Dark Vengeance by Kristi Belcamino (libby ebook reader .txt) 📗

Just as I thought this, there was a flash of black and brown and then snarling barking.

Four German shepherds raced over to me and stopped just on the other edge of the trip wire and laser beams. An invisible electric fence.

Keeping my eyes on the dogs, I reached off to the side and plucked a leafy twig off a low-hanging branch. I flung it off to the side of the dogs. As it hit the invisible fence, the twig crackled.

The dogs stayed back from the invisible fence. I didn’t know how they knew where it was, but they did.

I stared up at the house. The windows were all dark.

But I knew someone was watching.

X.

He’s got to be there somewhere, watching me. Waiting.

I’ll leave now. But I wasn’t done. It wasn’t over. Not yet.

I stared at the house for a few more seconds before I started the bike and headed back down the driveway.

Halfway back to the main road, I spotted a car with a man standing beside it.

Asahi.

He shook his head.

I hopped off my bike. Without speaking, Asahi leaned over and spread a tarp on the ground beside Matteo and then rolled the body onto it.

I grabbed one end, and we loaded the body into the backseat.

“Where will you take him?”

“There is a doctor in town. He handles things like this, as well.”

Asahi got inside the car and started the engine. He rolled down the window.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I see you already went to the house?”

“Security is tight.”

He pressed his lips together.

I waited until he turned his car around and headed back down the driveway before I got back on my bike. I wanted to make sure nobody else came down the driveway until he was long gone. He’d taken a great enough risk coming to help me.

Once I figured he was back on the main road, I started my bike.

Time for me to head back to the surf camp and give the bad news.

I also needed to make a plan. I needed to get into that house and get that girl while she was still alive. If it wasn’t too late.

It seemed like every way I turned I was hitting a brick wall. And it was only getting worse. Matteo was dead.

Rose was still missing.

And now Keiki’s life was also in danger.

18

Sitting in front of his laptop, X watched the woman on the motorcycle assess the situation. Even though the dogs were inches away, fur standing up, growling and barking, snapping teeth, salivating with the thought of fangs sinking into tender flesh, she didn’t flinch.

Instead, she held her head high and looked at the house. It was as if she could see right through the tiny camera hole and through the monitor to look deep in his soul.

It was unnerving. Her direct gaze and posture was unflinching.

She clearly wasn’t afraid of him.

And she was making sure he knew that.

He watched her, mesmerized, his mouth suddenly dry.

Killing didn’t bother him. It never had. Even that first time by accident, he was relieved that it wasn’t actually that big of a deal. He didn’t enjoy it. But he didn’t dislike it, either. It was a necessary evil for him to maintain his life and his lifestyle.

It was a small price to pay to avoid life in prison.

But that's where he was going to end up if he didn’t find the girl and hand her over to the psycho who had the dirt on him. Even thinking of what would happen if the authorities in the U.S. found him, filled him with anxiety.

He clutched at his chest. He knew he wasn’t really having a heart attack. It was a panic attack. He just had to concentrate on breathing.

After counting to ten and doing deep breathing exercises, he relaxed.

He was desperate, and he knew this made him sloppy.

His only leverage in finding Rose had been to get her dog. But someone had beat him to it. And that someone was most likely Rose. At this point, she was most likely off the island. The dog had disappeared in the night, before the fishermen had gone out for the day. He’d sent a man down to wait for the fishermen to return. He would kill every last one of them until he found out if Rose had stowed away on one of their craft.

Thinking this made him realize that as much as he loved his island home, he was going to have to move on. There were many more small islands in the area where he could set up shop again. With the order to get Rose, everything in his world had begun to fall apart. The people on this island were turning against him.

The girl told him this.

When she came to him the night before begging for drugs, she’d told him everything.

How the woman in the leather jacket on the motorcycle was Rose’s mother.

He rewound the security footage to where he’d left off when his panic attack had struck.

The woman started the engine on the bike and within seconds was gone.

He pushed his chair back away from the desk and watched onscreen as the dogs slunk back to the house. He could hear the faint breathing of the girl in the other room. She was nodding off from the heroin he’d given her. She had nothing to offer him in exchange except the paltry information on the motorcycle girl and a lousy, poorly executed blow job.

He wondered what she would do if she knew her boyfriend had come to save her but instead had been electrocuted and run over a few times for effect only. He’d been dead once he hit the fence.

Unlike a normal invisible fence, this one was specially wired.

Although 5,000 volts could sometimes kill someone on its own, what really made the fence fatal was the current. Most people didn’t understand that. They thought that volts killed. But it was always the current.

His fence contained 0.1 amps, which was almost always fatal. Even .007 amps racing