Pulse Read Online Free PDF Page B

anyway.
    She couldn’t hear him over the wind, but could see that he was laughing. He twisted her around so she was on her stomach and skillfully sliced the tendons behind her knees. She wasn’t going anywhere.
    Then he began having fun.
     
     
    An hour later, the wind had died down. At least it was no longer yowling. It was still coming out of the east, and was hard enough to drive curtains of rain when it gusted.
    Daniel left the woman and found in the house’s wreckage what used to be a bedroom. It was easy to locate some of the husband’s clothes.
    He stood naked in the searing rain for a while and let it wash most of the woman’s blood from him. Then he put on the farmer’s clothes. The guy had been well over six feet, so Daniel had to roll up the pants cuffs. The short-sleeved shirts were a little baggy but fit okay. The orange jumpsuit he wadded and shoved into what was left of a dresser drawer.
    These people couldn’t have lived in this isolated ranch house or farmhouse or whatever it was without some kind of transportation. He walked the perimeter of the house and saw what might have once been a garage. There was a vehicle near it, lying on its side.
    Daniel walked over and saw that the wind-tossed vehicle was an old Dodge pickup truck. He considered trying to shove it upright, but he found that he couldn’t budge it.
    That was when he noticed chrome grillwork peeking out from under the wreckage of the garage. He walked over and saw that it was the front end of a late-model Ford SUV. Suffused with a new strength, he began throwing wreckage this way and that, digging the vehicle out.
    When he was finished, and the SUV had a path out to where the gravel driveway was clear, he went to the dead man and found keys in his pocket. One of them was a car key. Good. That meant there’d be no need to hot-wire the ignition.
    He then pulled a wallet from the corpse’s pants pocket. Eighty-seven dollars.
    Daniel smiled. He rummaged through the wallet for more, but there was none. He did discover that he’d killed Flora and Nathan Amberson. Nice to have met you folks.
    He returned to the SUV, climbed in, and inserted the key in the ignition switch.
    The vehicle started on the first try. Daniel studied the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. Good enough .
    He returned to the woman and dragged her out so she lay on a flattened and shattered window. Then he set to work beating her body with a length of two-by-four from the house’s studwork. When he was finished, he threw some of the house’s wreckage over her.
    Daniel didn’t like it, but he left her with her breasts still attached.
    He carried his two-by-four to the husband and beat him in similar fashion. It would take at least a while for the bodies to be found, and longer before they’d be identified as murder victims rather than victims of the hurricane or one of its tornados that had destroyed their home.
    Meanwhile, Daniel Danielle would be driving.
    He poked around the wreckage for a few more minutes, looking for anything useful. There was an old shotgun, but it wasn’t loaded, and Daniel didn’t have time to search for ammunition, so he left it.
    He considered siphoning gas from the overturned pickup truck’s tank, but found that almost all of it had run out.
    Regretting again that he had to leave the woman with her breasts, he got in the four-wheel-drive SUV and maneuvered it onto the long driveway, then to the road that was cluttered with debris. He headed west. He liked trailing the worst of the weather. Its violence helped to divert attention from his violence.
     
     
    As he drove, his clothes dried and his heartbeat slowed. If he could make it to Interstate 75 and get south to the heavy population around Fort Myers, he could lie low someplace while time passed. Daniel was resourceful; he’d think of something. Right now, everyone was concerned with what the hurricane was leaving in its wake. If he was a greater danger, the hurricane was a wider one. He