Easy Prey by Claire Stibbe

Author:Claire Stibbe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery Thriller & Suspense
Publisher: Bookpreneur
Published: 2017-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

Jessie had been walking in a westerly direction for ten minutes with a gun in her hand. Sometimes turning full circle to examine the street behind, sometimes stopping to listen.

She took a deep breath. She was safe now.

Slipping the gun into her backpack, she began half jogging and half walking. It was hard going at first, bones grinding and muscles flaring in their old familiar way. Her cheek was numb below the eye Jago had punched and she tapped the swelling with her fingers.

The dead silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a shoe scraping on pavement, filtering out behind her. She glanced back and saw his face, drawn tight in the wan light of a nearby streetlamp. He didn’t look too happy.

Her heart was beating at a hundred miles an hour and her feet were like dead weights on the sidewalk.

Faster! she told herself. She didn’t relish another pebble in her head.

She heard the thump of his shoes but couldn’t register how close he was. She fought every inch of good reason to stick to the road, where he could easily see her under the streetlights.

“Get back here!” he yelled.

Screw that, she thought, racing blindly along the pavement, passing the Oak Tree Café and WisePies Pizza and the turn off to the Anderson-Abruzzo Balloon Museum.

If she turned right toward the museum there was only a few trees and a lonely stretch of road that led to Balloon Fiesta Park. If she kept straight ahead she was bound to meet an oncoming car and wave it down.

He must have been about ten feet behind now, matching her stride for stride. The encounter felt like something she might have expected from a dream—a nightmare or a scene from a thriller—but it was none of those. This was Jessie Bowman running from a killer.

She couldn’t stop and call the cops, nor could she turn and shoot an unarmed man. Was he unarmed? She had no idea. But she had a good idea of the law. There wasn’t enough distance between them to crack off a round and there wasn’t enough time to dig the gun out of her backpack. He was almost upon her.

She could hear her own breathing now and she teetered in that dreadful place between must run faster and can’t. There were no friendly headlights to run into with arms waving and a witness to help. This was a long road where, if she recalled, there was a large healthcare company on the right hand side.

She could hear the beating of feet on the pavement behind her and shouts of “You sick little bitch.”

Not a sick little bitch. Not a sick little bitch. Not a sick little bitch, she kept repeating to herself as she swung into a driveway with turns both right and left.

She chose left. Winding beneath a stand of light poles in front of a three story office building, she headed for a clump of weeping willow and brush at the far west corner. There

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.