The Real Mrs. Price Read Free Page B

shaking. These bones—and what they’d told her—made her physically ill. Marlowe had no idea how to make ready to face him, but there was no doubt that he sure as hell was coming, and he was coming for her.

 
    The Ritual Begins
    H OZIER ’ S “T AKE M E TO C HURCH ” streamed through his car speakers. Lyrics were everything when it came to songs like this. It was a love song. The ultimate love. That sacrificial kind. That mother-child kind. Unconditional and shit.
    Osiris Plato Wells wasn’t the kind of man who lived a life synonymous with love, but he dug this song, and the melody soothed him while he drove. Road trips were his thing, especially at night. In fact, he preferred driving at night, and unless time was against him, he’d get a room during the day and sleep so that he’d be ready to drive all night long if he had to.
    The habits of men, especially frightened men, seldom changed a whole lot. Edward Price was being hunted, and if he was still alive, he knew it. So that meant he’d work harder to break the rules and throw the hunter—Plato, in this case—off course. What he didn’t understand was the nature of this thing he was running from. In this game, it was Plato who held the advantage. Price was no different from any other man that Plato had been hired to find. He was afraid and desperate. And after all this time, Price undoubtedly had a false sense of security, believing that he may have actually managed to escape his fate. It would be that mistake, that very assumption, that would ultimately prove to be fatal.
    Ed’s shortcoming had been greed, pure and simple. Greed for money, of course, but also greed for a woman. It never failed to amaze Plato how dumb a dick could make a man. A month before leaving Colorado, Price up and married one of his mistakes. Marlowe Brown. The man had been greedy enough to take money that didn’t belong to him and to take a wife, a second wife, while he still had the first one. Price might as well have put a bull’s-eye on his back, and for now, it seemed that someone might’ve hit that target dead center. Not far from where wife number two lived, a body had turned up in his car, burned to a crisp. Authorities went ahead and started jumping to conclusions. The right one? Plato wasn’t convinced. Hence his reason for traipsing through Kansas in the middle of the night, singing at the top of his lungs until he was hoarse, on his way to Blink (And Fucking Miss It), Texas.
    He’d been in Europe when he got the call.
    â€œHow’d you find me?” he’d asked over the phone.
    â€œA friend gave me your number,” the man on the other end said.
    â€œWhich friend?”
    â€œThe one at the bookstore, on Main Street.”
    â€œWhat was he reading?”
    â€œA scene from Ellison’s Invisible Man, ” he’d stated and continued with the passage, “‘“Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?” I asked around a corner of my mind.’”
    A man in Plato’s line of work needed his reassurances, his checks and balances. The book never changed but passages changed often, and God help you if you called him and got it wrong.
    â€œWhat do you need?” was his next question, if you got it right.
    Edward Price was the name he’d been given. Edward Price was a businessman who’d made the wrong kind of deal with the wrong kinds of people, and he’d failed to deliver on his promise, whatever that was. Plato didn’t weigh himself down with the details.
    â€œWhere does he live?” he’d asked.
    â€œBoulder, Colorado.” The person on the phone had texted Plato the address.
    â€œWhere does he work?”
    â€œHe’s a stockbroker at a company called E&L Investments, also in Boulder.”
    â€œPhotograph?”
    â€œYou can get it off his website. It’s the most recent. I’ll text you the company