Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) Chris Bauer (free reads TXT) 📖

The thug turned back, lowered his head with the rubber MacArthur mask in close for an imperial glance at Andy through the eyeholes. The nose holes contracted a few nasal breaths, more from arrogance than from his ample girth. “Heh. Isn’t he precious.”

Maurice pulled his son back into him, against his leg, raised his hands again. The lingering robber moved past them.

Andy, undeterred: “You’re a liar. And you’re fat.”

The robber wheeled, clamped a gloved hand on to Andy’s chin and squeezed. “Listen, you wiseass little punk…” He raised the butt end of the machine gun.

Maurice drilled a fist into MacArthur’s chin, a short, crisp punch that dropped the fat man to the floor on his back. He picked up the machine gun and pointed it at the dazed thug, his finger on the trigger. “You piece of crap—he’s just a kid—” In a crouch, with Andy behind him, he swiveled toward the bank counter.

Greeting his face were both barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. The close-range blast blew him and Andy off their feet, Maurice bouncing once then coming to rest on his back, his face shredded by the buckshot. The sepia-hue pearl-marble floor turned into a river of arterial red. Andy crumpled to the marble, still conscious, at the feet of the man with the shotgun wearing a pair of PF Flyer sneakers just like his.

Bleeding from his shoulder, Andy sobbed for his daddy. The two thugs dragged their semiconscious partner and his backpack along the floor then shoulder-shoved their way through the glass doors, out of the building.

Andy’s aunt Kitty kneeled, lifted her nephew off the floor, and cradled him in her skirted lap. “Andy. Stay with me, sweetie. Andy, honey—”

BINGE KILLER: Chapter 1

Present Day

Rancor Savings and Loan’s lobby was old-school cavernous, with shiny chrome stanchions, glistening glass partitions, cloth chairs in aquamarine, warm pastel walls, black pens, silver chains, and a swirled-pearl-marble floor. For Andy Prudhomme, the lobby was also a minefield. Fatherless for over fifty years, and Aunt Kitty-less for over a decade, he shuffled forward in line, his and other footsteps echoing. Voices—his father’s, his aunt’s—and scuffling noises—and the most paralyzing mind echo of all, a shotgun blast, lay in wait each time he visited the bank, the childhood trauma ready to suffocate him with horrific images beginning in bright red soon followed by a deep-sleep black.

A part-time psych nurse at the state hospital in nearby Scranton, Andy was also a full-time local business owner, his trips to the bank for his business frequent enough that they should have bothered him a lot less than they did. He looked younger than his fifty-six years, hair mostly brown, some gray, was tall, “hot” according to his women friends, hotter yet in his nurse’s uniform. His half-lidded eyes remained unfocused, directed at the floor, seeing little, remembering too much. To his right, a stretch of marble all too familiar to him forced him to blink through his private horror.

Behind him a young man in creased khakis and a touristy Hawaiian shirt spoke up. “Yo. Buddy. You’re up.”

Andy smelled the blood, its metallic sweetness, could sometimes see it rivering away from his father on the floor, a wound to his head that was completely incompatible with life, as real today as it had been those many years ago.

The man behind him nudged him with a tap to his shoulder. “Hey. Let’s go, fella. Today, already. Move.”

When Andy failed to move, the guy reached at him again to get his attention, grabbing his bicep. Andy shuddered, snapped his hand up in a reflex that gripped the guy’s pinkie finger and bent it back in a well-executed move. The bozo groaned and dropped to his knees. The woman behind them intervened.

“Andy—it’s okay, honey, it’s okay. Stop, Andy, relax…”

Dody Heck, burley and blonde, had no trouble inserting herself between Andy and his newest acquaintance. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she said to the tourist, her outstretched arms separating them. With her arm pushing at Andy’s waist the PTSD moment dissipated, Andy’s breathing returning to normal. The complaining tourist found another line.

Andy and Dody did their banking in succession at the same teller, two close friends, one small town, and many unspoken thoughts between them.

They exited the bank together. Across the street, a news photographer framed the bank’s entrance in his camera lens. Stately white columns, tall first-story windows, three stories in total, white stone steps. He depressed the shutter, held it down through multiple clicks. Andy and Dody, the bank, the mountain ridge behind it, a few parked cars, and a long and low, etched-black granite memorial all made it into the photographs.

Andy collected his delivered newspaper bundle and magazine subscriptions from his Rancor Bed & Breakfast walkway and mailbox at dawn. In the pile, Sunday’s edition of the Scranton Times-Tribune, USA Today, People magazine, B&B Quarterly, and Small Business Owner. Inside the parlor he clipped open the baled bundles and walked the guest room circuit, dropping a copy of the newspaper at each doorstep. He returned downstairs on creaky hundred-year-old steps to read copies he kept for the parlor.

A few minutes later he was done with the newspaper. He found the People magazine. The pictures on the side inserts for the front cover hit him like a sack of coal in the solar plexus.

Rancor Savings and Loan Bank. Two photos, both from the same vantage point. One was present day, in color, a wide-angle shot, and was meant to contrast the second photo, a black-and-white Polaroid from five decades earlier. The words on the magazine cover adjoining the pictures: The Safest Town in America. Rancor, Pennsylvania, 1962 and today.

Andy focused on the magazine cover, his jaw clenching. “Sonovabitch.”

A shit-storm was coming.

BINGE KILLER: Chapter 2

Randall Burton and his landlady Loretta Spezak exited the Sands Casino’s parking garage in Loretta’s car. Loretta vouched for the ’61 Chevy Impala’s low mileage.

“Nineteen thousand six hundred miles is accurate, Stephen,” she said, addressing