Free The Serenity Murders by Mehmet Murat Somer

come get me in my sleep if he wanted to.”
    “Oh, come on, it’s not like he’s an angel of death who can move around unnoticed and then appear in front of you out of nowhere.”
    “Of course, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I’m the one who’s being threatened…the one who’s going to be sacrificed!”
    I had forgotten all about this childish side of Hüseyin’s. Caught up in a flood of emotion, his lower lip drooping, he sulked, confused by the entire world. For some time now I’d only seen him in the alternating roles of horny lover and melancholic romantic. Roles he played with varying degrees of success.
    “What am I supposed to do?” he said, as if I could simply wave my magic wand and give him an answer.
    “I don’t know,” I said in all earnestness. “But I’m going to check my messages immediately.”
    Hüseyin let out a big sigh as I pressed the button on the answering machine. He still hadn’t opened his beer.
    There were dozens of messages, from all sorts of people. A chaotic mix of congratulations and condolences. Alı, my partner in the computer business, had called twice and said that he had a new assignment for me. What it didn’t pay in money (which was zero), it would make up for in prestige, he said meekly. I was fed up with doing people favors. Oh, please hack so-and-so’s Web site, oh, please crash this site…I kept doing it in the hope that it would bring in customers, but the customers never came. I’d get mad and start hacking the Web sites of the thankless bastards who’d begged for the favor in the first place. Why should they get away with asking me to work for free? It wasn’t like I needed the prestige. I needed the money!
    Cem Yeğenoğlu, who claimed to be the first and only hypnotherapist in our country, had also left a message. “It may no longer interest you, now that you’re famous, but I thought I’d let you know that there’s going to be a pleasant little get-together at the Brahma Kumaris Society. But in case you are interested…” Then he explained that the meeting was to be held at the Brahma Kumaris, in other words the Brahma’s Daughters Building in Erenköy, and repeated the date and time twice. Loud and clear. I had no intention of going. I was bored of this fascination with Far Easterndisciplines, a fad that was spreading like wildfire. I’ve always had a keen distaste for that which is popular. It was quite a surprise to see how hungry our people were for such things. From the most innocent feng shui books to translations of the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, all this ancient foreign esoterica had suddenly become fashionable. No, I didn’t want anything to do with Brahma Kumaris. I’d gotten a whiff of their worldview at a couple of meetings I’d gone to. I didn’t like that they seemed to want to impose it on others. I refuse to be imposed upon! Cem Yeğenoğlu could very well go if he was interested. In the meantime, I couldn’t make my mind up whether to tell him or not. I knew his name had landed on the psycho killer’s list as well. Then again, what was he going to do about it even if he did know?
    Should I let everyone know who was on the killer’s list? But then that would put everyone in a panic. What was going to happen? What was I going to do? What were we going to do?
    Hüseyin finally opened his beer.
    “I’ve got to check the computer too,” I told him.
    “I’m coming with you,” he said, rising from his seat. He was a grown man, for Pete’s sake, he could hardly be afraid of being alone, could he?
    There were dozens of messages from our psycho; I say “our” because, after all, he qualified as Hüseyin’s psycho now too. It seemed he’d logged on to a different computer every time he got a little bored and sent me an e-mail. In one it said, “Check out your Web site!” and in another there was the address of the location of today’s Reiki meeting and a list of the names of the attendees. This guy was