Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller) (5 page)
Read Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller) Online
Authors: Tim Kizer
Nora turned out to be an honorable woman, after all.
She was capable of feeling guilt, which was quite rare nowadays. He respected
that.
There was no remorse, though. He had done the right
thing, and Nora had realized that, too.
She might have thought he was bluffing about the
tranquilizer, by the way. She might have thought she would just get inebriated
and wake up with a headache. But it was a moot point now.
Holding the cellphone in his right hand, Ted fixed his
eyes on his Rolex. He was cautious enough to admit that his wife might be
critical to the success of his idea. Nora knew about his plan, and,
theoretically, she could be the one who was going to ensure that future
generations of Duplasses remembered Ted’s instructions.
As Pete’s poisoning had demonstrated, the mix of
alcohol and a tranquilizer didn’t kill quickly. Ted had about ten minutes to call
the ambulance and thus prevent Nora from dying. He only needed five to
determine if Nora had to live.
Ted let out a relieved sigh. The Rolex hadn’t
evaporated as he had feared; it was still on his wrist, pleasantly heavy. And
the living room had not disappeared either. Ted sprinted to the window and
looked outside. Nora’s Mercedes and his Range Rover were still sitting in the
driveway.
Ted dialed 911 one hour after Nora stopped breathing. He
had no trouble sounding shocked and devastated as he spoke to the operator.
17.
There was a new email from Nick in the inbox when Ted
came home from Nora’s funeral. The message read:
‘Ted Duplass was killed by Kenneth Shelton, 27, on
January 6, 2014.
I found your time capsule.
Nick Duplass.’
Ted raised his eyebrows, highly intrigued. Then he took
a deep breath and exhaled slowly a moment later.
Maybe his efforts to avoid death were futile. Was it even
possible for him to change his fate? That was an interesting question.
Look on the bright side: he knew what was going to
happen to him, and that was half the battle.
Kenneth Shelton, 27.
27 must be the guy’s age. Good thing Nick had put this
detail in the email: it would help avoid a bloodbath in the style of King
Herod, who had ordered the execution of all young boys in Bethlehem to get baby
Jesus and thus save his throne. How many Kenneth Sheltons were there in
America? Probably thousands.
Ted wished Nick had provided more information about his
future killer—his address, for example. Or his date of birth, at least.
King Herod, huh?
By the way, was it going to be a premeditated murder or
some sort of accident? This Shelton guy could turn out to be the driver of the
semi-truck that would smash into Ted’s car on the 6th
of January,
2014. Or maybe he mistook Ted for a deer during a hunt.
One thing was certain: Kenneth Shelton had to go. Two
months was plenty of time to take care of this guy. The best defense is
offence, right? He already had the gun, so he might as well use it.
What if it didn’t end on Kenneth Shelton? What if Nick
emailed him another name after he bumped off Shelton? He would have to dispatch
that person, too.
How many times was Ted planning to repeat this? The
answer was simple: he would keep doing it until he received an email that said
he would die of old age. That was the kind of death Ted desired. Death of old
age. Very old age. Triple-digit age. By the way, he should ask Nick to figure
out a way to send him a life-prolonging drug that would let him live to be a
hundred and fifty; they would surely have these in 2223. These pills would
probably cost as much as a house, but it was okay—his boy Nick Duplass must be
loaded.
A wild thought flashed in Ted’s mind. What if Nick was
playing with him? What if Kenneth Shelton was just some random name Nick had
pulled out of his ass?
Ted shooed this thought away. Why would Nick do that?
He was correct about Nora, remember? She had indeed tried to murder him; that
was an irrefutable fact.
Ted lowered himself into the chair, switched on the
laptop, and started typing. He was finished two and a half minutes later.
‘Dear Nick,
Thank you for the information. I hope you’re doing
well.
You mentioned Kenneth Shelton in your last message. What
is his address? What is his date of birth? What is his social security number?
Can you send me his picture?
Ted Duplass, October 29, 2013.’
Yeah, he sucked at writing letters, but who the hell
cared? Ted clicked the Print button.
A few seconds later, Ted took the letter from the
printer, folded it in half, and dropped it in the time capsule. Then he printed
his first message to Nick—the one with the death question—and put it in the
capsule, too.
Ted was glad he had purchased a metal detector. He
would have spent hours looking for the old capsule without it. Once again, his
instincts proved right.
He screwed the cover on the time capsule and headed for
the garage.
Fuck fate. He was going to kick this bitch in the face
until it got tired of trying to kill him.
THE END
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Other titles by Tim Kizer
·
Days of Vengeance, horror novel
·
The Mindbender, suspense novel
·
The Dreamer, suspense novelette
·
Dark Luck, suspense novelette
·
Hitchhiker, suspense/horror
novelette
·
Intoxication, suspense novelette
Tim Kizer
When
a serial killer hitches a ride one sunny day in a beautiful California valley,
he does not suspect that he may have met his match, who is dead set to take
another life. The battle of wits begins and only the most devious mind will
survive.
#
Not so cocky now, are you, pretty boy?
He was staring at the body of a young tanned man lying
in front of him in the thick grass. He had stabbed this guy twice in the chest
three minutes ago and now was making certain that the good-looking stranger was
actually dead. So far he had not noticed any signs of life, which pleased him
very much. Squatting, he searched the dead man’s pants pockets and spent a
while studying his findings. According to the driver license, his
twenty-six-year-old victim’s name was Devon Hill.
Well, you picked the wrong day to
hike alone in the woods, Mister Hill.
Besides the license, the wallet contained a few plastic
cards and about a dozen dollar bills; he put the cash in his jeans pocket. He
decided he would burn Devon’s cards and ID when he got out of the forest. With
all these CSI wizards around, you could not be too careful and mere shredding
was not enough. Then he pocketed the coins he had dug out along with the
wallet. It was eight state quarters: Minnesota, Virginia, Massachusetts,
Oregon, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Arkansas, and Delaware. As he wiped the bloody
knife blade on Devon’s T-shirt, he looked around, cautiously, as if the danger
of being spotted was real. Well, there was no human being as far as the eye
could see. Before rising to his feet, he tossed his knife, Devon’s wallet and
keys in the bag. He could neither keep these three items, nor leave them near
the corpse since they were evidence now. He would throw the potential
prosecution exhibits in a pond or a river on his way out.
One hour later he was standing on the side of the
freeway, waiting for a tender-hearted driver to give him a lift. It was not too
long that he saw an oncoming car, a graphite metallic Chevrolet Malibu, and
started waving. He was a bit surprised when the vehicle pulled over and the
driver asked him where he was heading.
Well, let’s hope it is going to be a
fun ride.
#
“You can put your bag in the back of the car,”
instructed the driver.
“Okay.” He carefully placed his bag on the rear seat and
shut the door.
“So you are going to Redding?” the driver said,
pressing the gas pedal. He appeared to be around thirty and wore blue washed
jeans and a grey short-sleeved shirt.
“Yeah, Redding,” he answered.
“My name’s David.” The driver offered his right hand
for a handshake.
“Ron,” he replied and shook David’s hand.
“Pleasure to meet you, Ron.” The driver flashed a
sincere smile, which gave Ron a tingling warm feeling in his stomach and chest.
Ron thought it would be difficult to make himself murder this guy without some
sort of penitence.
He could kill him when they made a stop at an
uninhabited spot down the freeway. He could arrange that stop easily: he would
say he badly needed to pee or throw up. What was he going to do with the car?
This Malibu was nice, and he could use it for a couple of thrilling chores. He
wondered how soon the driver would be missed after he vanished.
“I’m heading to Salem, the Beaver State capital, so
it’s your lucky day.” David giggled quietly. “I’ve had my share of hitchhiking,
and I remember very well how hard it was to flag down a car. People don’t trust
hitchhikers, and I understand them. There are quite nutty individuals out
there. Besides, you can rarely get wherever you need to go just in one car.
It’s never happened to me.”
“Yeah, I got lucky,” agreed Ron.
Anyway, he didn’t have to kill David. He could play
with him instead. What would Zack say? Damn, he wished he could tell David that
dazzling story. He was no blabbermouth, nevertheless lately he’d been dying to
share this amazing secret with every stranger he’d met. But if he told the
story to David he would have to kill him afterwards.
“It’s hot today,” said the driver.
“Yeah, you’re right.” Ron wiped sweat off his forehead
with his left palm. “Hot like in hell. I should have put on sandals.” He tapped
on the floor with his dusty sneakers.
“It’s May, what else can you expect?” David adjusted
the right air vent so that his passenger could cool down faster. “The guy who
invented car air conditioning is a saint.”
#
Okay, now it is time for the dazzling story. Once there
was a guy in his early thirties, let’s call him George, who sold auto parts in
Southern California. His pregnant wife, let’s call her Janet, liked to walk
every morning in a park not far away from their home. One fine winter day two
friends saw that woman in the park and decided to have fun with her. They were
quite peculiar people, you know. For a number of reasons they loved hurting
young women, and Janet was a great specimen. They approached her, asked how she
was doing, with a smile of course, and then one of them hit her really hard in
the temple with a fist, thus rendering the poor woman unconscious.
The two friends brought Janet to their cabin in a
forest in the Sierra Mountains and locked her in the basement. The fact that
she was pregnant added delightful zest to the whole affair. The intensity of
pleasure quadrupled when the story of the missing woman went national. For some
reason every major TV channel and newspaper decided that the Americans needed
to know just about every little detail of that particular case, which quickly
became a murder investigation. Main suspect? Of course Janet’s husband.
#
“You have a cool car,” said Ron. “These Malibu are
neat.”
“I am a fan of Chevy. They make classy and reliable
cars. And affordable, too. Do you like the color?”
“Yeah, I do. What year is it?”
“I bought it three years ago and never regretted it.”
“What are you going to do in Salem?” asked Ron.
“I’ve got to pick up my wife and son. My mother-in-law
lives in Salem, so they went there to see her. They are very beautiful. Want to
take a look?” Without waiting for Ron’s answer, David pulled out his wallet and
unfolded it, letting out the photo holder. “My wife’s name is Laura.” His eyes
on the road, he handed the wallet to Ron, who, probably out of politeness,
started examining the pictures. “My son’s name is Tony. He’s four. He has my
nose and mouth. Do you see that?”
“I guess he does.” Ron returned the wallet.
“My mother-in-law is an all-right lady. Have you ever
been to Salem?”
Ron shook his head.
“I’m going to stay there overnight, and tomorrow all
three of us will get back home, to Oceanside. Ever been to Oceanside?”
“No. I’m sure it’s a gorgeous place.”
“It is a great place. But I’ve always dreamed of spending
a few years in Las Vegas. All those neon lights, casinos, seething nightlife.
Fascinating.”
#
Okay, back to the story. George was arrested and
charged with the murder of his wife. To make things even worse for him, it
turned out that he had been cheating on his wife for many years. And his latest
paramour was so treacherous as to tape her phone conversations with George at
the request of the local police.
George claimed he had an alibi: on the day Janet had
gone missing he had been fishing in a bay several miles south of Arroyo Grande,
one hundred and fifty miles away from his home. That was his biggest mistake
after trusting his perfidious mistress. That critical information about the
alibi was immediately made public by the media. The two friends, who were still
holding Janet captive in the basement of their cabin, decided it was a great
opportunity to safely get rid of the woman that had no appeal to them anymore.
They killed her and dumped the body in the bay where George had been fishing on
the day of his wife’s disappearance.
Result: George got convicted and sentenced to death.
Who knows what the outcome of the trial would have been if there hadn’t been so
much hype about the case. After all, the prosecution had no material evidence
of George’s guilt; they even failed to determine the cause of Janet’s death.
Moral of the story: never think you can’t be framed.
#
“I’ll go buy us some Pepsi,” said David a few minutes
after they had passed Merced--at the end of the first hour of their
acquaintance. “I bet you want to drink as badly as I do.” He steered towards
the parking lot near the convenience store on the side of the road. “Is Pepsi
okay?”
“Yeah, Pepsi’s okay,” replied Ron. “Thanks, you saved
me once again.” When the driver was halfway to the entrance, Ron shouted: “Just
not Diet Pepsi.”
David entered the store and, after glancing over the
shelves for orientation, walked over to the coolers. In the background, Kenny
Chesney was singing about a keg in the closet and pizza on the floor. He spent
half a minute deciding whether he wanted diet or regular, then opened the
cooler’s door, enjoyed the chill for a few moments, and finally picked up four
eight ounce bottles of regular. When David came over to the counter, Kenny was
complaining about separate ways that they had gone. David wanted to make a
remark that ninety percent of country songs were so depressing, but changed his
mind. His ear caught a portion of a phrase from a small TV set sitting on the
counter in front of the salesperson, a slender man on the older end of middle
age. David shot a look at the TV, which now was displaying a sketch of a
suspect who had allegedly murdered four people in Nevada.
“Four people,” the sales clerk nodded at the sketch,
having noticed David’s interest. “Some crazy dude.”
David stooped over the counter to get a better view of
the TV screen and had several seconds to scan the suspect’s face before the
picture changed. He murmured: “Yeah,” exchanged glances with the clerk, and,
after paying for the soda, left the store.
White male, twenty five to thirty five years old,
height 5’9” to 6’1”, light brown hair, white complexion. Even though it was
California, there were thousands of people fitting that description. For Pete’s
sake, even he possessed all of the above characteristics. Good thing they had
that sketch. Narrowed the suspects’ pool pretty damn significantly, didn’t it?
David wondered how they had managed to do it. Had one of this moron’s victims
survived?
The second he stepped under the scorching sunlight David
started devising a plan to neutralize Ron: it was his face he had just seen on
television, you know.
#
They made another stop several miles past Atwater after
Ron said he needed to call his friend and asked if David had a cell-phone.
“Sorry, my wife took it because hers had broken,” said
David. “But I bet there is a payphone at a gas station.”
“Could you lend some quarters when we get to a gas
station? I don’t think they’re going to change my dollar unless I buy
something.”
“Yes, some of those folks are unscrupulous. I’ll give
you quarters, no problem.” David took a bunch of coins out of his pocket and
spilled them on Ron’s palm.
“State quarter,” announced Ron, showing David the
reverse side of one of the coins. It was a Minnesota state quarter with a loon
making ripples on water and a pair of fishermen in a boat.
“They all are state quarters,” remarked David.
“Yeah, I see now. I like them.” Ron laid out the eight
coins tails up in two rows on his palm. “These are so shiny.”
“They are neat,” David agreed. “I can’t say I collect
state quarters. I just keep them as long as possible. For some reason I don’t
feel like spending them.”
As Ron left the car for the gas station mini mart,
David finally made up his mind: he would not follow Ron to make sure he did not
run away. Instead, he would examine the suspected killer’s bag.
#
Back there at the convenience store, he only looked at
the TV because he was afraid, for a second, that it could have been a report
about him. Imagine what a quandary it would have been for him if they had
actually
shown his sketch on the screen? Would he have killed that poor sales clerk?
What do you think? Well, would he have had a choice? That man paid so much
attention to the news of a killer on the loose that one could believe he really
cared about the victims.
David squinted at the bag, then cast an eye at Ron--who
was already on the porch of the mini mart--then looked at the bag again. What
the heck was he waiting for? He reached out his hand between the seats and
started patting the bag.
If there were anything incriminating in the bag, he
would not have left it in the car, right?
Clink. It seemed to David he had just heard a clink. He
began squeezing the area of the bag he had patted a moment ago and tried to
figure out what the source of the chinking could be. His heart racing, David
glanced over his left shoulder to check if Ron had left the store. Even though
he had murdered people himself--sometimes with his bare hands--the prospect of
getting caught in the act by a crazy serial killer did not cheer him one bit.
Thankfully, Ron was still inside the building, and David continued to squeeze
the bag. More clinking. He nipped the suspicious end of the bag and jiggled it
up and down. Dammit, there was a metallic object in there whose shape was
consistent with an outline of a knife! Probably it was two knives: that would
explain the clinking. David stretched his hand further and hastily explored the
most distant end of the bag. It appeared that there was something solid and
oval and as big as a human head. Actually the human head was the first
hypothesis that came to his mind.