The Red Scream Read Online Free Page A

like a little more creature comfort than they come off the factory floor with.”
    He grinned and shut the door for her.
    Molly looked out the open window. “Did Richard Dutton know what you were going to ask me?”
    “No, ma’am. I just said it was a personal matter.” He reached up through the window and took her hand in both of his. Squeezing it warmly, he said, “Thanks for coming and listening, Molly. Give it some thought. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
    She looked into his big ravaged face. He was smiling and his eyes crinkled at the corner, but she was certain that no matter how genial he might appear, this man wouldn’t stop pushing until he got his way. Well, if she had learned anything over the years, it was how to push back. “I’ll be in touch, Charlie,” she said.
    As she started the engine and revved it, she felt her blood quicken. Before this visit she’d been lukewarm about writing anything more about Louie Bronk, but now she couldn’t wait to get going on it. Nothing in the world gave her the motivation that opposition did. It was her own personal siren song. It reminded her of the time her Daddy told her never, not under any circumstances whatsoever, to go into the pasture where the old bull was grazing. That just made her spur her horse right on into that pasture. Of course, she’d gotten gored—she had the scar on her thigh to prove it—and her horse barely escaped alive. It was childish and contrary, but at forty-two she hadn’t yet grown out of the impulse to go into the pasture.
    As she drove out the gates she glimpsed off in the distance the buzzards still lazily working the ridge.

chapter 2

    When I was five
    Oh, man alive,
    I learnt to survive
    All alone.
    On my own.
    When I was six
    What a fix
    Ma did tricks
    With anyone.
    Weren’t no fun.
    When I turned ten
    She died then,
    The big fat hen.
    The sisters four
    They settled the score.
    I turned fourteen
    They got so mean
    Worst I seen.
    It wasn’t fair.
    I wuz outta there.
LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas
    T urning out of the driveway, Molly glanced at the huge houses lined up close together on the ridge, each one edging out a little farther than the one next door, like rich matrons elbowing one another to get a better view, and she couldn’t help thinking about money. What made Charlie McFarland think she could be bought off this story? And so cheap! If she were for sale, a measly hundred thou wouldn’t do it.
    As if she could stop now, before the end.
    After all, she had chronicled Louie Bronk’s sorry life and crimes from his miserable illegitimate birth in Laredo, through his twelve years in prison in Oklahoma for killing the oldest of his four sisters, and through his five murder convictions in Texas and his ten-year stay on death row. His lethal injection at Huntsville next week would mark the end of a case that had sucked her irresistibly into its vortex eleven years ago, on that miserably hot July day when Louie Bronk had been arrested in Fort Worth and extradited down to San Marcos where he was wanted for questioning in the death of Greta Huff. Lord, a lifetime ago.
    Molly flipped on the fuzz-buster attached to her visor and hit the accelerator as she turned onto Mesa and headed back toward her town house, back to the unfinished story waiting for her there on her computer screen. As usual she was facing a deadline and even after twenty-two years in the business, deadlines still made her sweat.
    Eleven years ago, back when she first got swept up in the Louie Bronk arrest, she hadn’t known it would mushroom into a long and harrowing serial murder case that would absorb her attention as nothing else ever had. She’d been a police reporter for the Austin American-Patriot at the time, and when she dropped in at the Austin PD press room, it had looked like a slow news day, too hot even for crime, which usually thrived on heat.
    Gus Drysdale, the head of the Austin homicide detail, had whispered