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  Reckoning

  A Detective Bobby Mac Thriller

  (Volume Three)

  By

  R.S. Guthrie

  Copyright © 2013 by R.S. Guthrie

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  This eBook was licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Most of the action in this novel takes place in Denver, Colorado, the Metro vicinity, the mountains, and other nearby areas. Certain liberties have been taken in describing the city, its institutions, people, locations, history, etc. The world presented here is entirely fictional, as are its characters, events, departments, and other details. Any resemblance to actual incidents or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art: iStockphoto / R.S. Guthrie

  What readers are saying about

  Black Beast & LOST:

  Detective Bobby Mac Thrillers (Volume One & Two)

  “Kudos to R.S. Guthrie!! I started reading Black Beast and from the first chapter I couldn’t wait to find out where the story would lead — a real pager-turner full of suspense and intrigue.”

  Becky Illson-Skinner, Mystery Writers Unite

  ~ ~ ~

  “R.S. Guthrie is a marvelous storyteller…The development of his characters is awesome. You feel you’ve known ‘Bobby Mac’ all your life.”

  Kathleen Hagburg, co-author of Getting Into the Zone,

  a Course and Workbook For The Mental Game.

  ~ ~ ~

  “[Black Beast] establishes Guthrie as a bona fide talent.”

  Beth Elisa Harris, author of the literary blockbuster Vision.

  ~ ~ ~

  “[LOST:] The Best Book That I Read This Entire Year!

  Carrie Green, author of Violets Are Blue.

  ~ ~ ~

  [LOST:] Be ready to sit for a while because you won’t want to put the book down to do anything else… I will read anything R. S. Guthrie puts out. His writing lures you in and makes you a prisoner of his prose.

  Gail Trish Gentry, ChickletsLit.com.

  Also by R.S. Guthrie:

  James Pruett Mystery Series

  Blood Land

  Money Land

  Honor Land (Coming Soon)

  Detective Bobby Mac Thrillers:

  Black Beast

  L O S T

  Reckoning

  Nonfiction:

  INK: Eight Rules To A Better Book

  For Garret.

  Preface

  I don’t normally write a preface to my books, but I recently had a reader pick up the second book in a series and read it first. She loved the story but felt she would have enjoyed it more had she known the history of the returning characters better. I thought that was fair—once a writer has eight or nine books in a series, perhaps the need to inform the reader they are picking up book number four or five becomes less important, but when there are only two or three in the series, I decided it would be the proper thing to do to let you, the reader (or potential reader) know that this is the third in the Detective Bobby Mac Thriller series, so if you haven’t read the first two (Black Beast & LOST), you might consider it. (And if you’ve read none of the series, it sells as a set now and you can save a couple of bucks.)

  I do my best to give enough background story in any “series” book that a reader should be okay if they haven’t read the prior book(s), but I wanted to respect the woman who took the time to comment enough to put this preface in book number two of this series.

  In fact, my editor, Russell Rowland, told me that Alfred Hitchcock distinguished Mystery/Thrillers by two different styles. The first was the traditional “whodunnit”. From page one the reader had no idea who the bad guy or gal was. I likened that to a boardgame of Clue. The second style he deemed “Suspense”. That would be where you pretty much knew (or thought you knew) who did what, but it was the getting there and the twists along the way that made the read a good one.

  I tend to write the latter. I love twists. I also love putting something right in the reader’s face and daring them to believe otherwise. Because of this, however, I do work hard to make each book in a series capable (hopefully) of standing on its own as best it can.

  For me, as a reader—and being a character-driven author—it is the relationships I develop with returning protagonists, ancillary characters, villains, etc. that make me want to read the books in order.

  Whatever your preference, I certainly hope you enjoy Reckoning as much as I enjoyed writing it It is, by far, my favorite of the three. Cheers.

  ~Rob (R.S.) Guthrie, 2013

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Coming Soon

  “The killer awoke before dawn,

  He put his boots on.

  He took a face

  from the ancient gallery,

  And he walked on

  down the hall.”

  The Doors, The End

  Prologue

  TERROR GRIPS every person differently. To some, who had seen the brutal truths in life, as in war, it could offer a strange comfort. But Hailey Carpenter had not seen war. She’d seen plenty: addicts, thugs, unkind guys who would pay her to do immoral things in the front or back of their leather-seated cars in a garbage-strewn alleyway.

  But not death. Hailey, as beautiful as she was, with the kind of skin models pined for and a thick mane of dark, obsidian hair, was from the neighborhood, so she rarely worried for her life. And she was of mixed heritage, light-skinned black enough to pass for white. But even white people from the hood had a look about them. It was in their eyes. Everyone else from the ‘hood gave you that nod of sad recognition.

  “Oh, you, too,” they wouldn’t say out loud. But it was in the eyes. Most of them would never get out. Most didn’t want to.

  Hailey did want to leave the shitty streets of Denver; people were always telling her she had the right look. “It.” She never took any drugs by needle and she demanded rubbers from clients (and always thought it peculiar she called them that—she was only nineteen). She had hopes and dreams.

  And this should have been like any other night coming home late from one of Kevin’s parties. Kevin threw great parties. Hailey was too busy for the party life, but when Kevin was setting up the gig, she always went: great music, nice people, never drive-bys or gun thugs. No heavy drugs, so the cops mostly left Kevin and his get-togethers alone.

  But there was something wrong. She thought she saw the shadowed figure mirroring her moves not two blocks from Kevin’s. For a while she told herself it was nerves. Bad s
moke. Some pot made you paranoid. She lived on these streets. But by now Hailey had given up on the hope it was just her imagination. She was being followed.

  After her third erratic, non-Hailey change of direction (one even back toward where she’d come, a move no one would make), it was still there. The shadow. And the horror in her gut wasn’t subsiding, it was building on itself. The kind of fear where you’re skipping along life’s timeline, for months sometimes without so much as a detour or an inconvenience, and then, suddenly, you’re in the middle of something.

  A car crash.

  A bank robbery.

  A bar fight.

  A stalker.

  And suddenly those months (or even years) of complacent solitude, they didn’t just fall away or fade—they vanished like a Republican in a blue state. Like a cartoon with a cloud of smoke.

  Gone. Your danger meter went from cobwebs, from lack of usage, from everything’s just A-okay to FUCKED. Then you tried denial:

  “This can’t be real; can’t be happening to me.”

  Then praying, even if you never believed in God a day before that, you prayed:

  “Jesus, please get me out of this—please make this go away.”

  But it didn’t go away. And your stomach felt like a balloon floating inside you; a balloon overfilled with a mixture of helium and hopelessness.

  Maybe you vomited. Maybe you just felt like vomiting.

  Hailey was now in the worst part of Denver.

  Five Points.

  Even the pimps, dealers, whores, and other street cretins disappeared by three or four A.M. around Five Points.

  Ironically, Hailey had always felt a strange sense of calm when shortcutting through the bad area—the very desertion of the streets made them feel alternatively safe. Sure, you rolled the dice—most the people in her neighborhood rolled the dice every day, even Kevin—but Hailey knew other routes that were guaranteed to take you right past all the meth-heads who would shank you for a couple of bucks. The meth-heads were the first to clear out of Five Points when the deep of night arrived. They were weak inside and out, when it came down to it, and the only motherfuckers that walked the streets of Five Points with bravado past midnight were bad dudes. And no women. But at least when walking through this area she hardly saw anyone and when she did, there was more than enough time and space to react.

  Until tonight.

  She picked up the pace. Whoever was stalking her was one block over, keeping to the alleyway between eighteenth and nineteenth streets. Maybe if she stayed in the open, walking from streetlight to streetlight, her mind still pleading with God to get her out of this, maybe then he would leave her alone.

  But she knew it was only buying time. The stomach. The balloon of fear and hopelessness and the absolute knowledge that soon she would be—

  Hailey leaned against an abandoned building and spilled her guts on the ground, orange-ish liquid.

  Screwdrivers. She’d been drinking orange juice splashed in near-full glasses of vodka.

  But what she didn’t throw up—what stayed deep inside her, eating away at all the warmth and comfort and kindness she’d ever known—was two hundred proof fear.

  Oh, yeah—she was stone sober now.

  And she knew she only had minutes.

  Maybe only seconds.

  She couldn’t get the thoughts out of her mind, no matter how hard she concentrated. The reports were all over the news every night and Hailey had watched them all, transfixed.

  The Judas Killer.

  Hailey fought the urge to run. Panic scampered up and down her spine like a platoon of angry, unruly, terrified cockroaches when all the light hit them square in the face. Her stomach twisted and moaned relentlessly inside her. The balloon swelled. She felt like she could spew bile again. She did, this time on the base of a light post.

  Could it possibly be him?

  COULD IT??

  Was she honestly to be victim number, what, seven? Eight? Things like this, they didn’t happen to her. The brain tries so hard in the face of unyielding fear to rush back to the basics. What were the chances of this happening now, here? She felt as if her number had just come up in a macabre lottery that she had no idea she’d even joined.

  She couldn’t concentrate. Images of the previous crime scenes—or what little they could show on the evening news—displayed in continuous flicker on the white screen in her mind.

  All females. All in their mid-to-late teens. All brunette.

  Hanged. He had hanged them all.

  By the neck until the futile remnants of life coughed or whispered or begged without sound from within the prison of their airless lungs and—finally—just—expired.

  Or did their necks break and it was painless?

  The news reports were sketchy on the details of the crime scenes, mostly (Hailey knew) because the cops needed to keep some details close to their chest; details only the killer might know.

  A way to root out the nut jobs.

  Hailey knew a snitch in the third district, however, who was lucky enough to work for a pair of chatty detectives who loved to gossip about the most macabre of events. Post-mortem, Judas was actually staging infamous killings with the bodies.

  The Black Dahlia, was the first body they found. Surgically sliced in half—two pieces, the dividing line at her navel—and her mouth cut at both corners, through her cheeks, and up to the ears in a hideous smile. He left her corpse in a field to be found rather easily by the waking public.

  Hailey was fascinated by it all. She’d watched all the reports. She loved the sensationalism of it all. True crime. Like a passerby squinting at a traffic fatality, subconsciously hoping to catch even a glimpse of it; straining to see the one thing most only ever got to see just one time:

  Real death. And then, only their own. Or maybe a loved one in a hospital bed.

  Seeing it happen, or witnessing the scene where it had just happened, was not like simply seeing a corpse, Hailey knew. Being there as death collected a life due and let you walk away untouched?

  Nothing made a person feel more alive than that.

  Nothing.

  Hailey shivered uncontrollably. The life to be collected now was hers. She was sweating through her undergarments even as the frigid night air threatened hypothermia; her breath popped from her lungs in short, panicky puffs. She felt like she was beginning to hyperventilate. Lightheaded. Still incredibly nauseated.

  She glanced quickly sideways, down a cross street, toward the alley.

  Nothing this time. No movement. The shadows remained just that: shadows.

  Maybe it was only a random pervert or mugger, she rationalized.

  With a serial killer slithering about the streets of Denver, the city’s residents had, over the past year or so, been reduced to the point of viewing “ordinary” crime as a strange kind of blessing.

  Oh, an assault?

  Just a robbery at gunpoint?

  Vehicular homicide?

  Whew, at least it wasn’t HIM.

  A shiver violated her again.

  She imagined movement to her right. Then her left.

  More sweat.

  The nausea worsened.

  It just couldn’t be him. Please, God, she begged silently.

  I’ll do anything. A thousand Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

  Don’t LET it be HIM.

  What were the chances? In a city of several million, what were the chances that the dark figure shadowing her every move was the worst evil the city—maybe the country—had ever known?

  Millions to one. The abduction of the victims seemed random enough.

  Suburbs. Downtown. Nice, clean neighborhoods. Some low-rent, north, south, east and west.

  Nothing concrete. Like he was moving around randomly but in the randomness showing a purpose, never leaving an M.O.

  Other than the hanging and the stagings.

  Well she had to do something.

  Hailey formulated a plan; maybe not so much a plan, really, just
a slow-arriving realization that she was running out of roadway (literally) and needed to make a decision—there was a vacant lot where all the westbound streets dead-ended a few blocks ahead. The telltale blackness of no buildings, no streetlights, no anything. Like the very end of the whole earth. And when the two of them both reached that lot—

  She knew if she broke and ran he would come after her; she knew if she deviated from her current course, he would come after her. Perspiration poured down her face and back and on the insides of her legs, soaking through her panties and shirt and jeans. She was beyond terrified, almost in shock. Her mind was fighting with itself: she knew it had to be him, yet she knew it just—couldn’t—be—him, dear God.

  She felt like sitting down in the middle of the street and bawling. Maybe then he would leave her alone. She could cry and plead and beg.

  The wave of mania subsided. The growing shock wooed her and she experienced a moment of quick euphoria; adrenaline-induced hope. She knew she had to do something before they reached—

  A huge black shape burst from the shadows to her left and before she could dodge or flail or scream, had her in its grasp. Strong, sinewy arms held her still and a gloved hand covered her mouth (though there was no one to hear her screams anyway).

  “Shhh, shhh,” the calming voice whispered in her ear. “You’re trembling. There, there—it’s all going to be over in a moment, dear one.”

  Hailey then felt a light prick in her neck, like a bee sting, and the darkness about her descended quick and mercifully.