Niceville by Carsten Stroud Read Free Book Online Page B

Niceville, out of the state entirely, I would do it. You have depths, Mr. Bock, and are not at all what you present to the world. I have encountered your like before, in my long life, and I imagine I will again before I go to my Maker. But I wish you to know, Mr. Bock, that I have
seen
you, and I have
noted
you, and that for as long as I am on the bench and you are within my jurisdiction, I shall have my eye upon you. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Mr. Bock?”
    A long, strained silence during which Mr. Bock struggled to find an acceptable face to put before the world. To Kate Kavanaugh, who deeply loathed the nasty little man for what he had done and had tried to do to Anna Marie and her mother over the last eight months, it was like watching one of the minor demons trying on various freshly skinned human faces.
    The one Bock finally picked was only half human and when she saw it a deep chill raced through her body. Bock was careful to show it to her only, in a flash of a sidelong scowl, and had a more human one in place as he faced Judge Monroe.
    “I do, Your Honor,” he said, in a penitent voice, inserting a tactical throat catch and blinking his eyes rapidly. “And may I say that I will try very hard to spend whatever time I have left in my life doing everything in my power to make you feel very different about me. You. My wife. My child. All of you.”
    Judge Monroe considered him for a time, his blue lips tight and his fingers steepled on the desk in front of him.
    “Will you now, Mr. Bock?”
    Bock nodded, his hands hanging down at his sides, his eyes averted from the shining disks of the judge’s glasses, now trained upon him.
    “I will, sir. I promise you all that I will.”
    Judge Monroe said nothing for a long moment.
    “I believe you, Mr. Bock. I believe that for the first time in my courtroom you are speaking the literal truth. Duly noted. Court is now adjourned.”

Delia Cotton’s Afternoon Was Hard to Explain
    Delia Cotton lived alone, quite happily alone, right up until the evening of her disappearance. She was an erect, full-figured, and elegant lady with soft brown eyes, once a heartbreaker and even now a rare beauty with a pale autumnal glow and a full head of rich silvery hair swept high and held in place with a Cartier diamond pin, bought for her in Venice by a long-dead lover.
    She had enjoyed a long and complicated life filled with personal and professional success, and she had known many charming and brilliant and utterly engaging people who, by the time she had reached eighty-four, bored her to distraction.
    Except for the ones who were dead and therefore could be depended upon not to grate on a woman’s nerves. She was now down to two regular visitors, aside from the ladies in her book club: Alice Bayer, who drove over from The Glades five times a week to clean, bring groceries, restock her bar, and tend to Mildred Pierce, her Maine Coon cat, and Gray Haggard—his real given name, God bless him—who came around occasionally to do some gardening and routine maintenance and, from a safe distance, in a tastefully unobtrusive way, quietly adore her.
    Delia cherished her privacy, and her memories, many sweet, some bitter, and all far enough in the past to have lost either their savor or their sting, and she dearly loved Temple Hill, her rambling old Victorian pile buried deep inside the tree-shaded privileges of The Chase.
    Tonight, around sunset, with a lance of sunlight shining through the oaks and laying a golden glow on the rolling lawn, she was sittingin the ornate octagonal window-walled room that her husband had liked to call the bandbox when the front doorbell bonged softly in the outer darkness of the great hall.
    She did not hear it right away, because up until a few minutes ago, she had been watching, with deepening depression, the urgent reporting of some hideous atrocity that had been inflicted earlier in the day upon several young highway patrol officers, up in the