Very Bad Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

his gaze wander over the lines of headstones. Only a few looked as if they had been tended. A plastic vase stood before one of them, filled with roses and fern.
    Lark’s eyes trailed along the lines of stones and then jumped to the cemetery fence: pillars of cast concrete set at intervals with black iron bars running between them.
    Part of the fence cut across the slope of the hill beneath him, and someone had tied a strip of yellow cloth to one of the bars. The ends fluttered in a mild wind.
    The priest kept things brief, and when Lark focused again on the ceremony the funeral director was working his discreet magic, pressing a button to lower the casket into the grave.
    Some of the mourners went forward to reach into a mound of earth and cast handfuls of it onto the casket. Madelyn and the boy were among them. When the crowd began to disperse, the deputies led Terry Dawtrey to the mound so he could repeat the ritual, digging into the earth with his two cuffed hands, letting it drift through his fingers like dark rain.
    Afterward, Terry Dawtrey huddled together with the two deputies. A moment later they separated. Lark brought the rifle to his shoulder and watched Dawtrey begin to walk along a path leading away from the remnants of the crowd, with the slim deputy following at a respectful distance. The stocky deputy went to have a word with the priest.
    Lark peered through the scope and saw Dawtrey’s scuffed black shoes and the chains of the shackles skittering along the path. The scope trailed up and the crosshairs passed over Dawtrey’s laced fingers and the silver rings of the handcuffs. It trailed farther until the circle framed his face. Eyes intense, searching.
    Lark pulled back from the scope and took in the larger scene: Dawtrey hobbling toward the grave with the vase of roses in front of it, each step bringing him closer to Lark’s position. The slim deputy now several yards behind.
    He looked again through the scope, at Dawtrey’s bowed head, at the weary set of his shoulders. He put the crosshairs on Dawtrey’s chest, a patch of white shirt between the lapels of the jacket. His finger tensed on the trigger.
    A sharp series of pops broke the quiet—rapid like machine-gun fire. Lark jerked back from the scope and looked to his left to find the source of the sound. Sparks flashed in the distance, shooting up from the gravel of the cemetery parking lot. A pair of boys, laughing, danced back from the sparks. Cutoff jeans and tennis shoes. Open shirts revealing skinny, tanned torsos. Sixteen years old, seventeen at the outside. One of them set the flame of a lighter to a fuse and tossed something onto the gravel, and another series of pops lit up the air.
    Lark turned back to the scene on the cemetery lawn in time to see Terry Dawtrey squatting by the vase of roses, plucking something from the grass. Then the fingers of Dawtrey’s right hand touched each of his ankles in turn, and the shackles fell away onto the path. He shot up like a sprinter out of the block—no sign of hunched shoulders or weariness now. He touched right hand to left wrist, left hand to right wrist, and the circles of the handcuffs dropped into the grass. His arms pumped and he made straight for the strip of yellow cloth tied to the fence.
    Lark put his eye to the scope of the rifle, wobbled the crosshairs to Dawtrey’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He drew back from the scope and shook the rifle as if that might solve the problem. Divided his attention now between the rifle and the scene below. Dawtrey closing on the fence. The two boys in cutoffs climbing onto bicycles and making their escape. Scattered mourners looking from Dawtrey to the parking lot and back. The stocky deputy pushing the priest aside, jogging past the mourners.
    The thin deputy tearing along the path after Dawtrey, drawing his pistol from the holster on his belt.
    Lark worked the bolt of the rifle and the useless