be watching her. But in a few days, especially if Pete was judged a suicide …
     then she would be ripe, a plum oozing with juice, to be plucked from the tree. Tonight was Monday. He could take her, he believed,
     by the end of the week. Friday or