Discover other Titles by Michael Kerr at MichaelKerr.org
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this Author.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Also By Michael Kerr
DI Matt Barnes Series
1 - A Reason To Kill - Link
2 - Lethal Intent - Link
3 - A Need To Kill - Link
The Joe Logan Series
1 - Aftermath - Link
2 - Atonement - Link
3 – Absolution - Link
Other Crime Thrillers
Deadly Reprisal - Link
Deadly Requital - Link
Black Rock Bay - Link
A Hunger Within - Link
The Snake Pit - Link
A Deadly State of Mind - Link
Taken By Force - Link (Read a free sample at the end of this book)
Science Fiction / Horror
Waiting - Link
Close Encounters of the Strange Kind - Link
Children’s Fiction
Adventures in Otherworld – Part One – The Chalice of Hope - Link
Adventures in Otherworld – Part Two – The Fairy Crown - Link
“I always believed that I was a decent person, but have to admit that I let circumstances affect me to the extent that I started doing very bad things. Killing someone is like breaking an egg: once you’ve done it you can never put it back together again.”
~ John Gibson
“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is the duty of the living to do so for them.”
~ Lois McMaster Bujold
CHAPTER ONE
He knew a lot about life and death and pleasure and pain. It was pretty simple really, like a graph with peaks and troughs indicating what had been good or bad days as time rolled by. He had experienced more foul than fair times, since leaving a miserable childhood behind him to join the adult rat race and get by in a dog-eat-dog world. Well, he did more than get by now; he took what he wanted, because he had no intention of holding down a poorly-paid fulltime job and being caught up in a system that was corrupt, self-serving to maybe ten percent of the population, and run by ex-public schoolboy pillocks, whom he adjudged to be parasites on working-class folk, taxing them unmercifully and squandering the money like compulsive gamblers suffering a permanent bad streak.
He showered, dressed in drab clothing that would not draw attention and left the house at exactly seven-thirty a.m., to stroll along the street at a speed that was neither too fast nor too slow. He knew how to blend and not be noticed by others. The art was to appear anonymous, like some dowdy old person who somehow became invisible: just another grey or white-haired geriatric that limped along under the radar. But he wasn’t old or limping. He was extremely fit, in peak condition for a young man in his mid-twenties. And he was blessed with physical hallmarks that made him look average; being slim, five-foot-nine, and with no facial features that were striking. He wore his mid-brown hair medium-length, and just merged with his surroundings like a chameleon.
Shit! He had inadvertently stepped on a crack between two flagstones. That was a no-no. Doing it was totally out of character for him. It had been at least four years since the last time this had happened. Was it a portent? Should he call his mission off? No, he could make it right. He stopped, counted to ten, backed-up three paces and pretended to look at something in a shop window before continuing on his way, this time avoiding the crack. He knew that he had a mild form of OCD, and although annoying, he could accommodate the obsessive compulsive disorder. But standing on cracks, walking under ladders and a host of other things were not a part of it. He was just superstitious. He remembered a saying from way back when he was probably no more than six years old: ‘Step on a crack and break your mother’s back’, his now dead grandmother used to