Killshot (1989) Read Online Free

spent his leisure time drinking Southern and Sevens and watching TV with Donna pawing him or listening to her tell him how, after devoting her life to corrections, they had treated her like dirt. Richie's opinion was that if you liked corrections it meant you wanted to live with colored, because that's what it amounted to. He'd tell her from experience. The first place he was sent, the Wayne County Youth Home, stuck in Unit Five North with twenty guys, all colored. In Georgia, when he got the six-to-eight for intent to rob and kidnap, he did three and a half at Reidsville, most of it stoop labor, all day in the pea fields with them. Hell, he'd been eligible to serve time in some of the most famous prisons of the south, Huntsville, Angola, Parchman, and Raiford, all of them full of colored, but had lucked out down there and only drew the conviction in Georgia. Okay, then the two years in the federal joint at Terre Haute, they were mostly white where he was. But then the transfer to Huron Valley put him back in with the colored again. How could she like living among guys, white or colored, that would tear your ass out for the least reason? Donna said, "Women are good for a prison. They have a calming effect on the inmates and make their life seem more normal." Richie said, "Hey, Donna? Bull shit."
    He'd get tired of lying around and go for a drive in Donna's little Honda kiddycar, go over to Harsens Island on the ferry and wonder about those summer homes boarded up, nobody in them. Stop at a bar on the island where retired guys in plaid shirts came in the afternoon to drink beer, waiting out their time. It was depressing. Donna told him to stay out of the bar at Sans Souci, Indians from Walpole Island drank there and got ugly. Oh, was that right? Richie dropped by one evening and glared for an hour at different ones and nobody made a move. Shit, Indians weren't nothing to handle. Go in a colored joint and glare you'd bleed all the way to the hospital.
    The score he had a line on had come about sort of by accident. One night bored to death listening to Donna and watching TV, Richie slipped out to hold up a store or a gas station and couldn't find anything open that looked good. So he broke into a house, a big one all dark, on Anchor Bay; got inside and started creeping through rooms--shit, the place was empty. He hadn't noticed the FOR SALE sign in the front yard. It got Richie so mad he tore out light fixtures, pissed on the carpeting, stopped up the sink and turned the water on and was thinking what else he could do, break some windows, when the idea came to him all at once. He thought about it a few minutes there in the dark, went out and got the name and number off the FOR SALE sign.
    Nelson Davies Realty.
    Richie had seen the company's green-and-gold signs all over the Anchor Bay area from Mount Clemens to Algonac and had heard their radio ads in the car: sound effects like a gust of wind whistling by, gone, and a voice says, "Nelson Davies just sold another one!" He seemed to recall they had a new subdivision they were selling too, built on a marsh landfill they called Wildwood, a whole mess of cute homes, twenty or thirty of them.
    Pretty soon after, while Donna was out driving her school bus, Richie called up Nelson Davies, got his cheerful voice on the line and said, "Them Wildwood homes are going fast, huh?" Nelson Davies said they sure were and began telling him why, listing features like your choice of decorator colors, till Richie cut him off saying, "I bet they'd go even faster if they caught fire."
    Nelson Davies asked who this was, no longer cheerful.
    Richie said, "Accidents can happen in an empty house, can't they?"
    Nelson Davies kept asking who this was.
    "I understand you already have one messed up," Richie said. "It can happen anytime. Call the police, they'll keep a lookout for a while, but how long? They get tired and quit it could happen again, huh? Or you can pay so it won't, like insurance. You get ten