You Can’t Stop Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

across.
    He gazed down at the woman. Pretty, and the spitting image of her two kids. His eyes fell to her left hand. To the wedding ring on the fourth finger.
    This wouldn’t be the first ring he had taken. In the beginning he hadn’t taken any, but he’d thought he could get his point across better if he began taking them, and something in him liked having souvenirs of his efforts.
    Still, for all its obviousness, no one seemed to be deciphering his message.
    Maybe it was time to start making the message more clear. More emphatic. Without really thinking about it, he withdrew from his pocket the garden shears the boy had tried to use on him.
    Maybe this brave boy had been sent to deliver a message to the Messenger.
    Perhaps it was time for him to spell the message out. Hadn’t his own marriage been severed?
    Just taking the ring was not a strong enough sign. He understood that now. He bent down, as if proposing, and took the woman’s hand in his. It was still warm. Placing the fourth finger between the blades of the shears, he squeezed.
    It took more effort than he had expected, but in the end, the finger crunched and snapped like a thick twig, the ring and finger coming off as one, the blood spill minimal since the heart no longer pumped.
    He found a plastic sandwich bag in the kitchen, slipped his prize inside and put the shears back in his pants pocket. He had a new trophy, in the ring finger…and a new tool. Despite the trouble he’d gone through, and the sacrifice of a brave child, this message had been successfully delivered.
    If only someone out there could understand. Only then could he stop.

Chapter Five
    The day began as uneventfully as any of Carmen’s, or yours, for that matter. But this seemingly routine day at the office would mark the real start of Carmen Garcia’s life, which, coincidentally, was what the eventual cost of her big break might be.
    A tall, reedy brunette in faded jeans and an Ozomatli T-shirt, hair tucked up in a loose bun, Carmen tightrope-walked to her cubicle, towering triple mocha latte clutched in a death grip in one hand, stack of folders tucked precariously under her opposite shoulder.
    Her doe’s brown eyes gave her an earnest, innocent look that belied an ambition to get to the top of the television news game, her high cheekbones and heart-shaped face aiding in that effort.
    So many piles of papers covered her desk that Carmen could only wonder if she were personally responsible for the death of an Amazon rain forest. She dropped the wad of folders onto the dead trees, flopped into her chair, slid her purse off her shoulder onto the floor, and sipped the hot latte with the passion of a true addict.
    Carmen had climbed aboard a plane the day after graduating summa cum laude from the television production school of Columbia College in Chicago, and moved here to LA, where she’d gotten a job as a production assistant with Crime Seen! , a first-year reality-crime show for the faltering UBC network.
    The United Broadcasting Company had run sixth in a six-network race for so long, they were threatening to get lapped, the network such an industry joke that Carmen knew getting a job there might hurt her résumé more than help it.
    But Crime Seen! had sounded interesting…in addition to being the first and, yes, only show to look past her lack of experience and make her a job offer.
    So UBC it had been. At least United was an over-the-air network, and not cable. Even a sinking ship in the broadcast ocean carried more prestige for your average rat than cable—not much of a rationalization, she knew, a sinking ship being a sinking ship whether the Titanic or a tugboat….
    Now, nine months later, she found herself enjoying working on the show. This was in part, of course, because Crime Seen! was UBC’s surprise ratings winner.
    In one season, the series—which brought coverage of interesting local crimes to a national audience—had led to the capture of over a dozen felons in