A Deeper Grave. Debra Webb

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       Four

      New Orleans

      11:30 p.m.

      Nick Shade waited in the darkness for another full minute. The shotgun house he’d been watching for the past two weeks was dark. The woman who called the place home was always in before dawn. Like a vampire, she didn’t make public appearances during daylight hours.

      He had been tracking the Executive Executioner for two months. Finding her had been a little trickier than he’d estimated. The Big Easy was the forty-year-old former schoolteacher’s preferred hunting ground. She’d left victims all the way from Houston to Tallahassee, but New Orleans apparently held some significance for her. It wasn’t her hometown though. Adele Pratt was from Jackson, Mississippi. She had been a daddy’s girl all the way up to the day he’d dropped dead in his office. Her father had been a low-level ad man at a major firm where he worked ridiculously long hours in an attempt to keep the boss happy. Adele had been murdering ruthless businessmen like her dead daddy’s boss for nearly a decade.

      Nick reached above his head and stretched his back. He’d been waiting and watching for hours, day in and day out. It was almost time. His prey was on the verge of taking her next victim.

      Adele Pratt didn’t know it yet but she was finished.

      For the first thirty years of her life she’d never shown the slightest reported penchant for violence, and then one of her students shot herself right in front of Adele. Something happened to her in that moment when a fifteen-year-old decided she couldn’t deal with her demanding and ironically high-level executive father for a moment longer. Adele’s family hadn’t heard from her since that day. They all thought she’d gone off somewhere and taken her life. But that wasn’t the case. Nick had found poor, sweet, reserved Adele. She had been busy giving all those demanding men like her father’s old boss and her former student’s father what she believed they deserved—a truly nasty death after hours of slow torture.

      She had lured in her latest prey and, if she followed her usual MO, tomorrow night she would make the kill. Oil tycoon Race Cashion had no idea what a lucky man he was. Adele, aka Alana Jones the Executive Executioner, was about to retire permanently.

      The day’s thick humidity had eased a little with the darkness, but the air was still far too suffocating for Nick’s liking. Halloween was approaching and the city had spent the entire month celebrating death in all its grim beauty. Nick stood and stretched again. The rocking chair he’d vacated eased back and forth once, then twice. The elderly man who lived in the house Nick used for a vantage point was sleeping off his nightly drunk. He generally started around five and by ten or so he was down for the count. Nick had to give him credit, he had good taste. The bourbon he inhaled night after night was some of the best the average man could buy and likely exhausted the biggest portion of his retirement check. Each night Nick tucked ten bucks into the coffee can over the stove. The old guy had cut a hole in the lid and used the can like a piggy bank where he kept his change. By the last week of the month the mound of quarters, nickels and dimes was probably all he had left. This month when he removed that lid he was going to have a nice surprise. It was the least Nick could do for the use of his back porch.

      He picked up his backpack and slipped across the narrow yard, using the overgrown shrubbery for cover. There were a few preparations he needed to make before Adele returned home. He approached her back door, listening for any sounds of trouble. Picking the ancient lock was too easy. People who renovated historic homes should never rely on the security of a century-old lock. He silenced the СКАЧАТЬ