A Triple Thriller Fest Read Free

vehicle, pulling onto the highway.
    “Dude, that was a sheriff’s deputy,” the young man in the rear seat whined to his young companion, “and he shot him. He killed a cop!”
    Krueger growled. “You’re right, Private, he was a deputy. Now he’s meat for worms.”
     
    Chapter 2
     
    Davis, California
    Daniel Rawlings stood under the shower nozzle, his head tilted back and his eyes closed. Rivulets of steaming hot water ran down his face as he tried to wash away the night sweat and anxiety that always accompanied the dream. For over two years, he had been haunted by a recurring nightmare. It always woke him and left him sitting up in bed, his heart racing. Over and over, he had been forced by an involuntary, self-inflicted penance to watch Susan die, each time as realistically as the first, though in the dream his wife’s face was absent—replaced by a blurred image beneath her fur-lined hood.
    He’d knelt in the snow and held her in his arms while she died, but she’d not been able to speak. Ever since, he’d been unable to convince himself that there wasn’t something, anything , he could have done to prevent her death.
    The dream always brought Dan awake, sweating and trembling, wishing for the thousandth time that it might only be a dream. Then, unable to erase the gruesome image from his mind or fall back to sleep, he would get out of bed and climb into the shower, hoping the hot water and steam might somehow purge the painful memories.
    Stepping out of the shower, Dan toweled off, wiped the fog from the bathroom mirror, and lathered his face. Staring back at him were the same blue eyes, the same thick, dark brown hair and heavy overnight beard. There was even the same body, exercised regularly in an almost ritualistic pattern. At slightly over six feet, Dan had maintained every aspect of his physical attributes that Susan had so loved. It seemed peculiar to him that all physical signs were void of the devastation that had occurred within his heart, his soul. Those he had been unable to maintain, to exercise, even to control.
    He and Susan had been married for less than a year when she died, and his morning ritual—a return to reality more than an awakening from sleep—was born of frustration at a reluctant but forced acceptance of the ever-present nightmare, of Susan’s absence, and the brevity of the marriage they had been promised. A widower at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, eternity seemed a long time away.
    The one redeeming benefit of waking so early was that after clearing his head of the memories, he was able to shift mentally into another frame of mind and make good use of the pre-dawn hours to work on the novel he was writing. He had spent hundreds of hours at his computer, his imaginary characters filling the lonely void in his life. In many respects, Voices in My Blood had been his salvation.
     
    Despite the bitter cold of the winter morning, sweat saturated the young soldier’s ragged uniform, and salty droplets ran from his forehead, stinging his eyes. Four of them lay abreast in their shallow log bunker, awaiting the next assault by the British regulars.
    “There’s no hope, Ned,” the young man said, his voice tight with fear.
    “Don’t give in, Tommy, we ain’t dead yet. An’ you’ll see, sure as shootin’, Ethan’s boys’ll come swoopin’ down outta them Green Mountains, and the redcoats’ll scatter like scared rabbits.”
     
    Nearly four hundred and fifty pages of his heart and soul, not to mention personal satisfaction derived from the effort, lay on his desk, ready to be sealed in a U.S. Priority Mail envelope and sent off to a New York literary agent. Born of a year’s worth of sleeplessness, early morning hours, and long, nighttime sessions that had replaced, in large part, any semblance of a social life, the book he hoped would be the next great American novel was finally finished.
    Rawlings had needed an outlet for the persistent pain, and he had turned to