Free A Mass Murderer - Tears for the dead (ADDITIONAL BOOK INCLUDED ) by Sara Wood Page B

and you Bill,” Bates raised a finger to his lips, warning him to keep his voice down. ‘I didn’t have no choice in this. He was brought here a couple of days back, and he said that if I betrayed him to the law, or to you, then his father would make sure I never worked again. And that his friends would kill me if anything happened to him. I didn’t want to help. I swear that boys. I’ve known you two and your wives for…..”
     
    “You make me sick,” said Klyne calmly, drawing his gun and smashing across his face, and running over his worn carpet.  Eyes closed, he rolled on his back and lay still, his breathing ragged and uneven.
     
    “Now,” said Klyne, simply running at the closed door, hitting it a solid blow with his shoulder. It burst open with a splintering and tearing of wood, its lock flying across the room.
     
    The man had been standing close behind it, obviously trying to work out what was happening, and the door sent him spinning away, to land on his back against the far wall.
     
    Bates and Klyne both stood in the doorway, looking down at him, guns ready in their hands.
     
    “Joe Nathan, if I don’t miss my guess. And this,” throwing the ring to him, where it tinkled on the wooden floor, rolling like a child’s top, “is yours. Maybe you’d better try and find another finger to put it on.”
     
    “You must be Klyne and Bates,” said the man on the floor, grinning up at them.
     
    “Bates and you’re Nathan.”
     
    “I have that honor, sir. May I rise from this undignified and uncomfortable position?”
     
    “Sure. But try anything and you’re dead,” said Bates.
     
    “My my! How very dramatic. I’ve heard about how hot-tempered you small town folks are, but I hadn’t realized it was true. Really.”
     
    With a grunt, Nathan got up off the floor, dusting down his elegant clothes. He looked about twenty-five years old, with a chubby, puffy face, that spoke of too much food and too little work. He wore a smart suit, with a brocade waistcoat and a shirt with ruffles of lace to the front. Leaning easily against the wall, Nathan seemed totally unworried by the threat of the two guns.
     
    “You and your murdering bastards of friends mutilated, raped and killed our wives.”
     
    “They should have been pleased with the honor that I and my friends did to them. The poor looking women. Both of them, indeed, and living in such conditions. I can hardly imagine that the authorities permit such things to happen in our fair and decent country.”
     
    The room seemed filled with the click of Bates easing back the hammer of his gun. “You lousy, stinking bastard!”
     
    “Really, Mister Bates. I can hardly be held responsible for your wife’s death, as I was….Err, occupied, in the other room at the time. And as for your wife, Mister Klyne, then you should be pleased that she chose to rid herself of the painful affliction of such a squalid life. If she had lived I would have taken action against her for causing me this painful wound.”
     
    He waved the bandage at them. It was unbelievable to Klyne and Bates that the man….hardly more than a boy, should be self-possessed. In his arrogance, it never seemed  to occur to him that he and his friends had done a deadly wrong, nor that the two men in the room with him might kill him.
     
    “My father….you’ve heard of Senator Nathan from San Francisco….knows of my accident, and is sending his own physician here to this one-horse town to attend to me. Your local man is about as much use as a barrow of horse-shit, and not much more congenial as company.”
     
    Nathan was astoundingly indifferent to his own danger, seeming as though he was trying to insult them and anger them. Yet, could he be that stupid? Time was that Klyne  ‘the Hunter’ would have relied on his sixth sense to guess that there was something dangerously wrong in the man’s manner. But it had been there years since he last faced a man in anger, and he had even