Free Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down by _Collection Page B

Jessie,” one of the nurses said, “what have you done…?”
    What, indeed?
     
    So there I was…obviously I’d brought her the gun with which she’d killed herself, which made me an accessory.
    My panicked brain recognized immediately that one, I was not dead, and two, I’d be charged with a crime. But since I was alive, and Jessie was not, at that point, copping to a charge of accessory to murder was definitely more appealing than admitting what I’d really done.
    The story I’d tell swirled through my head, bits and pieces tripping over each other as I tried frantically to put one together. And I’d come up with a pretty damned good one, if I do say so myself.
    Jessie couldn’t face another day living with the memory of what had happened to her. She begged me— begged me—to help her to end it. As her friend, as someone who loved her, as the only person to whom she’d speak, how could I deny her that release? Who would doubt that story, knowing what she’d gone through?
    I could get off with a light sentence, I knew, once I explained. No one would ever need to know the truth, right?
     
    I was just starting to breathe a little easier when the door opened and my father walked in. He’d seen the story on TV—who in the tristate area had not?—and he’d come down to the station.
    But he’d not come to comfort me, or even to ask me why.
    His gaze was just as cold as it had been when, as a child, I’d disappointed him in some fashion. I wasn’t surprised, frankly, that there’d be no attempt at understanding. There never had been in the past.
    In his hands, he held a blue envelope. The same blue envelope I’d left in his mailbox earlier.
    “Daddy,” I said, ever the coward, holding out my shaking hands, silently pleading for him to give it to me.
    But Judge Lucas Bradley—Judge Luke “Hang ’Em High” Bradley—handed the letter over to you. I guess there were other instincts that were stronger in him, other bonds harder to break than the one that existed between father and daughter.
    Signed this date: Deanna Jean Bradley

    When Detective Mallory Russo finished reading the last page of the statement, she held it up in one hand and said, “You haven’t signed it.”
    “I will.” The young woman held out her hand for the pen.
    The detective and the once promising assistant district attorney stared at each other from across the table.
    “You could have come to me, Dee,” Mallory told her. “You could have given me the information and we could have gone after these guys. It didn’t have to be this way.”
    “Yes, it did, Mallory. And may I remind you that none of you were too interested in them even as I was picking them off.” The A.D.A. shifted in her seat. “Besides, everything that happened…it was all my fault. It wasn’t your fight.”
    “They’re all my fights,” Mallory told her. “We’ve known each other for years, Dee. Why couldn’t you have trusted me to take them down?”
    Deanna shrugged, her eyes shifting to the two-way window on the opposite side of the room.
    “Is he still there, watching? My father?”
    “Judge Bradley left an hour ago.” Mallory rested her arms on the table.
    “You know, he could have burned my letter, he could have kept it and held it over my head for the rest of my life.” Deanna Bradley continued to stare at the mirror. “I still can’t believe he turned against me.”
    “Your father has an unswerving sense of justice,” Mallory reminded her. “He’s always going to follow his conscience.”
    “So will I, Mal.” Deanna sighed. “So will I….”

DAVID HEWSON
    David Hewson knows where to find the perfect black rice in Barcelona, the richest coffee in Venice and how to kill a person in a thousand gruesome ways. His wonderful series set in Rome, featuring detective Nic Costa and his stand-alone thrillers share an authentic sense of place, characters with rich lives that began long before you picked up the book and a relentless sense of