Scare Tactics Read Online Free PDF Page A

anywhere?”
    “No.”
    “I wonder why I don’t believe you.”
    She turned her face toward the sea, livelier than this boneyard, but invisible. “I’m going away tonight. I won’t be back. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe me. What matters is that you make restitution, in David’s memory.”
    “I’m afraid that would mean the end of my career.”
    “You might try writing something of your own,” she said sharply.
    The night breathed mistily on my brow, its chill sinking to the roots of my heart. I suffered a momentary pang of self-loathing, and I hated her for judging me. She was very young; how could she know what it felt like, to be out of the running all of your life?
    I took a step toward her. Our eyes met in a dead heat. I was shaking from anger, and desire. Goaded by her essence, repelled by the setting of death in which my lust was manifest.
    “If I had the right muse—” I said, now throwing her own joke back in her face. “Why don’t you consider taking the job? I’ll treat you better than David Hallowell ever could.”
    She shook her head slightly. “I’m not the muse you deserve. But one will be provided—once you’ve admitted that you stole David’s novel, then done everything in your power to ensure him full credit. That is the will of the Association.”
    “Goddamn you! What difference does it make to David now?”
    “It’s the right thing to do.”
    I knew then that she would never let me touch her. That she meant what she had said. She was going away. But I couldn’t bear the thought that Dierdre would be forever beyond my reach—the one who knew, unforgiving.
    I took the pistol from my pocket and shone the beam of the flashlight full in her face. She looked steadily at me, not blinking, bold eyes with no appreciation of danger in them, no fear.
    “That doesn’t mean a thing,” Dierdre said. “You can’t hurt me. I’m immortal.”
    “You’re crazy,” I said. “Or we both are.” I raised the pistol a little higher and shot her between the eyes.
    Something seemed to uncurl from the fog like the lash of a whip and snatch the flashlight from my hand. Dierdre disappeared without a sound; I was blind in the fog. Moments after I fired the shot I was seized by a clonus—a series of violent muscular spasms. Involuntarily I dropped the gun, then went to my knees beside David Hallowell’s grave crying incoherently, anticipating some lethal, otherworldly blow that would end my own life.
    But nothing happened. No one was there. I had no company but the disinterested dead, who now included Dierdre among their number. The flashlight, still in working order, lay a few feet from where I was kneeling. Perhaps, unable to bear the sight of murder, I had flung it there myself just after pulling the trigger.
    I picked up the gun again and crawled to the flashlight. I looked through the fog for Dierdre’s body. The purse she had brought to the cemetery lay near the low brick wall at the edge of the cliff. Gasping for air, I went to the wall and looked over it. The beam of light, diffused by fog, afforded me a glimpse of her tumbled body fifty feet below.
    I wanted to search her purse, find out who she really was; but I couldn’t chance leaving a fingerprint behind. I gathered up all of the loose yellow sheets of the draft manuscript, frantic that I might miss one, thus leaving behind a clue that eventually would point the bird dogs of the law in my direction. When I was sure I had them all I returned in a deathly cold sweat to the Mercedes and climbed inside. The pistol was in my pocket. I planned to pull off the highway on my return to the City of Angels and fling it well out to sea.
    Before starting the car I looked through the legal pad pages I had carefully gathered up. David had written nothing on them; they were blank. Dierdre had been bluffing. She had no evidence of theft on my part. A pathetic attempt at blackmail had cost her her life.
    But was it blackmail that she had in