Eye of Vengeance by Jonathon King Read Free Book Online Page A

inmate was Ferris was still in the wind. And at this point Nick didn’t even know if the shooter was targeting anyone specific. Maybe the sniper was just some whack job out to pop a bad guy, any bad guy, and knew the sally port was where prisoners were off-loaded. But the picture was still in Nick’s head, the roofline looking down into the fenced yard, the distance, the single blood spatter. No way, he decided. There were probably half a dozen prisoners down there. All this guy wanted was one shot. One preselected victim.
    Nick called up an old file on his computer, a huge list of telephone numbers he’d collected over the years. He was the kind of reporter who recorded nearly every substantial contact number he’d gathered over the years. Each time he finished a story, he’d copy the numbers from his notebooks or cut and paste them from his computer notes and put them on the bottom of this list. There were hundreds. He knew he’d never use eighty percent of them ever again, but times like these kept him at the habit.
    Using a search function for Ferris’s name on the computer, he found what he was looking for in seconds—Ferris’s father’s and brother’s names and their telephone numbers. The father had been in West Virginia three years ago and hadn’t been much help. But the brother lived here. The cops would have the same numbers and at some point they would call to inform next of kin. Nick knew if he got some family member on the line, he’d have a good chance of confirming it was Ferris who was now lying in the morgue. He picked up the phone and started to punch in the number for the brother, then stopped. David Ferris’s address, in a mobile home park only twenty minutes away in Wilton Manors, was typed in next to the number. Nick checked his watch: eleven o’clock. He was not pressed for time. No other stories were breaking. He’d made a dozen of these calls before. After the ones in which he was the first person to tell a relative that a son or wife or brother was dead, it always left a soured lump of guilt in his gut. He hung up the phone and logged off his computer.
    “We’re still waiting on the identification of that shooting victim at the jail,” he said to the assistant city editor as he walked by. “I’m going out. But I’m on my cell.”
    Nick made sure the editor had heard him and waved the phone and got a nod from the guy.
    You tell somebody his brother is dead face to face if you can, Nick thought as he rode the elevator down.

Chapter 4
    D on’t hesitate, he told himself, sitting in his car outside David Ferris’s double-wide, watching the curtains in the window just to the right of the louvered front door. Nick had driven up Federal Highway, practicing the words he’d use when the brother of the dead man answered the door: Excuse me, Mr. Ferris, I hate to bother you. I don’t know if you remember me, Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I did some stories about your brother a few years back?
    Liar, Nick thought. You don’t hate to bother him when there’s a good chance that his brother has just been shot dead. You’re after a story. You need a comment.
    Hello, Mr. Ferris. Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I’d like to verify if you’ve heard from the Sheriff’s Office concerning your brother.
    The straight-out-in-their-face technique was at least honest.
    Oh, and by the way, if you have heard, could you please spill your guts to me on how you feel about this news for two hundred thousand strangers to read in tomorrow’s editions?
    When he’d arrived in the correct block, Nick pulled into the entrance of the Palms Mobile Park and checked the address on his pad. But after the first left turn, his memory served him. He eased down the narrow street past Flamingo Trail, Ponce de Leon Court and Anhinga Way. Speed bumps between each block jounced him, and palm trees, all with too-thin trunks and browned fronds, leaned precariously at each corner. Nick once noted that trees did not