Free The Hidden Man by Anthony Flacco Page B

provided the risk element. Just one noticer could be enough to set off a whole chain of them—busy little noticers forming a promenade leading him straight to prison.
    Unacceptable. If things went wrong, he was genuinely terrified of the consequences. But the wave of pleasure that accompanied the danger was so strong that now his legs were becoming as weak as those of personal Revenge girl, if for different reasons. The similarities between an assailant and his victim were beautiful to him.
    “Step along,” he whispered through a fake smile. He pushed the barrel into her ribs again, just to remind her.
    Luck kicked in for him at that point; everyone else passing by was too busy to notice anything. Revenge girl managed to keep her feet under her, no doubt hoping to buy good treatment from him with her cooperation.
    At any other time, she might have been able to do just that. But God had made a mockery of the nondescript man. The same God to whom he had been so grateful, one day earlier, had abandoned their partnership in the mission to bring down a man whose arrogance cried out for destruction.
    The Divine betrayal was even worse than it would have been for him to discover that God did not exist at all, because the betrayal was personal proof that God not only existed, but was the type of Heavenly entity who was willing to fill a desperate man’s hungry soul with the impression that guidance was at hand every step of the way…only to turn his back upon his nondescript servant at the most crucial moment.
    Oh no. No, no, no.
    His rage was a boiling black tar, clinging to anything that it touched, burning away. He guided the terrified shopworker into the Hall of Science, down to the completed “Cave Dwellers” area where his workers had been given time off for finishing ahead of schedule. He checked to see that all was clear, then quickly pulled her back through his concealed door and into the large dead space behind the imitation cliff.
    He had fixed the trick door and added some more insulation to the inner “cave.” With nothing left for him to do but finish the display’s last few touch-ups himself, he had spent his free time behind the fake rock cliff, readying a private little area that God, as it turned out, may not have picked out for him after all—but which He really should have.
    He made the place ready without knowing how it would play into his need for revenge, working purely on faith.
Plans are for atheists,
he reminded himself. And who could tell about that? The exposition was set to last for ten months.
    Questions for tomorrow. He had failed at Duncan, the genuine article, and the scalding rage drove him like lashes of a whip. He could not wait. Once she was properly tied and muffled back inside the hidden cave, he finally admitted to himself that he was not going to be fulfilling her hope of letting her go.
    He did not have a catch-and-release policy.
             
    At that same moment, in the kitchen of the Blackburn-Nightingale residence, Vignette stood between Randall and the Eastern Whore and tried not to drop the dish that she was rinsing and flee the room. Miss Freshell had her trapped in another one of her domestic rituals. Vignette called this one the Wash-Rinse-Dry ceremony, which left her stranded in the middle rinsing position and handing each dish to Randall. She did it without looking at him.
    Miss Freshell, in all her evil glory, controlled the pace of the ceremony because she did the washing. You could never go any faster than she wanted you to. This meant that nothing was ever over, in this little ceremony, until Miss Freshell damn well said it was. And now with poor Randall still so besotted, he no longer seemed capable of anything more than parroting Freshell’s proclamations and glaring in disapproval whenever Vignette or Shane put up any friction over the new set of opinions in their lives.
    Vignette felt like a worm under the beak of the Eastern Whore. This woman was able to