Every Hunter Is Hunted – Barry Lyga

Jasper asked. The rain had picked up again, dirty spatter on the windshield, the steady wish-click of the wipers. “You re-interview everyone from the reception?” “All the men at least.” It would be a hell of a task, he knew. He leaned back against the head rest.

He was glad he would have nothing to do with it. His phone chirped for his attention. It was Howie. GW is awake. Wants to talk to you. Got a minute? He was just thumbing back Sure when de la Croix’s radio erupted in a panicky burst. An address, a time, followed by words that chilled Jasper to the bone: “… husband shot …” OceanofPDF.com THE VICTIM WAS Morris Gibson, husband to the third victim and the only Black person in the entire affair so far.

De la Croix needed her GPS to get them to the right place, and it took them through a densely wooded park. Jasper was half convinced the satellite had lost its damn mind and sent them off into logging country when suddenly they broke through into civilization again. When de la Croix pulled up to Gibson’s neighborhood, there was already a massive police and FBI presence—multiple squad cars, unmarked sedans with lights flashing.

An ambulance had parked half on the curb in front of a Tudor that he assumed belonged to Gibson. The radio in de la Croix’s car had been a chaos of overlapping voices and contradictory commands; she’d snapped it off roughly three seconds before Jasper was going to beg her to do so.

A husband. Was this part of Bridekiller’s plan, some new wrinkle they hadn’t imagined? But he should have imagined it, he realized. Bridekiller’s letters indicated a loathing not for the women, but for their mates. He killed to save the women from what he saw as a life of drudgery, submission, and travail. It made perfect sense, then, that he would come back for the husbands. First take the wives, to make the men suffer. Then come back and kill the men to avenge the dead wives.

He figured he could tell Conroy not to worry about the lesbian weddings, at least. Perfect sense. Twisted sense. Jasper felt himself slipping into Bridekiller’s psyche and was both mollified and horrified to find it fit. De la Croix flashed her ID to a uniform charged with keeping press and lookie-loos away from the crime scene, then maneuvered her car as close to the action as possible.

PATRICK WOKE TO the shaky blue dark, his hotel room wobbling and vibrating in the cast-off light of the muted TV. It took him a moment to place which hotel room: a moderately decent airport Hilton. Flying out early in the morning, they had opted for the cheaper wedding night hotel in favor of more money for the honeymoon. His last solid memory, floating in a sea of bemused and marrow-deep fatigue, was of checking in at the front desk.

That must have been hours ago. He tried to sit up, but a throb at the base of his skull sent him back to his pillow. Walking the fingers of his right hand across the mattress, he encountered not Rebecca, but instead only the cool of her empty half of the bed.

The bedside clock blurred before him. Through sheer force of will, he cleared his eyesight. The clock’s display wavered, stabilized, digits melding back into themselves. It was 4:13 AM. “Honey?” he called. “Honey?” They were due to fly to Antigua at ten. There was no reason for her to be awake so early. At no response, he struggled to a sitting position, this time successfully. The bathroom door was open. After a necessary interval to catch his breath and make sure the room would not suddenly upend and hurl him to the floor, he stood.

Feeling every inch an invalid, he crept to the bathroom, using the furniture for support along the way. So utterly silent was the room that he felt he must be wrong, that Rebecca could not possibly be in the bathroom. With the door open, he would hear something, and the room was just so damn quiet.

Maybe she’d stepped out for ice for a headache. Or something. Anything. But, no, she would be in the bathroom, he knew. She would be in the bathroom, and as he leaned against the doorjamb, he saw she was, in fact, in the bathroom, lying in the tub, face up, one arm flung casually over the side, wearing her wedding gown, its white lace bodice gone almost black with her blood, her eyes staring up at him, staring, staring, and they would never, ever stop.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 889ac082a083693a
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 5,005,927 bytes (4.774 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 257
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 376.74 minutes
• Total Words: 75,347
• Total Characters: 421,481
• Average Words per Page: 293.18
• Average Characters per Page: 1640.0

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