A Ruthless Victim by Nadia Siddiqui (best novels to read for students .txt) 📗

Just a bit further, and somebody will hear them…

The car sounds closer, but she cannot look; she cannot risk it because then she will slow. She can’t afford to slow, not even for a single second.

Her chest burns, and her legs are fire.

It doesn’t matter - she’s no match for the car. She hears the sound of a heavy side door opening and then the brakes slamming into place as the van nearly clips them with the effort of whipping around in front of them, and her force is such that she cannot stop. Her shins collide with the van’s open side cavity, and she’s pitched forward into the vehicle that doesn’t stop moving.

A person in black punches her square in the face, and the last thing that she hears is her daughter’s screaming silenced in the same fashion as she is slammed into unconsciousness.

Chapter Three

I t’s not often that Nathan sees visions. Sometimes it’s of the future, but more often than not, it’s of the past. More often than not, it’s a small clip of an event that a person has done, an atrocity that the person has committed. More often than not, Nathan is standing there, the proverbial fly on the wall, looking at the scene unfolding in front of him. He’s never been the person before. He’s never had to experience the emotions, the raw terror of something like what he has just seen, what he’s just experienced. It’s almost enough to cripple him. It hit him with such force that he’s almost unable to stay standing, the panting in his chest requires a long shower and three chugged bottles of water to get his heart back to a normal pace.

Nathan’s almost never the victim either. He’s usually the sadistic prick committing some terrible something or another that Nathan will end up killing him for. Even more disturbing is that he has no idea how this vision ties into the case or what he has even done to have triggered it in the first place. Nothing in this room seems out of the ordinary to him. He knows that there were two people involved in kidnapping that daughter and her child. However, the assignment that Nathan is here to investigate is a car bombing. One that claimed the life of a wife and daughter, that perhaps might be similar, but their bodies were found charred almost beyond recognition inside of the vehicle. The local police force had claimed it was accidental arson and said that it was an open and shut case.

However, the husband and father of those two poor victims had never believed that, not for a single second. According to the case file, the man has attempted to sue everything and everybody related to the case in any capacity. He has even placed a lawsuit against the individual police officers as well as the entire precinct. He sued the insurance company, the car manufacturer, his personal mechanic, their dentist, the city and the review board. This man wanted answers, and he was being denied them at every turn. It was enough of a wave that his persistence had caught the eye of the company. Who, unbeknownst to Mr. Bradley Kramer, has been delving deeply into the case of his wife’s alleged accidental arson….or accidental murder.

To many, it seems as if it’s little more than Mr. Kramer being mad at the world. It seems that he is a brokenhearted man and that he will turn to any venue or outlet that he can get his hands on. All of the obvious things have been ruled out: the car was never tampered with; there wasn’t a recall, and an engine fire like that has never happened to any of the other cars of that same model that were manufactured in that year. Really, it seems as if Mr. Kramer might be losing his sanity in an effort to make the world make sense to him again.

However, the police file ruled the accident an arson, but no suspects were ever cornered with any information as to what might have happened or who could have done this. Mr. Kramer used to work in insurance. His reputation within the stock market field is nearly unmatched to this day; he just has a head for numbers, and because of this, he has done very well for himself. Once upon a time, he had quite a bit of money. Though after the death of his family, he quit both of his jobs and went back home to mourn...and then he never left again, something that many would consider to be a great waste of talent. Somebody who ought to be on his way to becoming a very young billionaire was instead nearly destitute and living off of the modest retirement that he had started to accumulate, and then started to draw far too early.

Standing on the front porch of Bradley Kramer’s house isn’t inviting. The lawn is poorly cared for and browning in some places. The car in the driveway has four flat tires, and there are weeds poking up through the spaces between the wooden slats in his painted front porch. What must have been a very charming family home now seems like the sort of place that should be walled off by vines that children tell horror stories about. Even with the door closed, Nathan can smell liquor coming from inside. He can feel it against his skin as if a warning to every bit of his five senses.

Behind the chipped front door with peeling paint comes a shuffle, the sort of shamble that’s hard to expect at noon but would been very fitting were this last call at a bar. From the way that the locks start to click open, Nathan knows that Bradley Kramer is drunk well before he ever catches a glimpse of that unshaven