Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

“You aren’t much of a criminal mastermind, are you?” I said.

I stomped on Arlo’s back, keeping him down while I looked for the Rambo knife. It was still sticking out of the bed. He’d been fooled by the pillow trick. Who says you can’t learn anything watching cop shows?

I went to the closet, snatched up my gun and the roll of duct tape, and turned around to see Arlo trying to get up. I noticed he was wearing the same tennis shoes he used on me in Santa Monica. That pissed me off all over again.

I stomped him down, then gave him a swift kick in the side.

“That’s for what you did to me in Santa Monica,” I said. I gave him another kick and thought I felt something give against my shoe. “That’s for Lauren.”

Then I grabbed him by the hair, lifting his blood-splattered face off the floor so he could see me. I looked right into his dazed, watery eyes.

“And this is for Jolene,” I hissed into his ear, right before I slammed his face into the floor a couple of times. “The rest of your punishment I’ll leave up to the law.”

I straddled his back, pulled his arms behind him, and bound his wrists with duct tape. Then I taped up his ankles together, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him into the living room. I propped him up against the couch, set my gun on the table, then pulled out a chair and sat down so I could take a good look at him.

I was momentarily repulsed, not so much by the man in front of me, but by what I’d done to him. Before that guy tried to rob me on the Interstate, I’d never beat up anybody before. I didn’t think I could do it. I certainly never thought I’d enjoy it. But I’d never imagined I’d be in a place like Deerlick, stuck in a cabin alone with a murderer.

It wasn’t even a fair fight. If it had been, I had no doubt I’d have been the loser. I prevailed because I ambushed Arlo, then kicked the shit out of him when he was down and couldn’t defend himself.

It didn’t say much about me as a man.

Travis McGee and Spenser would be ashamed of me. More importantly, I suspected Carol would be, too.

Not that it mattered, but Arlo wasn’t going to give me a chance to defend myself either, stabbing me to death as I slept. And what I did to Arlo was far less brutal than what he’d done to Jolene or Lauren. Violence was an inherent part of his character; it wasn’t in mine.

Maybe it would be now.

Arlo’s head lolled on his chest and he drooled blood and mucus onto himself. After a few minutes, he began to groan. He lifted his head up slowly, spat out a big glob of blood and teeth, then tried to focus his eyes on me.

When he spoke, it wasn’t easy to understand him, what with his smashed nose and mouthful of teeth.

“You’re the guy who pissed on my money,” he slobbered.

I’d hunted him down, uncovered his scheme, foiled his attempts to kill me, and ultimately captured him, and that was all he had to say. He’d murdered his wife and drove Lauren to suicide and this was how it was going to end.

So much for my evil adversary. My Moriarty.

I looked at him and found it hard to believe that someone so stupid and pathetic could cause so much misery and death. It didn’t say much for me, if this guy had met his match.

I thought about terrorizing some answers out of him, like I’d originally planned, but the idea had lost all of its allure. I’d captured him and given him a beating. That was enough. Suddenly, I was tired of the whole damn thing and just wanted to go home.

“I’m going to go and call the police now,” I said. “But first I want to know if Little Billy is out there waiting for you.”

Arlo didn’t say anything.

“You better tell me if he is,” I said. “Because if I see him, I’ll shoot him dead and say it was self-defense.”

I picked up my gun and aimed it at him, so he’d get the point.

“With a BB gun?” Arlo slobbered.

I could have hit him again and felt good about it.

Instead, I taped his mouth shut, tipped him over on his stomach, and hog-tied his arms and legs together. I didn’t want him slithering back to his Rambo knife or finding some other way to cut his bonds while I went up to the phone booth.

I looked at my handiwork. It was a good thing I’d had that highway robber to practice on. The police might not be so impressed, but I couldn’t see how they could call me anything but a hero.

I wished I’d felt more excited about capturing Arlo, but I figured that would come later, once I’d put some time between me and everything that had happened, once it didn’t seem so ugly and it became just a story I told.

I eased open the front door and peered out into the darkness. If Little Billy was out there, he was doing a good job of blending into the surroundings.

My gun held at my side, I closed the door behind me and cautiously stepped off the porch, careful to peer around the edge of the cabin first.

Then something grabbed me by the ankles and the ground came rushing up to my face. I instinctively reached out my hands to break my fall and my gun flew out of my grasp.

I slapped against the ground hard, my arms taking most of the impact. I was about to scramble for my gun when my head exploded and I died.

Chapter Twenty-Three

You don’t dream when you’re unconscious. It’s not like sleep. And when you wake up, you wish you hadn’t.

It was still dark.

At first that was all I was aware of, beyond the pulsating pain in my head. Then I was aware of being alive, which confused me and gave me an incentive to get past the agony and focus my eyes.

After a minute or two, I was able to sharpen the blur enough to tell I was lying on my back on the cabin floor. I was afraid to lift my head up, because it felt like the floor was the only thing holding my brain inside my skull.

I turned my head a tiny bit and saw my gun on the table, beside the roll of duct tape. Neither Arlo nor Little Billy seemed to be around.

So I lay there, waiting for some sensation besides pain to return, pondering my predicament.

The last thing I remembered was going outside to call the police. Someone was hiding under the porch, knocked me down, and hit me on the head with something.

My guess was a large baseball bat.

What I couldn’t figure out was why I was still alive. Arlo came to kill me, and I’d given him a beating and trussed him up with duct tape. If anything, he had more reason to kill me now than he had before.

So why didn’t he finish the job?

Maybe he was getting ready to. Maybe this was the only chance I’d have to escape.

I lifted my head up. My brains didn’t spill out, but the pain made my eyes blur again, almost into unconsciousness. Using my feet and my elbows, I slid across the floor and propped myself up against the couch, roughly in the same spot Arlo had been in before. I know that because I was sitting on the glob of blood he’d coughed up.

Supposedly, if my TV education in private detecting was to be believed, all I had to do was rub my neck a few times and I’d be revived enough to ambush Little Billy and Arlo when they came through the door. The problem was, I couldn’t lift my arm and didn’t have the strength to do any rubbing.

So I resigned myself to the reality of the situation. I rested my head against the couch cushion, in case I’d jarred a chunk of my skull loose, and waited for the Pelz brothers to come back and finish what they’d started.

If, by some miracle, I survived, I was going to write a very nasty letter to the executives at TVLand about the inaccuracies in their detective programming. I was glad I’d learned this lesson from a concussion rather than a gunshot wound in the shoulder, not that it was going to make much of a difference now.

A moment or two later, I heard footsteps on the porch and turned my head to face my executioners. Only one man came in, and it wasn’t who I expected.