SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set by Billie Sue Mosiman Read Free Book Online

them at all.
    In three days he got over the cold and fever, but he would never get over what his mother had done.
    Never.
    #

    Nick sat up on the hospital bed in Tacoma, Washington, his eyes wide open and frightened. He felt his throat, massaging the place where the ribbon had choked him. Was Shakey right? Was he insane?
    Finally his pulse slowed, and he could swallow. He lay back on the bed. What was the difference? He had done nothing wrong, nothing immoral, nothing to be punished for. Didn’t anybody understand? If he was insane, then the whole world was insane. All he needed was Daley to help him. He needed to be free. Free to be where he belonged, free to roam Houston where no one would notice him.

CHAPTER 5

Houston, Texas
    Summer 1976

    John Marcus Deshane, known to everyone as Jack, awoke before the alarm sounded and lay staring at the ceiling. He could hear his ten-year-old son, Willie, snoring from the other bedroom, but that was not what woke him. He had gone to bed the night before upset. He still believed he and the other policemen could have taken the butcher knife from the Chicano youth without killing him. Why did the boy have to die in a rain of bullets as if he were a mad dog foaming at the mouth?
    Jack was one of four patrolmen who had arrived at the scene. There were three others from the precinct and a total of eleven men altogether fanning out around the sixteen-year-old. He had escaped from the psychiatric facilities of Ben Tabb Hospital, and he still wore a starched white hospital gown over a pair of ragged jeans. He was barefoot and dancing in small circles around the grass. His dark hair was plastered across his smooth forehead, and his eyes gleamed craftily as he looked from one man to another. They knew he was on a hallucinogen. Every few seconds he screamed a high piercing scream that made Jack’s hair stand on end. Chills crawled down his back like spiders down a bean pole. They tried to talk the boy into giving up his knife.
    “Come on, kid. This isn’t going to get you anywhere. Hand over the knife and we’ll talk about it,” Jack urged.
    The boy screamed again, but it was cut off sharply when Jack’s partner tried to close in from the circle. Bill Lorenza, a four-year veteran, kept speaking in soft Spanish.
    Jack had not drawn his gun from the holster. He did not believe for a minute that weapons would have to be used. The kid was having a psychotic episode, and no one could predict his actions from one second to the next, but what could he do with a single butcher knife against eleven armed men?
    Bill and a detective from homicide took turns talking Spanish to the boy, but Jack did not think they were getting anywhere. The boy’s reality lay elsewhere and he continued to scream.
    Jack would never be able to say who was responsible for the first shot. Bill Lorenza had edged in toward the boy and stood ten feet from the brandished knife. Bill had holstered his gun to come toward the boy with both hands out in a gesture of help.
    Suddenly the youth gave a shattering cry that rooted Lorenza to the spot, and as he lunged forward with the knife, the shots rang out in a thundering hail, bringing the boy to his knees. He was sent sprawling, bleeding on the dry summer grass. The knife lay at Lorenza’s feet.
    It would not be the last time Jack would see things that were unjust. He knew that. It was simply the first time he had witnessed it.
    Jack rolled from bed and shut off the radio an instant after it started to blare. Six A.M. Usually his best time of day, but now sullied with leftover images of vague nightmares he could not recall and a pervading feeling of defeat he could not shake.
    The young man’s death triggered a refrain in Jack’s mind as he showered. It might be Willie some day, he thought.
    He knew that was farfetched but enough of a threat to frighten a father. Right now Willie was a good boy, bright, obedient, and loving. But after a year as a patrolman on the Houston Police