The Boyfriend

The Boyfriend Read Free Page A

Book: The Boyfriend Read Free
Author: Thomas Perry
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and went to the bedroom door. He looked back once. It was a shame. She was so much more beautiful than she knew, and so kind. He picked up his trash bag, went out to the hall door, stopped there and listened, then opened it a crack and looked out to be sure the hall was clear. He locked the door and walked out the front entrance toward his car.
    Once he was on the road, he felt confident. He knew that if the cops found a man’s hair, prints, or clothing fiber in Catherine Hamilton’s room, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. There were probably forty guys a week leaving physical traces of themselves in that apartment, and none of them had any lasting relationship with her.
    She had been very pretty, with bright catlike eyes and that strawberry blond hair. She’d had her hair done in a salon that was full of movie actresses who were still perfect specimens and hadn’t gotten famous enough to have the hairdressers go to their houses yet. She had fitted in. She was one of those girls who had started taking money for sex because it was so easy that one night the temptation had just pulled her in. She never took drugs or even drank, so that wasn’t even a small part of her decision. She had gone to college, and she was smart.
    She had been seduced by arithmetic. If she had been a lawyer, she could have charged clients about four hundred an hour, and given back two hundred and fifty on office rent, taxes, secretaries, and student loans. Instead she charged three hundred an hour, and about once a month she’d buy some new thongs and thigh-high stockings. She’d told him once she liked men well enough close-up, so the job hadn’t been a huge chore.
    Selling sex was a profession that put girls in a position to control men—promising, teasing, coaxing. It made some girls jump to conclusions. Because they could manipulate men so easily, they imagined they must be smarter or stronger. A lot of them died of that. Catherine had been wiser. She had lived within the bounds of reality, not getting overconfident or foolhardy, and not taking anything for granted.
    Her only problem was that she had run into him. She had liked him and let him sleep in her apartment for a few weeks while he was in Los Angeles doing a job. He had told her that when the job was done he would move on. He hadn’t told her that the nature of his job made it necessary that when he moved on he would have to kill her.
    As he got on the eastbound freeway he accelerated rapidly and changed lanes to place his car behind one truck and in front of the next. In a minute, by gauging the speeds of the other cars on the freeway and inserting his between two of them to his left, he found the perfect speed in the perfect lane and relaxed. He did not think of Catherine again. She was gone.

2
    Jack Till knew the essential skill was to exert total control over his hands. He held the pistol steady and breathed evenly while he kept the sights lined up and even across the top. At the end of an exhalation he pulled the trigger. The Glock had a long trigger pull, and he knew there was going to be a bang and the gun would jump a little, but he had to pretend he didn’t know that—make his mind think past the jump while he completed the squeeze. There was a Bang! And then there was the ring of the brass casing that was ejected onto the concrete floor to the right.
    It was hard to see a nine-millimeter hole in the paper at this distance. If what you were shooting at was a man, you knew right away. When the bullet hit his body anywhere, it was really bad news for him—about the worst news the body ever got—and it showed. The man went down and became immobile, and there was still a shooter with some more rounds just like the first one in his magazine, and his hands were settling the front sight between the two rear ones right within the outline of the body again. Bang! Till got the round off into the center of the target again, but there was definitely barrel drift to the

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