Black Widow (23 page)
Authors: Victor Methos
56
Stanton dashed to the front of the house. He ran around the yard and through the front door. The house was quiet. With the Desert Eagle held in front of him, he stepped through the living room. He glanced over to the stairs leading to the second floor when he heard an engine turn.
He sprinted out to the patio as Rick’s truck peeled out on the dirt road. Taking aim in the Weaver stance, he fired three rounds. All three hit the back of the truck.
Emptying his clip, he knew he hadn’t hit her. He lowered the weapon and walked down to the road. Watching as the truck kicked up clouds of dust and was gone. In the distance, he could hear sirens.
Stanton stayed at Rick’s house while the forensics team went through it. They had found Rick in the bedroom upstairs. He was tied to the bed and had been skinned alive. One of his legs was missing a large portion of the musculature.
Stanton sent uniforms to search the surrounding jungles and called out the S & R unit, but they didn’t find anything. No trace of Heather. If she had made it back to the city, she was probably gone by now. Or, Heidi had lied and killed her. Buried her out here under the shrubbery where no one would find her.
“Detective?” a forensic tech said, walking out of the house.
“Yeah?”
“We found this in the bedroom with the stiff. It’s addressed to you.”
Stanton reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out two latex gloves. He snapped them on and then opened the envelope. Inside was a handwritten letter. The penmanship was in copperplate and it appeared like something that could have been written six hundred years ago.
Jon,
What we had
was real.
Sincerely,
HR
“Mean anything to you?” the tech said.
Stanton folded up the letter and put it in the envelope. He handed it back to the tech and said, “No. Just the babblings of a crazy person.”
He left the house. Rick fought the Department of the Interior, who wanted to demolish this house as unsafe due to a nearby volcano. Without him around, the house would be torn down and buried.
Stanton hoped the memories of her would be buried here as well.
EPILOGUE
Stanton walked into the Lanai Airport. One of the smaller airports on the island of Oahu, it was tucked away in the central business district of Lanai City. Few people ever used it, but Stanton had been to it once before. When Melissa came to pick up his boys, she had used Lanai instead of Honolulu. He had said goodbye to his two sons not thirty feet from where he was now.
Mathew, now eighteen, had called him the other day and said that he was moving out to the island. Johnny would be staying with his mother. Stanton tried to talk him out of it, that his brother and mother needed a man around, but Mathew had retorted that his mother had plenty of men around and didn’t need him. He would be flying back out to the island that summer.
Stanton spotted who he was looking for. A woman in a red sundress with black speckles. He came next to her on the row of seats and sat down. The woman, who was wearing sunglasses, didn’t look at him.
“I knew you’d eventually have to leave,” he said. “Island fever sets in after a few years.”
She was silent a moment. “How did you find me?”
“You thought I’d drop the net, I’m guessing. That we could only keep that up for so long.”
“I knew you wouldn’t drop it.”
He looked to her legs. Once tanned and firm, they appeared pale now. Thin. “It was the name you bought the tickets under. Virginia Woolf. I’m guessing your favorite author?”
She made a clicking sound against her teeth. “I thought I should have just picked a random name.”
“Sometimes, in cases like these, the perpetrator’s unconscious can’t handle what they’re doing. The unconscious works to get them captured.”
She scoffed. “Are you saying I wanted to get caught?”
“Did you?”
She didn’t respond.
“We found Heather’s body. She died of dehydration. The jungle she was in was only fifty miles square. We think she walked in circles. The potassium you injected her with sped up the process. She might have made it otherwise.”
The woman shook her head. “She was always incompetent. If she would have picked any direction and started walking she would have gotten out.” She glanced over to him. “You still with Homicide?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “I can’t go back with you. They will declare me incompetent and put me in an asylum. I won’t go there again. Ever.”
“You’ve killed a lot of people, Heidi. This has to stop.”
Moving her purse aside, she crossed her legs. She took off her sunglasses and put them in her purse. “You know, I really did feel something for you.”
“I know.”
“Did you for me?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“Odd how that works, isn’t it? You don’t get to choose who you fall in…” She didn’t finish the sentence and the two of them sat in silence a moment longer.
Stanton saw her fingers dip into her purse.
“Don’t, Heidi. Please.”
“Goodbye, Jon.”
A syringe full of golden fluid flashed out of her purse. The needle was aimed at Stanton’s neck. He grabbed her wrist and pushed it back. She pulled with both hands on the syringe. He tried to stand for better leverage but tripped, and took her down with him.
They hit the floor hard, staring into each other’s eyes. Heidi was on top of him and he felt her warmth, smelled her hair. A rush of all the feelings he had spent a year burying came back to him. Flooding him like adrenaline.
Her mouth was open. He pushed her off, rolling her to the side. The syringe was sticking out of her chest. The needle was completely buried in her flesh. The plunger had been depressed, the fluid pushed into her bloodstream. He didn’t know if that had been an accident or not but hoped it was. He pulled it out.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She grinned. “Me too.”
He held her in his arms a few moments, before the light dimmed in her eyes and she was gone. Stanton rose. The uniformed officers outside came in with guns drawn. Jones was with them. He marched up, his gun pointed at the body.
“I thought she’d surrender,” Jones said.
He shook his head. “No.”
Stanton walked out of the airport and into the warm morning air. He didn’t look back.
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BY VICTOR METHOS
Jon Stanton Thrillers
Science
Fiction & Fantasy
Empire of War
: An Epic Fantasy
Star Dreamer: The Early Science Fiction of Victor Methos
Superhero Thrillers
Superhero (An Action Thriller)
Plague Trilogy
Scourge (Coming February 2014)
Thrillers
Black Sky (A Mystery-Thriller)
Murder Corporation (A Crime Thriller)
Creature-Feature Novels
Paranormal Thrillers
Humo
r
Earl Lindquist: Accountant and Zombie Killer
Philosophical Fiction
Existentialism and Death on a Paris Afternoon
To contact the author, get tips on starting your own adventures, or learn about upcoming releases, please visit the author’s blog at
http://methosreview.blogspot.com/
Copyright 2013
Victor Methos
Kindle Edition
License Statement
This
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Please note that this is a work of fiction. Any similarity
to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All events in this work are purely from the imagination of the author and are not intended to signify, represent, or reenact any event in actual fact.