Werewolf Cop Read Online Free PDF Page B

henchmen?”
    His henchmen. God, he loved her. As if Abend were a villain in one of the old black-and-white movies she watched on TV. These, along with religious and homemaking websites, were almost the only media she looked at.
    â€œIt does seem kinda unlikely,” Zach murmured into his beer bottle—which was pretty much what he’d said to Goulart too. Only now that he’d had the time and quiet to think it over, Grace’s question struck him as a good one. If Dominic Abend was personally on hand while Marco Paz and his family and his crew were being hacked to pieces— why was he? Why would he expose himself like that after living out of sight for so long?
    â€œThe little boy said the killers were looking for something,” he told her. “They kept asking ‘Where is it?’ That’s what he told April.”
    â€œDid he say what it was?”
    â€œHe did not. But it wasn’t money. There was plenty of cash lying around, and Paz would have given it up if they’d asked.”
    â€œThen what?”
    â€œWell—it could make sense, you know, if you think about it. If these killings had just been about money or revenge or punishment or some kind of territory or power play, Abend could’ve sent his crew to do the job. But if he was looking for something else, something important . . .”
    â€œ. . . maybe it was important enough, he wanted to make sure he found it himself,” said Grace.
    â€œThat’s right. Maybe he wanted to make sure none of his crew got there ahead of him.”
    â€œThere you go, then,” she said. “This could be your big break.”
    Big break. Like in one of her old movies.
    â€œ You’re my big break,” he told her.
    â€œOh, yeah?”
    She gave him that look she gave him, and he was achingly aware just then that she had never given it to any other man, that it had not even been in her look repertoire until after their wedding night.
    Upstairs, in bed with her, he was able to forget for minutes at a time about the threat hanging over him. And afterward, with her head on his chest and that scent or atmosphere or whatever it was coming off her and into him with every yearning breath he drew, he was even able to doze off for a while. But an hour later, he was awake again, wide awake and in a cold sweat of anxiety and remorse.
    We need to talk.
    The remorse had begun at once, the very instant he was finished with Margo. It was terrible, way beyond any sorrow he had ever felt before, even his grief at his mama dying. Margo’s hips were still hoisted in his hands, her arms around his neck, her back against her living-room wall. Her blouse was dangling down from the waistband of her hiked skirt, her bra gone, her body still desirable even as the desire drained out of him—and all Zach wanted to do was detach from his solid self and reel back from his own flesh in revulsion. How many times in how many places had this idiot scene played out in the history of men and women through the ages? How small and stupid a little incident it was, when you considered it that way. Yet, now that it had happened to him—to him who had never so much as broken his word before this, not even the word he’d given to some murderous bad man who had fallen into the clutches of his justice—now that it had happened to him against all his principles and expectations, it seemed to undermine the very foundations of his self-image and self-respect. Adultery! What had he been thinking of, for Christ’s sake? What had he not been thinking of? Grace. Tom. Little Ann. An unwanted pregnancy. Disease. Divorce. The children’s faces when he told them he was moving out. . . . Ten seconds after the climax of what had seemed his need for Margo, he couldn’t even remember what it felt like to want her, what it felt like not to be repelled by the very sight of her.
    He let her slide slowly, slowly down until both of her