Hush Hush by Erik Carter (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📗

beyond and the garage door opener mounted on it. Just past that door was a staircase with a dark wood banister leading to the second floor.

He glanced up to the landing. His view was partly obscured, but he could make out two doors—one open, one not. There was a bit of light coming from beneath the closed door.

His senses pulled him in that direction.

Before he could even take a step, his intuition was validated. From behind the closed door came a bloodcurdling scream.

Kim.

Silence bolted across the tiled entryway, around the sofa at the back side of the living room area, to the base of the stairs.

A sudden jolt.

Pressure on his shoulder, powerful fingers pressing into his skin and pulling him to the side, using his own rushing momentum against him, diverting his path. A gust of dry air against his skin. Darkness in front of him.

And as he stumbled through the doorway into the pitch black garage, he saw a flash of Mr. Accord.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Carlton laughed.

“What are you screaming about, Kim? I haven’t done anything yet. I just wanted to show you.”

He was on the bed, sitting a few inches from her, holding the tool in the air. An hour earlier, when Finley had called to say he’d be bringing Kim to the house, he’d stashed it in a drawer in the nightstand.

“Do you know what this is?”

Kim just stared up at the tool, shaking, sweating, tears trailing from the corners of her eyes. Carlton waited a moment, making it clear to her he would not continue until she responded. She finally shook her head.

“It’s a turning tool,” he said, admiring the tool himself, a long, sinuous thing, delicate and almost feminine-looking, but incredibly durable, tough. Its chiseled tip was freshly sharpened, a perfectly clean, precise edge. “Demolition has been my game since retiring from the force. But woodwork is my passion. High-end stuff. Doctors’ offices. Mansions. I’ve built a small but enthusiastic client list. Did Amber ever tell you about any of this?”

Kim shook her head.

“You know what I like about it? The immediate feedback, the tactile sensations. You press a piece of metal, like this, to a piece of wood, and you receive an immediate response. You’ve changed the wood forever. Maybe for the better or maybe for the worst, but either way, you’ve changed it. You learn from experience, and as you improve, so do your products. Very different from police work. Or the demolition business. There are so many gray areas in those lines of work, so few opportunities for tactile feedback. But this…” He twirled the tool between his fingers. “This is real. Tactile. Receptive.”

He held it closer to Kim. She cowered back into her pillow, eyes squeezing shut. The bedside lamp played off the long, thin shaft of metal coming out of a long, hourglass-shaped piece of smoothly polished ash, secured by a brass ferrule.

“It’s a skew chisel, for use with a lathe. When you put a piece of sharp metal like this against a rapidly spinning piece of wood, it rounds the corners, smooths the wood to a circular shape. Leave the chisel in one spot for a while, you start changing the curves, which means you can make things like table legs, lamp bases.

“This is a fine tool. A precision piece. I don’t buy crap. Hardened, tempered, high-speed steel, which holds an edge much longer than carbon steel.”

He brought his free hand close to the chisel, dabbed his thumb to the upper point, the toe. Chillingly sharp.

He smiled at the chisel then looked at Kim.

“We don’t have to use the chisel tonight, Kim.”

This made her gasp. A tear fell down her cheek. Then her eyes darkened into a scowl. “How did it happen? They were just gonna scare her. Rough her up her. Didn’t you tell them about her condition? How did you let this happen?”

Carlton smirked. Kim was in no position to be demanding answers.

He turned and reached for the laptop, which he’d placed on the nightstand, opened, and plugged into the telephone jack. He twisted to face the bed, its rubber feet squeaking on the glass topper.

“Now, here’s what you’re going to do, Kim. You’ll see that I’ve directed Netscape to the OPDCOM system. And you’ll further see that the username and password fields are empty, waiting for your credentials.”

He smiled at her.

“I have a message prepared and ready to go in a Word document. I’m going to copy and paste it into an email that’s going to be delivered to the police from your account. The message explains you were the one who killed my daughter. You and Amber were friends, worked together at the dispatch center, and when Amber began asking too many questions and found out that you’re a hooker, you panicked, thought the do-gooder was going to turn you in. So you encouraged her to take her brand-new husband to couples therapy all the way out in Titusville, getting her outside the city, in the middle of nowhere on US 50. You hired people to run her off the highway and kill her.

“But now, since Amber was such a good friend of yours, you’re feeling guilty. And you want to confess. Don’t worry, Kim; the Well appreciates all your, er, hard work, so we’ll see that you don’t fry. I don’t see what other options you have. All I need from you is your username and password.”

Still smiling, he placed the chisel on the glass beside the computer and poised his fingers over the keys.

Kim shook her head. Her trembling lips searched for words momentarily before she could speak. “No. I’m not going to jail for the Well. I’m going to finish what Amber started. I’m gonna bring the damn thing down.”

Carlton smiled broader. “You know, Kim, I’ve heard you’re one of our best refined ladies, but you have a tendency to be problematic. That was a very problematic answer.”

He picked the chisel back up, and there was a small cling as its sharp tip