Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

arrest will be made in the early morning. A gun store owner in Queens called in after getting a copy of the mug shot the police put together with the help of the second witness. He remembered the guy buying a knife, said there was something odd about him. The shop’s CCTV got a clear image of his face.”

“Did the detective give a name?”

“No, and they won’t until the suspect is arrested. My dad wants me to go in to identify whoever they arrest tomorrow. I’ve decided to do it. But you have to stay here and rest with that injury.”

John could see in her eyes that she was in no mood to argue.

Six

Roaches scurried in darkness amid food debris and empty takeout containers, across the dirty kitchen floor of a sixth-floor walk-up in the South Bronx. Footfall vibrations passed like seismic waves through the floor, causing them to stop, motionless. Something heavy was coming their way.

The door opened and a dusty lightbulb, suspended precariously from the center of the ceiling by an ancient flex, sparked to life. The large figure of Vernon Hardwell entered and stood amid the peeling, pale-green paint and tired kitchen cupboards. A lumberjack shirt draped the overhang of his belly above a pair of stained jeans. Looking far older and more unkempt than a man of forty-two years should, he stood looking at the roaches. Normally, he would make a clumsy attempt to kill one, but this time he just stood there, confused. He had no idea why, just minutes before, he had woken from what seemed like hours of sleep to find himself lying on the hallway floor on top of his black coat—his one good coat now dirtied, as were his hands, with dark, sticky blood. The metallic smell and taste had confirmed it was blood, and checking himself all over had satisfied him that the blood was not his. His relief would have been greater if it wasn’t for his delayed realization that he had someone else’s blood quite literally on his hands.

The evil voice in his head telling him what to do, and pressuring him incessantly to do it, had gone. He couldn’t remember exactly what it had made him do, but the blood meant it was something bad, very bad. He washed it off his hands over the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. As he turned to look for a towel, his eye caught the distant, nighttime view of Manhattan from the solitary window. The top three sections of the Empire State Building were bathed in a green light, appearing like a bright-green wizard’s hat sitting on top of a sea of glittering lights. He stopped, enchanted like a child. His hands dropped to his sides and droplets of water fell and cratered the layer of dust and grime on the cracked linoleum floor.

For a moment he managed to shut out the noise: the rumble of the traffic, the shouts and music of his neighbors. Then, suddenly, it all returned with the sound of banging, threatening and thunderous, on the door of his apartment and the shouted words, “NYPD! Open up!”

Disoriented, he tried to grasp what was happening. He had seen enough cop shows to know that the police wouldn’t ask twice. The door burst open, and two NYPD ESU officers carrying AR15 assault rifles stormed in, followed by two more. The barrels of their weapons quickly panned across the room. The muzzle of one rifle homed in immediately on Hardwell’s chest. He already had his hands up.

“Reach for the sky!” he mumbled to himself, thinking of the classic westerns he liked to watch.

“Drop to your knees! Hands behind your head!” an uncompromising voice screamed at him.

The voice was female, and her stance was solid and muscular. Her dark eyes seemed to pierce through the tactical goggles that protected her against acid attacks along with the balaclava beneath her Kevlar helmet.

Hardwell immediately complied, cowering before her. He was still mumbling to himself. On his knees, with his head dropped forward and his hands positioned obediently, as ordered, he was easy to cuff. In the meantime, the other officers searched the apartment. The other officer shouted the ‘All Clear’ seconds after the female officer had finished cuffing the suspect.

“Need any help with that one?” One of the officers joked as he saw Hardwell’s deflated posture.

On hearing the all-clear, Detective Williams entered the apartment from the safety of the corridor. He immediately noticed the coat on the floor and what he supposed were ESU-regulation boot marks on it. Unfortunate, but understandable. These guys risked getting their heads blown off every time they burst open a door so he didn’t have to. The last thing on their minds was not disturbing evidence, which in this case had caused a smearing of blood on the floor around the coat. “Get CSU here now to bag this,” he said to one of the officers and motioned for the suspect to be helped to his feet.

“You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of John Logan,” he told the faintly babbling suspect, who was then read his Miranda rights. “Do you understand your rights as I’ve read them to you?”

Hardwell kept his head dropped and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

Williams pulled the man’s head back to make solid eye contact. “Do you understand them?”

“I’m sorry,” Hardwell continued to say, as if in a trance and with tears running down both cheeks.

Both confused and frustrated, Williams let the suspect’s head drop back down. The detective ruminated on the fact that this guy just didn’t seem like the type to slash someone’s stomach open. He motioned to the female officer to take Hardwell away and the man was led out of the apartment still mumbling and with tears welling in his eyes.

Williams looked around the tiny apartment. It was a sour-smelling, dismal place, void of anything personal. The single bedroom, like the kitchen and adjacent living area, was dirty, dimly lit and contained only the bare essentials of