The Dark Ones Read Online Free PDF Page B

corners of her eyes. She blinked slowly, laboriously, unable to clear her eyes as consciousness began to ebb.
    “Shit.” Norman kicked at a rock on the ground. “Shit and double shit. You dumb little bitch.”
    Goddamn his work ethic. It was the whole reason he’d been there instead of shooting the shit with the fellas at the Jackson. Ransom Lumber & Supply had recently taken on a big new account, maybe their biggest, and he’d been waiting on a call from the new client’s head honcho, Rich Winchester, when the phone in his office rang.
    It wasn’t Rich Winchester on the other end.
    “We need to talk,” she told him.
    Her morose, almost numb tone made him instantly wary. She didn’t sound much like the vivacious young secretary he’d hired only nine months earlier. Back then she’d been bubbly, good-humored, and good-looking, just the way he liked. A good-time party girl who knew how to let her hair down and be one of the fellas when the time was right. He was poking her almost daily inside of a month. At first it’d been wonderful. She made him feel young. Made him feel like a stud, like J.R. Ewing on Dallas , a real mover and shaker, the cock of the walk.
    That all changed three months later.
    The first time she suggested he hire a hit man to kill his wife.
    Turned out she wasn’t satisfied being the boss man’s fun fling on the side. She wanted to be a big shot’s wife. It struck Norman as a little funny. A gal into that kind of cold-blooded social climbing would’ve been better off just about anywhere other than a little bump in the road like Ransom. He told her this, suggesting maybe she’d be happier in Nashville or Memphis. He could give her some references, maybe set her up in a sweet deal with some likely fellas in a big city.
    She wasn’t interested.
    “I want her dead. It’s all I can think about, Normie.”
    He’d tried to laugh it off again. “Lord, the way you think would spook a man of lesser fortitude. You want to take Audrey’s place. Fine. Dandy. There are other ways to make that happen, like divorce. Why you gotta jump straight to murder?”
    “Don’t make fun of me.”
    “I’m not.”
    “You’re calling me crazy.”
    Crazier than a shithouse rat , he thought.
    But what he actually said was, “Nonsense.”
    “Now you’re calling me stupid.”
    He sighed.
    This conversation was a long walk down a dark, dark alley, and there looked to be only one way out. It was time to be assertive.
    “Darlin’, I reckon it’s time you start looking into other career options.”
    He’d allowed himself to hope that was the end of it. He should have known better. No one willing to broach the idea of cold-blooded murder was going to go quietly.
    “Talk about what?” he’d asked her an hour ago, playing innocent.
    “You know. You and me.”
    He’d started to get angry. “There is no you and me. Thought I made that clear. Now I’m gonna hang up, and I don’t want to hear— ”
    “I have pictures. Compromising pictures.”
    His heart almost stopped. “What?”
    “I have tape recordings. Listen.”
    He heard a click from the other end, followed by his own voice. And then her voice. A goddamn recording. And there was no mistaking what was happening in the recording. Norman was shaken. His whole world was crumbling to pieces around him. Desperation engulfed him.
    “Come see me,” she told him. “We’ll talk.”
    What choice did he have?
    He followed her directions down Weakley Lane, a lonely stretch of two-lane rural road that was mostly just woods on both sides once you got past the old National Guard base. All those tall trees spooked him. He made a mental note to feel out some developers he knew, see if any of them might be interested in knocking out a few hundred acres’ worth of these damn trees to put in a subdivision or two.
    He slowed down as he neared mile marker six and kept an eye on the opposite side of the road, just like she told him. And pretty soon he saw the narrow