The Shadowkiller Read Online Free PDF

instinctively slammed the brakes as hard as he could and the old Benz, without benefit of antilock technology, tried to bite the mist-wetted asphalt. Despite his desire for self-destruction, Ty did not want his last earthly act to be mowing down a hapless doe and her fawns, so he rapidly pumped the brakes to maintain control. The deer family stood fast, as they are wont to do in the wash of headlights, and Ty pulled back on the wheel as if it would stop the car faster. Squealing rubber spooked the deer, but they didn’t bolt.
    As fast as the crisis was upon them it was over. The car stopped so close to the deer, Ty could see their black, shiny noses—even their long eyelashes. As they casually strutted from his path on stick-thin legs, he honked the horn to speed their departure.
    Now they move. “Shit! Stupid goddamn deer!”
    The car sat in the middle of the road, wrapped in the dark woods, running lights glowing, exhaust steam quickly dissipating in the frigid early morning air. Ty’s heart raced. His hands shook as he grabbed the Glenmorangie and took a slug off it. Glug, glug, glug. He was supposed to be on his way to his final destiny and a near-death experience had him rattled. Great. What did that tell him?
    Easing away at a greatly reduced pace gave him more control over his mental resources, more time to figure out just what it was he was doing. If anything, he wanted some control over when it would happen. If it happens, he now thought.
    A few minutes later he saw a familiar landmark and slowed. He couldn’t believe it but he’d driven the wrong way, and instead of heading away from Snohomish, he’d driven into it. At almost four in the morning there wasn’t much going on except some men drinking beer in front of a bar that had closed a few hours before.
    A half block away, for some reason he wasn’t quite sure of, he pulled into the town’s only 7-Eleven, sliding in front of the windows filled with racks of magazines. The kid behind the counter made eye contact, probably because he’d never seen a car like that. Ty shut off the engine, took another swig off the Scotch, and slouched as best he could in the low-backed seat.
    His eyes went from the storefront to the instrument panel to his hands on the wheel. In the fluorescent glow of the store he examined the lines and veins in them. Good hands, they still looked youthful despite his being technically defined as “middle-aged.” They were the same hands that had held his wife when they made love, when he slipped the ring on her finger, when he cut the cord when his children were born…
    Don’t do it. Think of your family…
    Oh, that’s not fair.
    Then the trump card. His left brain, in desperate overdrive to make its case for survival, ran footage of the faces of Ronnie, Meredith, and Christopher, shrunken into hideous masks of anguish as they learned of his violent suicide.
    Ty lost the battle to die right then and there, and tears began streaming down his cheeks.
    No, no, no, I’ve been over this, I can’t live!
    But I can’t die…because of them.
    Oh shit. No, no, no…
    Reason, and all the whys and why nots dissolved into a sea of tears as Ty crumpled behind the wheel of his old German car, sobbing like a man without hope or answers, save for one: he would continue living, yet he didn’t have the faintest idea how.

    Todd Shelton had been plagued by wicked acne from the time he was eleven. Now nineteen, he liked working graveyard because his acne scars and rampant zits made interaction with other people painful, and at this time of night in Snohomish, Washington, you interacted with very few people. And while Todd had seen some strange stuff working the counter for a year and a half at 7-Eleven, this was really weird. This older dude, like thirty or so, pulls up in a really cool old car, drinkin’ right outta the bottle, then bawls like a baby. Weird, man,