Cool Heat (30 page)
Life,
she thought,
is a damn funny thing the way it works out sometimes.
All the shit she’d taken. Men using her like some jackoff toy since she was eight. Making her hate herself.
“I’m rich,” she yelled out at the gods of night, holding up the arm with a new diamond bracelet on it, triumphant. “I’m free, rich, and now it’s my turn!” Tears of joy came to her eyes.
A smile plastered on her face, she raced on into the fierce, icy effulgence that was the beginning of her new life, her much deserved new life—her first stop, Vegas…
64
When the text message from Kora North came late Sunday evening, Marco and Sydney were in the Shelby cruising around the lake.
The Tahoe basin was as balmy and beautiful under the full moon as any place on the planet.
The guests were all but gone from Thorp’s, and the cleanup crews were being supervised by Rouse. He’d made the payout to the poker winners. The death of Thorp wouldn’t be reported until Monday, when the body would be discovered.
Sydney stared at the text message, then held the phone over to Marco. “You believe this?”
Scorpion drowned. I swim alone…thanks.
He shifted gears, slowed, and glanced at the smartphone. “Sounds like a short honeymoon.”
Sydney shook her head and emitted a dry chuckle, saying, “I thought they’d at least get a day or two. Talk about a nasty honeymoon.”
“You think she planned on killing him all along?”
“I don’t know.”
They rode in silence.
Later that night, they went out on the lake in the Shaws’ boat and skinny-dipped under a full moon. They were as quiet as secret Washo Indian lovers a thousand or so years ago on a night just like this.
***
At that moment, four hundred fifty miles to the south in a ravine, Henry Craven Lee, aka Leon, known to himself and a few others—some of them dead—as the Urbanwolf, rolled again. This time, he rolled about halfway down the hill before a piece of flat ground and some bushes stopped him just above the floor of the narrow desert canyon. The bullet had passed through his jacket into his right chest. He didn’t know how deep.
He was still amazed that she’d done what she had. But he appreciated it on some level. She was a serious bitch, no doubt.
Then he began to hear the sounds of night in the desert. Small sounds of creatures that come out of their holes, from under their rocks. Predators of the night.
And Leon, a man who’d often wondered how and where and when he’d die, never thought it would be in a place like this.
So he decided he couldn’t die here. No way he wanted to be food for the scavengers. He grabbed a handful of dirt and bush and pulled. No. Not here. Not now.
He envisioned the big birds would come and land and squawk and peck his flesh, his eyeballs, clean his bones. Nature being nature.
That bitch.
And if he died at the hands of that woman, shot with the second gun to the one that had killed Lincoln, he’d be famous forever if the world knew. But the world wouldn’t know. And that aggravated him all the more.
There were plenty of ways the Urbanwolf could die, but as a dog kicked off a hill, that couldn’t be. Anger inspired him to crawl, to fight.
Had he the capacity to laugh at his misfortune, and his choice of women, he would have, but it hurt too much and he needed every bit of energy he could muster just to move a few feet at a time…
The End
About the Author
Richter Watkins currently lives in Southern California with his romance writing wife and a cat that thinks it’s a dog.
Contact:
http://www.richterwatkins.com/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the kind folks at the Lahonton Fish Hatchery and the best reporter at the Tahoe Daily Tribune.
Other Works by Richter Watkins
The Murder Option – Box Set: 3 novellas to thrill
Books Written Under Terry Watkins
Stacked Deck
Contents
Other Works by Richter Watkins
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Cool Heat
Copyright © 2013 by Richter Watkins
Published by Pryde Multimedia, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the author and/or publisher.