Perfect Victim Read Online Free PDF

It was almost time.
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    Ulysses Grove was leaning over the upstairs bathtub, reciting to his boy with great melodrama. His voice echoed off the bathroom tile as he traced the washrag around the tiny convolutions of the child’s ear. “‘The brave knight heard a voice then. He looked around the dark and saw no one present other than the tall dark trees.’”
    â€œLooks like talking tweez!” Aaron exclaimed, pointing a chubby little finger at the illustrations of the Golden Classic book his daddy was holding over the bathwater.
    â€œThat’s right,” Grove said with a nod. “It’s the tree that’s talking to him.”
    The boy was on a roll. “Like in The Wizard of Oz. ”
    â€œExactly…the ones that threw their apples at Dorothy.”
    Aaron looked at his dad excitedly. “Do these tweez throw apples?”
    Grove shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”
    The boy looked back at the book.
    â€œKeep weading, Daddy, keep weading,” he insisted.
    Grove grinned. “‘Beware,’ said the great old oak. ‘Beware the troll that lives under the bridge!’”
    The little boy’s eyes widened with awe.
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    The dark man paused, the tide licking across the deserted beach brushing the edge of his black wingtips. His face cloaked in shadows, his muscles flexing under the coat, he felt something moving inside his giant duffel bag. He tightened his grip on the strap, then started toward the pilings.
    A woman’s leg burst suddenly through the end of the duffel bag.
    The tall man dropped his human cargo in the sand. In the moonlight, the leg appeared sunburned, peeling here and there. On closer inspection, the wounds revealed themselves as horrible bloody divots, still oozing.
    The stranger stood over the wiggling mass and watched with a blank, poker-faced stare. The bag teetered in the sand, once, twice—accompanied by a strangled cry—and then began to roll. It rolled over and over again, toward the water.
    The figure watched impassively. It was nearly time. The duffel bag landed in the water just as the flailing woman inside it tore through the broken seam.
    â€œHHHEEEHHHHHHH—HHHHEEEHHHHP—!!”
    Karen Finnerty—voice strained to the breaking point—attempted the word help but was impeded by a birth defect or injury of the soft palate. Somehow she had gotten her bloody hands free and had torn the duct tape from her mouth, and now she crawled madly out of the bag, trailing the canvas behind her like a giant slimy pupae in the dark breakers foaming across the beach.
    The truck driver’s garbled shrieks were drowned by the crash of waves against the breakwater. Her bottle-blond hair sticking to her horrified face, her sinewy muscles defaced by all the superficial wounds across her sacrum, she kept crawling and crawling, and she got nowhere.
    The shadowy figure behind her watched with the implacable calm of a nineteenth-century gentleman judging a croquet match. He looked at the moon, then glanced across at the cones of vapor light shining down on the parking lot.
    A nearby rust-pocked sign demarcated the distance to the next town on the island, which the figure had calibrated carefully.
    It was 9:48. The peroxide-blonde woman had two minutes to live.
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    â€œâ€˜You must answer a simple question in order to pass over the bridge,’ said the Troll.”
    In the bright, gleaming, soapy atmosphere of the bathroom, Ulysses Grove lowered his voice to nearly a whisper. The boy sat upright in the tepid water, rapt, his little mouth slack, his eyes huge.
    Grove continued reading: “The Brave Knight nodded and said, “‘Very well. I am ready.’” And that’s when the troll smiled a crooked smile and said, ‘The question that I’m about to ask is the only question that matters. The only question there is.’”
    Aaron gawked. Grove paused for dramatic effect, as he