The Perfect Crime Read Online Free

waited and asked her out instead of wasting his time with that fucking hooker.
    When it was time, he walked out of the coffee shop and down the street. A block over, he crossed and came back up the alley behind the electronics store. He was sure nobody saw him. A knock and Jack was letting him in the back door. He followed him to the front and they went down the rows of shelves, the dealer removing the items Reader told him he wanted and placing them in a red plastic shopping basket.
    “That it?”
    “Yeah. I think so. Let’s see, transmitter, receiver, crystals...say, give me five, six more crystals. Different frequencies. I don’t know if he has a preference so I might as well get a bunch. And yeah. All the stuff’s here. How much? Add a hundred to that for your trouble. No, add a couple hundred. You been a real sport. My kid’s gonna be thrilled, thanks to you.”
    He thumbed through the items spread out on the counter mentally cataloging them, making sure everything was there. He looked up at the guy, Jack, showed him some teeth.
    “Say, Jack, you know I saw Louis Armstrong once. Live, in person. When I was a kid. Over on Camp Street. Helluva thing. On a Second Line. Lead trumpet. Cat was wailing some stuff, I tell you!”
    Might as well have him go out with a stupid grin on his kisser, fucking citizen with an ear for accents. Be the decent thing to do. Yeah, right. Decent! He laughed out loud.
    The store they stood in was jam-packed to the ceiling with every possible inch of shelf space stuffed with electronic parts and accessories. Some of the things Reader could see were right out of Star Wars. It’d be fun to find out what some of these items were. No time for that, though.
    “This is what it comes to. Plus what you said.” Jack tore an invoice out of the pad he was writing on and pushed it across the glass counter to Reader. “What kind of boat did you say you have?”
    “Looks fair, Jack. Say, what’s this?” He pointed to one of the figures near the bottom of the sheet. As Jack was leaning over Reader pulled that hand swiftly to the hunting knife sheathed behind his back at the same time his other hand was grabbing Jack’s hair and slamming the man’s face down on the counter. As the glass shattered with the force of the man’s head crunching into it, Reader said softly, “Sorry, friend,” and plunged the knife into the back of his neck and twisted it, tearing gristle and cartilage. There was no sound other than a soft grunt. Reader waited for several seconds for the tenseness to leave the man’s back muscles all the time working the blade slowly and methodically. When he relaxed, Reader withdrew the knife and wiped it clean on Jack’s back, letting him slide to the floor.
    He got busy. First, he put on a pair of tight-fitting driving gloves and placed the items on the counter into a large supermarket shopping bag he took out from under his shirt and unfolded. The invoice was lying on the counter, and he picked that up and put it in his pocket along with the carbon and the copy. He left the bag on the counter while he methodically walked around the store tipping over shelves and scattering merchandise. He found the burglar alarm and cheked it. It was activated, pretty much as he’d thought. When Jack had opened the door and let him in earlier, he’d excused himself hastily after bolting the back door and hurried to the front. A cautious fuck , Reader thought, glad he was paying attention.
    The alarm was one of those combination deals.
    He considered the situation. Let’s hope he wrote the combination down somewhere, he thought. He went to the cash register, careful not to step in any of the blood, and lifted up the coin receptacle. Under it was a hundred dollar bill, which he stuck in his pocket. There was a mass of other papers, bills and notes, mostly names of various electronic gadgets and numbers, probably order or serial numbers. At the very bottom of the stack, so small he came close to