Fear the Night Read Online Free PDF

soul must live there.
    Betty Ern seemed a nice enough lady. Every twenty seconds or so she’d become embarrassed by his quick, appraising glances, and a smile would sneak onto her face. Her husband or boyfriend, a large man in a gray suit, stood off to the side and watched, trying not to seem too impatient to be going.
    Jim Lu ignored the man, ignored the traffic teeming noisily behind him on Broadway, ignored the mass of humanity flowing along the sidewalk before him. Gray Suit edged toward the curb so he could see what Jim Lu was doing, then grinned at Betty.
    “Not much there yet,” he said, “but what there is sure looks like you.”
    Jim Lu smiled and nodded at the compliment he’d barely heard in his deep concentration.
    Yet a part of his mind thought of Michelle, as it had more and more often lately. Michelle who so liked to give and receive oral sex. When he was finished here—
    A pain erupted in his back, then in his chest and arms. His head must have jerked backward because he was staring up through the haze of light at faint stars that became fainter ...
    Betty Ern heard the loud, echoing crack! and thought at first something had fallen from a building. But the artist, the little man with the neat dark beard and mustache, had slumped from his chair and crashed to the sidewalk with his easel. Betty stared numbly down at him, at the sketch paper on the pavement, at her single left eye staring back at her. Only her eye, but she knew it was her own.
    She noticed specks of blood on it, around it.
    Someone or something slapped her hard, high in the chest, just beneath her throat. She heard another of the loud, reverberating cracks and was aware that she’d fallen backward, aware of people surrounding her, arms supporting her upper body, screams off in the distance. Where am I? What happened? She tried to inhale but couldn’t, and the pain and panic carried her to cold dark spaces. Her last coherent thought was of the loud, reverberating noise she’d heard, like the screen door slamming on the farm where she grew up. It was a sound she’d loved. As a girl she always slammed the door going out ... coming home.
     
     
    The next morning he read the front page of the New York Post and smiled. It hadn’t taken the media long to decide what to call him: “The Night Sniper.” That was fine. Nights were most convenient for him. And since the media were giving him the night, he accepted.
    The Night Sniper. Crisp and descriptive.
    It would make wonderful headlines.

    Repetto sat staring at the Times in the Bonaire Diner when Carrie placed his eggs, toast, and coffee before him.
    “Hell of a thing last night in Times Square,” she said. “Must be a nut, this Night Sniper. World’s full of nuts, don’t you think?”
    “Except for thee and me,” Repetto said, moving the folded newspaper aside to make room for his plate.
    “Two people shot to death, and three injured in a traffic accident when all the cars tried to get outta there, bunch of people damn near trampled to death when they realized they were being shot at.” She topped off his coffee. “Musta been bedlam.”
    “New York,” Repetto said sadly.
    “Whatza difference?”
    “People in Bedlam are certified insane.”
    As he began to eat, he stole glances at the paper. A sketch artist and a tourist from Iowa, both dead. A teenage girl in a limo killed when a cab collided with it near the shooting. More injuries from traffic accidents. A child almost trampled to death on the sidewalk.
    Repetto felt an anger growing in him that supplanted his appetite.
    It didn’t help when his cell phone chirped.
    He dug the phone from the pocket of his jacket folded on the seat beside him. “Repetto,” he said, swallowing a bite of egg.
    “It’s Lou Melbourne here.”
    “It’s breakfast here.”
    “I figured that’s where you’d be. Don’t you usually read the paper while you’re abusing your arteries?”
    “I was doing just that. Front page. Times Square