Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) Read Online Free PDF

right, down a narrow lane.
    The boy frowned. He was about to say something when, abruptly, the paper box began to fall apart, blossoming in the dim light like a time-lapse flower. It was a hundred, all right. His first three-digit trick. He laid the bill across his thigh and tried to iron the wrinkles from Robert Borden’s face with the palm of his hand.
    The van bounced down the lane, headlights jabbing crazily through the night. Mannie shifted down into second gear. The nose dipped as they turned down a short, steeply pitched asphalt driveway and into the parking area beneath a stuccoed apartment block.
    Light rippled on the short hood and near-vertical windscreen as they passed beneath row upon row of long fluorescent tubes. Mannie braked, and eased carefully into a slot bounded on one side by a concrete wall and on the other side by a dusty camper top on blocks. He put the van in neutral and yanked on the emergency brake. Turning towards the boy he suddenly wedged his hand between the seat and white trousers, grabbed a cheek and squeezed hard. The boy gasped and arced his back, struggling to get away. He cried out, his voice shrill.
    “Hush!” warned Mannie.
    The boy wriggled. “Just…tell me what you want me to do,” he said.
    Mannie gave him an enquiring look. “What do you like to do?”
    “Whatever you want,” the boy whispered.
    Mannie had lied often enough to recognize the truth when he heard it. He realized that the Econoline had become an ersatz confessional; he a priest of the moment and the boy a penitent about to atone for a deficiency of character, flawed genes, an unfair share of bad luck. He looked at the boy, measuring the depths of his weaknesses and the vast breadths of his fears. Cigar ash spilled unnoticed down his chest, across the tie of many colours. He squeezed a little harder, kept up the pressure until there was no doubt in his mind that the boy knew who was in charge. Then he let go.
    “Get in the back, kiddo.”
    The boy nodded. He was crouched in the narrow gap between the bucket seats when Mannie stabbed him in the small of his back. The force of the blow and his own momentum sent him tumbling across the foot of the bed. He opened his mouth to scream. Mannie fell on top of him, knocked the wind out of him. Blood gushed from his side. He felt Mannie’s plump white fingers clawing at his scalp, pushing his face down into the silvery sheets. He tasted metal, his own sour bile.
    Mannie tried to pull the knife out but it was stuck. He worked the blade up and down, savagely twisted it from side to side.
    The boy wriggled and squirmed. He corkscrewed frantically across the bed. The knife came free. Blood geysered. Mannie drew back his arm so far that a seam in the bargain basement suit gave way with a strident ripping sound. He put the knife in again and hit bone, the force of impact jarring his arm all the way to the shoulder. The boy kicked out. The mirrored headboard exploded, showering them both in a storm of silvered glass.
    Mannie stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again, splattering himself with tiny cutlets of flesh, digging like a frenzied archaeologist of the human soul. The air filled with a fine red mist that turned deep purple where it was touched by the fluorescents. Mannie felt himself tiring. He didn’t let up.
    Finally the boy made a raspy clotted sound deep in his throat, and went limp.
    Exhausted, Mannie fell back against a wall of red shag. His breathing was fast and shallow and ragged. He was hyperventilating. He felt dizzy and disoriented, as if he’d just been whacked on the gyroscope. Letting go of the knife, he closed his eyes.
    When his heart had slowed to the point where he could distinguish individual beats, he wiped gore from the crystal of his watch and saw that a little over twenty minutes had passed since he’d bagged the van.
    Wearily, he made his way back to the driver’s seat. There was a full box of Kleenex on the shelf under the glove compartment. The