I Died In His Sick Game novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Flare
I stayed on my knees in the boat.
"Your boat?" I said. "It's got Bradley's name on it."
"Everything's got Bradley's name on it." Kendra smiled. "I'm the one who drives."
Eli had his phone up.
"Put that down," she said, "or I'll put a flare in her face."
"Kendra," I said. "There are people asleep on these boats."
"Then be quiet."
She came two steps down the finger pier.
The duffel bag swung on her shoulder. Something in it sloshed.
Gasoline.
She hadn't come to get anything off this boat.
She'd come to burn it.
"You should have let it go," she said. "You had the house. You had the custody. You had your little shark man. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut."
"Like the captain?"
Her face did the thing again. The blank thing.
"She was going to tell Bradley," I said. "Wasn't she? She came out to the island to tell him what you paid her to do."
"She was a drunk who wanted more money."
"And you put her in the lake."
"I put her where nobody would look," Kendra said. "And then Bradley decided he wanted a pool."
She laughed.
It was a short, ugly sound, nothing like her TV laugh.
"Ten months, Abby. I watched you every night. Do you know what you looked like? Holding her up to the camera, begging?"
"Yes," I said. "I was there."
"You looked like a dog," she said.
Eli's thumb moved on his phone.
She saw it.
She swung the flare gun at him and fired.
The noise was enormous.
A ball of red fire shot past my head so close I felt the heat on my ear.
It hit the blue canvas behind me and burst.
The whole cover went up at once.
Eli grabbed my arm and hauled me out of the boat onto the dock, and we went down together on the boards.
When I looked up, Kendra was running.
Her shoes slapped down the main dock toward the parking lot.
The duffel bag lay where she'd dropped it.
The boat was burning.
"The sunglasses," I said. "Eli, the sunglasses are on the seat."
He was already moving.
There was a red fire extinguisher in a box on a post at the head of the row. He smashed the little glass panel with his elbow and pulled it out.
He came back down the pier and emptied it into the boat in long white blasts.
The canvas hissed and blackened and went out.
Lights were coming on all along the marina.
Somebody on a sailboat was yelling.
I crawled to the edge of the dock and looked in.
The cover was a black rag. The seat cushion was scorched.
On the seat, gray with powder, lay a pair of mirrored sunglasses on an orange strap.
I started to laugh, and then I couldn't stop, and then I was crying.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of I Died In His Sick Game are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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