What Comes Around: An Alex Hawke Novella (Alex Hawke Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page B

behind his breastbone into and out along his left arm. Fucking hell. His wrists were still tied to the bedposts? Was she insane?
    He heard a sob escape his own lips, and then a cry of pain caused by the elephant sitting atop his chest.
    “Sshh,” the doctor said, getting to his feet and coming to the head of the bed to stand beside him. He was naked, too. He put his finger to his lips and said “Sshh” again.
    “You’ve gotta do CPR or something, Doc,” Harding croaked. “My pills! They’re in the right pocket of my trousers. Please. I feel like I’m going to die . . .”
    “That’s because you are going to die, Harding,” the man said.
    “What?”
    “You heard me.”
    “Wait. Who are you?” He squinted his eyes but couldn’t make out the physician’s features.
    “Vengeance, sayeth the Lord, Harding. That’s who I am. Vengeance.”
    “You’re not a doctor . . . you’re . . .”
    “Dr. Death will do for now.”
    “Who . . . no, you’re not . . . you’re somebody else. You’re . . .”
    “Don’t you recognize me anymore, Harding? I’ve had a little surgery recently. A bit of Botox. But, still, the eyes are always a dead giveaway. Look close.”
    “Spider?”
    “Bingo.”
    “No, can’t be . . . You’re fucking Spider, f’crissakes,” the dying man croaked.
    “Right. Spider Payne. Your old buddy. Come rain or come shine. Tonight, it’s rain. Look out the window, Harding. It’s goddamn pouring out there. Ever see it rain so hard?”
    “Gimme a break here, Spider. What are you doing . . .”
    “It’s called poetic justice. A little twist of fate shall we say?”
    Pain scorched Torrance’s body and he arched upward, straining against his bonds, coming almost completely off the bed. He didn’t think anything could hurt this much.
    His old nemesis knelt on the floor by the bed and started gently stroking his hair. When he spoke, it was barely above a whisper.
    “You fucked me royally, Harding. Remember that? When I needed you most? When the French government, whom you always claimed to have in your pocket, nailed my balls to the wall? Kidnapping and suspicion of murder. Thirty years to life? Ring a bell?”
    “That wasn’t my fault, f’crissakes! Please! You gotta help me!”
    “That’s my line. Help me. You don’t get to use it. Way too late for that, I’m afraid, old soldier. You’re catching the next train, partner.”
    “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe . . . I can’t catch my  . . .”
    “This is how it works, Harding.”
    “What—”
    “It’s so simple, isn’t it? Judgment Day. How it all works out in the end? In that dark hour when no bad deed goes unpunished.”
    “I can’t . . . can’t . . .”
    Harding Torrance opened his eyes wide in fear and pain. And as the blackness closed in around him he heard Spider Payne utter the last words his addled brain would ever register:
    “You fuck me, right? But, in the end, Crystal and the Spider, they fuck you.”

 
    C HAPTER 9
    A P ERFECT DAY for a funeral.
    It was raining steadily, but softly. Dripping from the leaves, dripping from the eaves of the old Maine cottage on the hill. Tendrils of misty gray fog curled up from the sea, only to disappear into the steaming pine forests. Thin, ragged clouds scudded by low overhead.
    Hook’s burial service was in the overgrown family plot. A hallowed patch of small worn gravestones dotting a hilltop clearing overlooking the misty harbor. There were rows and rows of folding white chairs arranged on the grass surrounding the gravesite, filled with mourners hidden beneath rows and rows of gleaming black umbrellas.
    There was even a piper in full regalia standing by the freshly opened wound in the rich earth. A white-bearded fellow wearing tartans, an old friend of Hook’s who’d rowed over from Vinalhaven for the three o’clock service.
    At the center of it all, a yawning grave.
    Alex Hawke was seated in the very last row beside his old American