Beg Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

arm. He knew by now that I wasn’t going to shoot him, so he went about his business, quickly and efficiently, and Lee and I were both mesmerized. We didn’t understand at all what he was trying to do, but I think we both suspected it was suicidal. He looped these cords around his ankles, and a long rope led to a collar that he snapped on around his neck—
    “Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”
    Lee moved first. His hand gripped the cord, trying to keep the tension out of it, because we couldn’t understand the mechanism but it looked like he was going to choke himself. It was utterly surreal. Didn’t he know we wouldn’t give him that kind of time?
    The collar was tightening around his neck.
    Lee and the guy were wrestling now, the assailant no longer interested in killing Lee, only himself.
    He clumsily shoved Lee away and then fell on the sidewalk, and I watched his legs straighten. We heard this hideous
snap
—the most horrible, haunting sound. The guy’s eyes popped, his mouth went slack, and blood cascaded over his collar, leaked under it—
    “Oh, my God,” I whispered.
    There were some kind of grotesque studs, barbs, on the
inside
of the collar. When he pulled the cord taut with his legs, he had sent them shooting out, and they had cut his carotid artery. He was dead within seconds.
    He had killed his partner to prevent him from being defeated and captured. He had killed himself when he was beaten.
    Fanatics.
    Lee insisted we get out of there as fast as possible, and we trudged back to our vehicle. He drove. As the little engine whined along, I thought of the killer fetishist who made his collar into a bear trap.

    Lee was convinced that his attackers had nothing to do with any of his enterprises.
    They must have been sent, he argued, after he had dispatched his own men to interview Anna’s boyfriend, Craig, in London. Someone must have been keeping an eye on Craig Padmore to make sure he didn’t raise a stink over Anna’s death, and when Lee’s henchmen showed up, they had traced them back to Bangkok. “Whoever killed Anna doesn’t want me solving her murder,” he insisted.
    “Then why send the photos to taunt you?” I asked. “They didn’t have to tip you off that someone else was involved. They could have kept their mouths shut and let you think the worst about her—that she was a drug addict. Why send the photos at all? It’s almost like the killer changed his mind.”
    He wasn’t interested. To him, it made sense:
Look, we got away with it, but don’t try coming after us.
I wasn’t so sure.
    This was his city, and he had contacts within the Bangkok police, who confirmed that the Thai killer had been a rent-a-thug, strictly freelance. The white guy, Mr. Bad Suit, was an unknown. Interpol didn’t have his prints and neither, it seemed, did any American or British database. Unless you were in the system, you didn’t track. It could take months or years before somebody identified him.
    I suggested I hang around a few more days, but Lee said no. “I can get bodyguards, Teresa. Please! Do the job I’m paying you for!” Then he apologized for being so abrupt. “Anna…She never did anything to anybody.”
    “I know.”
    “Hurt them for me.”

1
    H ome again. One day someone will tell me why Heathrow can simultaneously stay modern and yet keep this drab, dingy feel to the area around the luggage carousels. The atmosphere of oppressive gloom begins the minute you hit customs, continues through luggage collection, and past the newsstands selling all the tabloid irrelevancies. Good thing was that Helena was on time to pick me up and drive me back into town. In style. A kiss on both cheeks, and then it was the back of the limo.
    “How was the flight?” she asked politely.
    “Pleasant enough. Thai Airways presents you with a wet flower when you get onboard that you don’t really know what to do with. Then they punish you with an American teen comedy that you wouldn’t waste even a minute on