Free The Green Lama: Crimson Circle by Adam Lance Garcia Page B

behind him.
    “You disappoint me, Mr. Harrin,” the man sighed as he followed after him, his shoes clapping against the floor with a slow, methodical rhythm. “I expected someone with your experience to be a bit… braver.”
    Harrin sobbed as he violently shook his head, tears pouring out of his eyes. “I don’t wanna—I don’t wanna!”
    “Please stop, Mr. Harrin,” the man sighed. “Everyone dies.”
    “It’s not suppose to be like this,” Harrin cried, struggling toward the door, but his body was too broken, in too much unrelenting pain to go any further. Terror flooded his mind; gooseflesh covered him. His body shook, frigid and warm all at once. His life wasn’t flashing in front of his eyes, he wasn’t hearing the angels sing above him. There was only the panic, the remorseless black deluge, pulling him down to the bottom, drowning him. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”
    The man crouched down in front of Harrin. “That’s where you’re mistaken,” he said as he drew his pistol and placed it against Harrin’s temple. “This was the only way it could have ended.”
    The magician sobbed. This was a mercy killing, the man decided, nothing less; he needed to be put out of his misery. The man pulled the trigger and Theodor Harrin’s skull turned concave, splattering brain and blood across the barroom floor.
     

Chapter 4 : Homecoming
    “ PLEASE, SIR , you havta lissen to me,” the woman begged, an unending flow of tears streaming down her cheeks, eyes blood red, a droplet of snot hanging from her nose. She wasn’t going to be winning any beauty pageant that was for sure. She stood on the tip of her toes, pushing her five-foot frame as far as it could go, her head just barely making it over the front desk. “You havta help me, please!”
    Sergeant Evan Wayland sighed and leaned back in his chair so that only the woman’s black hair was visible. He would’ve cared more back in the early days, back when he was a dozen pants sizes thinner and his chin didn’t have a second and third brother, but that was a long time ago. “Ma’am, if ya haven’t noticed we’re a little busy,” he said in monotone, waving toward the long line of impatiently waiting citizens, each in some kind of physical or emotional distress, all of them pathetic. “So, if you just wait, someone will get around to you, I swear.”
    “But please, sir, my husband!” the woman sobbed, her nails digging into the front desk’s soft, worn wood. “I no see him in seven days! He no come home!” she sobbed in broken English.
    Wayland rolled his eyes. “You check the local pub? Probably just passed out under some barstool after drinking some…” he trailed off, trying to think of that Mexican stuff with the worm the spics always like to drink. “ Tock-keel-ah ,” he managed.
    “No!” the woman protested, smacking her hand against the desk. “No! He no drink!”
    “Right, and Grouch Marx’s mustache is real.” Wayland leaned forward, pancaking his stomach against the desktop. “Listen, sweetheart, why don’t you go home; take care of your kid, and we’ll let you know if he turns up. Okay?” he said in the sincerest voice he could manage, though his eyes were distant and numb.
    The woman’s head slowly sank down behind the desk and Wayland thought he heard her whisper something that sounded like: “La ma-dray keh teh pareeoh.” He grumbled in response, knowing whatever she said probably wasn’t too friendly, not that he cared. There were too many of them, immigrants, sucking up work like some malicious sponge from real Americans like Wayland’s brother-in-laws. It stirred something up inside him that he couldn’t seem to push down.
    “What was that about?” Officer David Heidelberger asked from behind him, watching the woman waddle mournfully out of the station. He had a clipboard tucked under his arm; a pen perched on his ear, ready for his shift at the front desk.
    “Lost husband,” Wayland said