Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4) by Nick Pirog (best ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📗

Then you get down on one knee again. Man, that takes guts.”

He cut his eyes at me.

I wasn’t done. “You must have been so excited. After rejecting you, she wanted you back, then she agreed to marry you. You guys can live happily ever after. Only…”

He slammed on the brakes.

I crashed forward against the seat belt, then smashed my head backward on the seat. My brain, still recovering from his kick, flickered like a bad strobe light.

When I regained my wits, we were parked next to my car.

I opened the door.

I didn’t thank him for the ride.

On my exit, he cut his eyes at me and snarled, “Don’t leave town.”

“I won’t,” I said.

I had a case to solve.

Chapter Thirteen

My brain has always worked best when my feet were pounding the pavement. I’m not sure if it was the kick of endorphins or that my body went into autopilot, but while running, cold cases had been cracked, text messages from women had been decoded, and the name of the actor in Apollo 13 who wasn’t Kevin Bacon or Tom Hanks had finally come to me.

I did a couple light stretches. Harold and May glanced up at me. They knew I was headed out.

“Sorry, guys. You can’t come.”

They both whined.

“I have to go running,” I told them. “I have to get back into shape. I got my ass kicked yesterday.” My jaw was still sore from Miller’s kick. But not as sore as my pride.

Harold squealed.

“I know, it was embarrassing.”

I picked him up and turned him over. I gave his little pot belly a rub and said, “We really have to start working on your core.”

I set him down, then headed out. I started down the long dirt road, down the hill, through the puddle, and to the dusty country road. It was 8:30 a.m. and overcast.

The snapshots from the crime scene came swirling in. Nearly six months of Netflix and Naked and Afraid reruns had left my recall as withered as my forearms, and the images were low resolution. Far from the 4K I was used to seeing in my prime. I cascaded through the grainy images: the ransacked living room, Mike’s open eyes—the small broken blood vessels spider webbing across his irises, the broken lamp on the floor, the angle of his feet on the carpet.

What was the perp looking for?

My gut told me that whoever killed Mike Zernan was searching for whatever it took Mike three days to get his hands on, whatever he intended on showing me. Proof of something to do with the Save-More murders.

It could have been a simple lump under the skin, suspicious but ultimately benign. Something along the lines of a misstep in the procedure, a lack of due diligence, or a mishandling of evidence. Something that wouldn’t have had an effect on the outcome of the investigation.

Or it could have been something malignant. Something metastasizing, spreading from cell to cell, replicating, and with intent. Was it more than simply a revenge killing? Were there more people involved than just Lowry Barnes? What if Lowry had an accessory, someone driving, or someone who helped with the planning? They were as guilty as Lowry. And they were out running free.

Regardless, whatever it was, it was worth killing Mike over.

Then again, maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Maybe Mike’s death had nothing to do with the Save-More murders. Maybe whoever killed him was simply looking for Mike’s rare coin collection or a signed first edition. Maybe it was a Craigslist murder. A guy came to look at Mike’s hot rod and got the sudden impulse to act out one of his dark fantasies. To strangle a man.

Only, Mike wasn’t easy prey.

He was in his late fifties, but he was still in relatively good shape. Even shaking his hand, you could feel the underlying brute strength from his time in the military. Which is why I suspected Mike knew his attacker. It would be the only way someone could have snuck up behind him.

But in a small town, where everyone knew literally all two thousand people, this didn’t narrow down the suspect pool much.

As far as suspects went, the only suspect on my list thus far was Chief Eccleston. Maybe Mike had something in his case files that proved some level of wrongdoing by the Tarrin Police Department.

I turned around on the country road and headed back. My legs were beginning to itch, a sensation I can only liken to the feeling you get when your feet begin to thaw after skiing. Only this time, it wasn’t the cold, it was the cells of my legs reactivating after six months of hibernation.

I pushed the sensation away and found my way back to the case.

Suppose this accessory to the massacre, suppose he was still out there. Did Mike know who this person was? Were they the one who killed him? And what about Mike’s mention of bugs?

In the twenty-four minutes I spent poking around his place, I searched high and low for any sign his house was bugged, but was unable to find anything. This wasn’t to say the perp hadn’t removed the bugs after killing Mike, which would have been the logical thing to do.

And what about what Miller said? That Mike wasn’t stable. That he had PTSD and bouts of paranoid schizophrenia.

Was he just a crazy old coot?

My gut said no.

I trusted him.

Speaking of my gut, my stomach began to cramp, and I stopped.

I puked.

I’m not sure if it was a physiological reaction to the exercise or a psychological response to my working theory.

I wiped my mouth, then continued on for another quarter mile. That’s when my arm started to tingle. But don’t worry, it was my left arm, so yeah, I was having a heart attack.

I considered stopping, but decided I’d rather suffer a heart attack than ever get my ass kicked again. Thankfully, the tingling went away a few minutes later, and I started thinking about my next move in the case.

There