Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1) (20 page)

Read Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1) Online

Authors: James Harper

'Are you hurt?'

José shook his head and
smiled grimly. She stared, terrified, into his eyes. She could swear he'd
wanted it to happen like this all along.
As if he needed an excuse
. She
could already feel the stinging pain as the razor sharp steel slit her flesh
open, watching in horror as her blood welled up and overflowed out of the
wound.

'Not as much as she's
going to be,' José said through clenched teeth.

They dragged her kicking
and screaming back to the kitchen where they stripped her naked, ripping at her
clothes as they pushed her back and forth between them. They taped her arms and
legs to a chair and made sure her legs were stretched open, nice and wide, all
the soft bits on show and easy to get at. Then they taped her mouth, but they
poked a small hole through the tape. She wondered if it was because they could
see she was having difficulty breathing through her nose from when she'd been
slapped. Or maybe they liked to hear their victims scream. Just not too loud,
so as not to disturb the neighbors.

The guy she'd shot,
José, had made a tourniquet out of strips of kitchen towel. It seemed it was
only a flesh wound anyway. It was only his left arm as well, and, like her, he
was right-handed.

'Pass me that
Yan-something, will you,' he said to the other guy, whose name she still didn't
know.

The guy didn't so much
pass it across as stab it into the wooden table top, before going back to
rooting through her handbag.

José took hold of the
knife and worked it free, a sick, satisfied smile on his lips as he took hold
of her hair and pulled her head back. The sound of her desperate sobs squeezing
past the tape that covered her mouth made his breath come faster, made his eyes
shine, as the horror that lived behind them came awake.

'Hey,' the other guy
called, her driving licence in his hand, 'her name's not Rachel, it's—'

But José didn't hear the
end of the sentence. A red mist consumed him as the first, hideous scream
filled the room. It didn't make any difference to him what her name was.
Bitch
was good enough for him and soon she wouldn't need a name at all.

***

To be
continued in
A
Time To Kill – Dixie Killer Blues Book 2
, out NOW!

If you enjoyed
Before The Killing starts
, don’t forget to sign up to my mailing list so you’ll be
the first to know when new books are released.

What’s more, you’ll get a free copy
of the first Evan Buckley thriller,
In Cold Blood.
It’s the
complete
stand-alone novel for free, not just an excerpt.