Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 Read Online Free PDF Page A

with him. Kenny didn’t even have the energy to tell her off.
    With a shake of his head, he turned to leave. “Thanks for nothing, you bitch,” he muttered.
    Kenny bumped full on into a lanky guy who stared at him with eyes the color of polished brass. Contacts again. Had to be. The guy had blond hair, too long but it hung on him well, and a two-day stubble on his chin. There was something about him, not just his look but the way he carried himself, that reminded Kenny of a gunfighter.
    A smile flickered across the guy’s face for just a second, and then he was all business. “You probably shouldn’t have said that,” the gunfighter said.
    “Yeah?” Kenny replied, angry now, letting the beer do the work his brain ought to have been doing. Instinct told him to walk away but alcohol and pride wouldn’t let him.
    “Yeah,” the guy said sadly. Then he glanced over Kenny’s shoulder at Jasmine. “We’re gonna have to go somewhere else to talk, aren’t we?”
    “Hello, Dallas,” Jasmine said, greeting the man warmly. “It does look like we’ll have to relocate. You know how the cattle can be. Don’t want a stampede.”
    Kenny was slow catching on, but now he got it. This was the guy she was waiting for. And now they were having this conversation around him, like he wasn’t even there. He thought again about fish and sharks, and for just a second he felt good about himself. As down and dirty as he had gotten to play the game of software sales over the years, he had never been as casually cruel as these two.
    “Excuse me,” he said dismissively, trying to push past the guy she’d called Dallas.
    “Too late for that, partner,” Dallas replied.

    He grabbed Kenny by the arm, spun him around to face Jasmine and led him into the shadows. Kenny tried to pull away, but he could not. They were strong, these two. Jasmine slid up to him, taller than he was. Her arms went around him, and then her hands were on his throat.
    She smiled as she broke his neck. Her orange eyes and her impossibly sharp teeth were the last things he saw as they let him slip slowly to the pavement to die.
    Kenny’s eyes were open.
    He stared up at the night sky; stars washed out by the lights of the Seaport and of Manhattan itself. Voices drifted to him. Someone called out in alarm. With a roll of his eyes he could see Jasmine and Dallas walking away from him, calmly speaking to each other as though nothing had happened, as though he had been forgotten.
    Forgotten.
    But not forgotten, because now there came more shouts of alarm. Someone nearly stumbled over him, a teenage girl. She glanced down at him and winced, then looked around for someone else to join her in her staring. Then there were others . . . so many others . . . voices shouting . . . staring eyes . . . heads bent over to study him . . . who did it? . . . how’d it happen . . . he was talking with some girl, where’d she go?
    Sirens. He heard sirens. The rumble of gathered voices like thunder, a storm not far off. Ominous. Threatening. More faces above him, police officers pushing people back, EMTs. But all of them look strange, now, like shadows of people, like two dimensional gray things he had to blink to see.
    He didn’t feel drunk anymore.
    Words echoed. Dead. He’s dead. You’re dead. I’m dead.
    I’m dead.
    Another face above him, suddenly, but this one isn’t a shadow. A young guy, Latino maybe, with a goatee and a cigarette burning. He’s real, this one. Full color, 3-D, like Kenny could reach out and touch him. So he tried. At first it was like his hand was underwater. But then his fingers broke the surface and he stretched an arm out, up . . . and the goateed guy grabbed his hand and hauled him up onto his feet.
    Kenny’s stomach convulsed and he felt like he was going to puke. But not from the beer. He wasn’t drunk anymore. Not at all.
    He leaned on the guy for balance and the smoke got in his eyes, but the weirdest thing was he couldn’t smell it.