Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

a swift move, he raised the gun to his partner’s head
and shot him twice.
    The move caught Morrison
completely by surprise.
    He just stared with a grimace
as the dead body fell forward in the grave in a spray of blood and brain matter. Goddamn guns . He really hated them.
    The echo of the shots rang
out high above while the body landed with a muted thump at the bottom of the
dirt pit. A pool of blood quickly formed around the mangled head. Arms and legs
rested at an impossible angle that only the dead can withstand.
    “Turns out I did need that
hole,” Mike said. “That’s lesson number one. Don’t mess with me. Don’t do
anything behind my back. That guy did. Look at him now.”
    Morrison shook his head, and
then he looked away from the lifeless body.
    “That’s not how we did
business,” he said.
    “Guess what?” Mike said. “The
world has changed.”

Chapter 7
    Morrison figured that the
ace digger was the dead guy. As soon as his ex-partner’s body crashed at the
bottom of the hole, the blond guy jumped on the tractor, started the engine and
floored it for a couple of seconds to get some heat into it. Then he went to
work. Rather clumsily. He started by putting the tractor’s backhoe in its
resting position. Then he used the front loader tilted at an angle to push the
mound of earth back into the hole. This made enough sense. But he operated the
beast with half-assed moves, like he knew the theory but seriously lacked in
the practice department. The tractor kept jerking back and forth in semi-controlled
short bursts. No way could this guy have dug such a precisely sharp-lined rectangular
grave with this digger. So if it wasn’t the blond guy, then it had to be the
dead slicked-back hair guy. Morrison knew Mike could never operate a tractor if
his life depended on it.
    “Come on, we’re going back
to the house,” Mike said.
    Morrison climbed into the Jeep
after him. As Mike turned it around, Morrison gave a last stare at the grave.
It was now almost filled with earth. In a few minutes, the blond guy would finish
leveling off the surface. In a month’s time, nothing would show. The grass and
wild flowers would grow back, and you would never suspect there was a slicked-back
hair jerk rotting in the dirt underneath.
    The Jeep hummed back
toward the house on the meandering path. As he sat beside Mike, Morrison stared
into the empty space, still shaken by the execution. Goddamn violence. He hated
it. Always had, always would. He himself never used it. Well, not exactly. He
never initiated it. This would be a more appropriate way of putting it. In his
mind, violence was for idiots. For dumb, witless idiots. Like the Italians. All
those connected guys. Those mafia guys. All hollow swagger. Brainless
creatures. Violence, threat of violence, is all they had. They weren’t smart
enough to do without it.
    What he hated most about
violence was that it was a spiral. A vortex that took you deeper and deeper in,
and that you couldn’t ever escape. It was a black hole that drew your mass to
its center where you would be crushed, obliterated, vaporized. If you established
your position with violence, you’d have to defend it with violence. In the
proceeds, you lost your freedom. Nothing you could do but continue to follow
that narrow path. And it led to a dead end. Sooner or later, you’d run into
someone stronger than you. And then what would you do?
    Morrison preferred to be
smart. That way, you could preserve your freedom. You devised smart operations,
carried them out, then went back to the shade. Laid low. In and out. OK, on the
freedom front, his stock had taken a serious beating these last three years. No
question there. But he had enjoyed a long stretch of success before. And
besides, he was in it for the long term. He knew the odds. He played the long
game.
    The Jeep threaded its way
back to the house on the long, meandering dirt track, raising a cloud of
reddish dust as it bounced from deep ruts to crested