Black Death (A Sam Rader Thriller Book 4) Read online

  Black Death

  A Sam Rader Thriller

  Simon King

  Contents

  Free Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Afterword

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  1

  Not all siblings hate each other. For some, the bond that grows between them is sometimes one of the strongest found in nature, like a lioness protecting her cubs on the vast Savannah. This bond could be developed simply through the passage of time, like two brothers sharing the same interests for dirt bikes, or fast cars. Maybe it’s a couple of sisters, both with a passion for the latest musician or movie star. Whatever the force that brings them together may be, once it has weaved its magic, there’s almost nothing that could ever break it apart.

  For Lucy and Grace Shaw, the force that brought them together was violence. It was the kind of violence many children around the world are made to witness each and every day, where an overzealous stepfather or boyfriend chooses to bestow his own failures on those closest to him.

  Grace, the older of the two, tried her best to protect her baby sister as much as she could. It wasn’t easy growing up without their father around, himself killed a few years before, the victim of a drive-by shooting in one of Chicago’s middle-class neighborhoods.

  Their mother had tried her best to provide for the girls, taking on odd jobs here and there, as well as waitressing down at the local bar called the “Schnapps”. Working evenings had brought its own challenges, with Grace often forced to look after Lucy while their mother endured long shifts.

  Being five years older, Grace often joked that she was the “fill-in Mamma”, the one taking care of the child, while the real Mamma was working. But inside, she knew the struggles facing her young family, as if she had already reached adulthood.

  It was the boyfriends that had made life difficult, the latest a stick of sweaty dynamite, ready to explode at the smallest issue.

  June Shaw had met Leroy Martin at the bar she worked. Despite knowing he had a penchant for violence, she began to date him, hopeful that he’d prove himself a loyal partner and possibly a father-figure for her girls.

  But old habits die hard and it wasn’t long before the violence began, both Grace and Lucy forced to watch as Leroy dished out regular beatings to his latest squeeze. It was the drink he had a fondness for, including the attraction to other women booze always seemed to bring with it.

  Whenever he demanded money from June and she refused, he would beat her until she either handed over her purse, or collapsed to the ground and he took it from her. Either way, he would end up with the cash, regardless if it was meant for groceries, rent or even a birthday gift for one of her babies.

  The day that changed their world forever was just an ordinary Monday, with school for both girls taking up most of the day. June had dropped the pair off just as she always did, then headed off to whatever job she had going on at that time.

  When she didn’t return that afternoon to pick them up, it didn’t worry Grace, accustomed to her mother getting held back with work. She’d simply waited for her younger sister, then held her hand and led her the four blocks back to their apartment.

  Despite being black in a predominantly white neighborhood, the girls had never known any different, the apartment their father’s final investment. It didn’t matter that they had a white father and a black mother, with people in the neighborhood seeing the girls as just another part of the community.

  They would greet passers-by with warm smiles, waving as they walked slowly home. With Grace a very tall 11-year old, she looked closer to 15, an age considered old enough to take care of her 6-year old sister. But anyone having an issue with the family? Why would they?

  But someone did take issue, calling June a betrayer to her race, a whore to the whites and a traitor to her people. Leroy didn’t just hate the fact that his girlfriend had fucked a white man and happily let him father her children, he detested the very ground she walked on. Unbeknownst to June, her new boyfriend had even gone as far as taking the bus out to the cemetery, finding the dead father’s grave, then pissing on the headstone.

  Some said the only reason he began dating the single mum was so he could get back at her for allowing herself to fall pregnant to a white man in the first place. But it wasn’t until he lost his job that things really took a turn for the worst. That was when he also felt a threat to his manhood, with June the sole bread winner.

  It was the smell the girls first noticed when they walked in the door, a rich aroma they could almost taste. Grace said later that the smell reminded her of the local butcher, a place her Mamma had always taken them every Saturday. The front room of their apartment appeared normal and thinking their Mamma was still at work, weren’t expecting to find her home.

  It was little Lucy that found the body, lying half in and out of the bathtub in the apartment’s only bathroom. Her mother’s head was lying on the floor, the pool of blood looking more like a rug than the congealed horror laid out before her.

  She didn’t scream when she saw her; not at first. But as she saw her mother’s open eyes staring back at her, one jutting out a little too far as if squashed from its socket, that was when she felt the air from the room escape, screaming loud enough to bring the neighbors.

  It took the police three days to locate June’s boyfriend, eventually finding him inside the apartment of a woman he’d been secretly dating for the previous month. He didn’t confess at first, the investigating cops spending hours interviewing him, relentlessly questioning the killer until he finally cracked.

  That was when he admitted beating June with a mini baseball bat, bashing her repeatedly as she desperately tried to escape from his clutches. The young mum pleaded for her life, Leroy telling officers “the traitorous bitch” tried to convince him to stop by calling for her children.

  What shocked seasoned officers more, was that Leroy initially planned to kill the girls as well, sitting around the apartment for almost two hours as he waited for them to return home. It was only when he heard a neighbor walking up the stairs, that he panicked and instead fled.

  Grace and Lucy were eventually taken in by their paternal grandmother, who lived in New York City. It meant an entire change of scenery for the girls, but many agreed that it would help them overcome the horrors they had endured.

  But while the beatings they had witnessed had forced the sisters into a bond closer than most, it was their mother’s eventual murder that would seal both their fates, a maternal instinct instantly forming between the sisters that could never be broken.

  The protective instinct each carried for the other would continue to grow in strength, as the girls grew up in a world they now saw as foreign to them. For one of them, it would never again be seen as a place where happiness was possible. For one of them, it would always be filled with the evil that came hunting for them.

  Life continued for the girls, each eventually finding their place in the world. Lucy had dreams of becoming a ballerina, while Grace pursued her law degree. The girls eventually followed two very different paths, but would always ensure they remained close.

  Lucy moved to Chicago, studying dancing and actively pursui
ng the future she always wanted. She eventually met an art student named Wilson Thomas, a man even Grace eventually approved of.

  Grace’s journey took her across the country, settling in Los Angeles, where she’d been accepted into a mid-sized law firm that felt she was the perfect candidate to fill their needs. It meant being a country apart, but with a good income and enough spare time, the older sister regularly returned to the Windy City to visit her sister.

  Sometimes, fate is one of the cruelest monsters known to exist, capable of striking at the most heartbreaking of moments. It was Grace that had always kept an eye out for fate itself, knowing that one day, it could strike once again, just as it had when it took their mother from them.

  It was the night before Lucy’s stage debut that the monster finally reappeared, visiting its cruel hand on the girls a second time. But this time, it came in a way that truly rocked Grace to her core.

  Her sister had been prostituting herself on the side, some saying to make ends meet. But Grace knew money wasn’t an issue for either sister, with the sale of their father’s apartment providing a substantial nest egg for the pair. So, when Lucy was found murdered by a client in a rundown brothel in the darkest parts of the inner city, Grace found her heart ripped from her body by fate itself.

  The police did what they could, but found little evidence to go on. With no surveillance cameras, no willing witnesses and a room filled with the DNA of hundreds, the case soon went colder than the darkest places of the human soul.

  Her sister had been tied to the bed and brutally beaten to death after being sodomized with a spray can, the weapon left lying nearby. The authorities told Grace that her sister had suffered for well over an hour at the hands of her attacker, before being left alone to die a horrible death.

  It was the police officer’s parting words that would eventually send her towards a future she had no idea was waiting for her, a future where she would be the one to make them pay.

  “Don’t expect too much,” he’d said. “This is just another Black Death”.

  2

  “Lady, if you can do what I need, I’ll pay you double.” The cop looked at her with eyes that zoomed in on her bust, licking his lips as he considered her for a moment. “And I know you can do it all.” She smiled at him, pulling her shirt’s zipper down a little more to increase the amount of cleavage showing. She could tell he had committed to “buying” her long before he ever opened his mouth.

  “Two hundred,” she whispered, trying to sound her sexiest. She cooed at him as he eyed her up and down again, taking in every inch of her long legs.

  “Two hundred it is,” he whispered back, reached forward and grabbed a handful of her butt, kneading it painfully. But the woman didn’t break from her spiel, continuing to eye him with lustful eyes.

  “Follow me,” she said, curling a finger and beckoning for him to stay close. As she walked through the door and up the narrow staircase, she looked behind her, watching as his eyes fixated on her butt again. To keep them drawn, she swaggered it from side to side a little, noting his mouth opening as his tongue went to work.

  When she reached the top of the stairs, the cop tried to reach forward, hoping to grab another handful of her, but she was too quick and began to skip up the next flight. A cheeky snicker escaped her, bouncing up the stairs as the pair of them continued on. Only when she reached the very top of the stairs did she slow enough for him to get another feel.

  “Cone on, Captain…Don’t keep me waiting,” she oozed into his ear, then broke free and skipped down the hallway.

  “Hey, not so fast,” Dwight called out, feeling the hammer in his chest beating overtime. He wasn’t a young man anymore and stairs weren’t something he chose to do. If he had to exercise, as his doctor and wife kept telling him, then fucking hookers was a far better form of workout.

  “Come on, honey bun,” the woman cooed, beckoning for him to catch up. She held up a key, dangled it from side to side a few times, then unlocked the door. Before Dwight had a chance to catch up, she disappeared from the hallway, into a room where he planned to make her pay for choosing one so fucking high in a building with no elevator.

  He reached the door, briefly peered inside, then licked his lips again. He could already feel his prick warm in anticipation of what lay ahead. This wasn’t the first hooker he’d taken care of and she wasn’t going to be the last. In Dwight’s world, taking care of hookers was something he’d been born to do and they needed him as much as he needed them. They just didn’t know it yet.

  “Hey, you coming?”

  “Not yet, sweetheart,” he whispered as he closed the door behind him, then locked it just to be sure. After walking down the brief entrance, he poked his head into the dimly lit room where the bed was the only real piece of furniture.

  “It’s all we need,” he muttered to himself as he stepped towards the broad.

  The woman was standing on the other side of the bed and had already taken her top off. Her breasts pointed at him like accusatory fingers and he licked his lips again as the throbbing in his pants ramped up a notch.

  “And the rest,” he whispered, eyeing her up and down again. She looked perfect, although he normally didn’t favor dark women. He figured he didn’t choose them through habit and vowed to change that once he sampled what this one had to offer.

  She slipped off her skirt and stood before him wearing nothing but a red thong. As he stepped forward, the woman slid onto the bed and began to crawl towards him, staring up with eyes that he swore actually wanted him. It caught Dwight off guard and for a moment, hesitated to react when she reached for his pants and began tugging on his belt to bring him forward.

  He felt the throbbing increase further as she undid his belt, then rose onto her knees, thrusting her delicious chest out in the process.

  “You like ‘em?” she hissed hungrily at him and Dwight reached down, cupping each full breast in his hands.

  “Damn, these are fine,” he said, then leaned down and began to flick each of the nipples in turn with his tongue. The woman ran her fingers through his hair and pulled him closer, willing him to do more.

  “Yes, you do like ‘em,” she whispered, pulling his face even closer.

  Dwight peered up at her, squeezed one breast harder and began sucking on it in earnest, biting the soft flesh hard enough to make the woman wince. As his hand began to work its way down her body, slowly caressing the soft skin beneath his fingers, the woman began to moan.

  Just as he reached the top of the thong, his head started to feel giddy and by the time he managed to pull his face away from her, the room began to swim. With his legs failing him, Dwight looked up at the woman, now staring back at him with an expression resembling thunderheads. It was the last thing he saw before the world disappeared, his body dropping before her and hitting the floor hard.

  It was the taste in his mouth that Dwight first noticed when he regained consciousness. There wasn’t a sound in the room, but somewhere in the distance, he could hear the familiar blaring of a cab’s horn. That was followed by a siren and he was sure it was the sound of the cavalry coming to rescue him, but as it too faded from his ears, he knew no one would come.

  It took a little longer for his eyes to readjust to the room. Whilst it wasn’t completely dark, the light that did work, wasn’t doing such a hot job. The room was still bathed in more shadows and with no movement visible, for the briefest moment, Dwight thought he was alone.

  There was an annoying itch on the side of his face and as he tried to reach for it, something bit into the flesh of his wrist. He looked up and across to where his hand was tied to the bedhead, then shook it furiously as he realized he’d been tied down with his own cuffs.

  “What the fuck?”

  He tried to look around the room again and this time saw the dark shadow watching him from the corner. It didn’t move at first, but he knew who the eyes belonged to.

  “What the fuck do you want, bitch?” He tried to sound strong, but
his tone betrayed him, the panic it held, more than evident. As he looked further down, he saw that he was in fact naked, each arm and leg cuffed to the four posts of the bed. As a sign of defiance, Dwight pulled on his arms and legs at the same time, shaking the bed as hard as he could in the hope of somehow escaping his captor. But the cuffs held tight, doing what they had been designed to do with perfection.

  The shadow stepped slowly forward, the woman holding something up to the side of her face. Dwight couldn’t make out what it was at first, but then saw the familiar outline of the knife he kept taped to his ankle.

  “Let me go right now and you might survive this,” he snarled, bits of spit flying across his chest. He shook the bed for a second time, this time more desperate to break free.

  The woman reached the foot of the bed, lowered the knife and carefully ran the tip of the blade along the length of Dwight’s underfoot. Whilst not painful, it did give him a sense of terror as he felt the steel threaten the supple skin.

  “Isn’t this what you like, Dwight? To be in the presence of fear? Of pain?”

  “What?” The woman lifted the blade slightly and pointed it, taunting him with his own weapon.

  “Isn’t this how you like to treat women?”

  She lowered the knife again, this time dipping the tip down onto the bottom of his shin. He could feel the sharpness resting on his skin as sweat began to bead on his brow.