Danse Macabre Read online

  Danse Macabre

  A Lou Thorne Thriller

  Kory M. Shrum

  Contents

  An Exclusive Offer For You

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Thank you!

  Get Your Three Free Books Today

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kory M. Shrum

  Copyright

  An Exclusive Offer For You

  Connecting with my readers is the best part of my job as a writer. One way that I like to connect is by sending 2-3 newsletters a month with a subscribers-only giveaway, free stories from your favorite series, and personal updates (read: pictures of my dog).

  When you first sign up for the mailing list, I send you at least three free stories right away.

  If giveaways and free stories sound like something you’re interested in, please look for the special offer in the back of this book.

  * * *

  Happy reading.

  Kory

  In Memoriam

  for Arthur J. Fedor

  1950-2014

  Thank you for your wisdom and tender kindness.

  Thank you for patiently pointing out the path.

  Prologue

  Lou held tight to the top of the trucks as they plowed east through the winter night. Snow fell from the black sky, illuminated momentarily by headlights.

  A bright moon loomed overhead.

  Lou took a breath and faded through the frosty roof of the truck. When the world reformed around her, she was crouching between the two front seats and the men who occupied them.

  She pulled her gun and put a bullet in the driver first. The truck careened, rumbling off into the frozen field.

  The passenger tried to grab the CB, but one shot splattered his brains across the window. The bullet passed straight through the head and into the wall of the truck. The hole whistled as air leaked through.

  Lou shoved into the driver seat and wrenched open the door. She pushed the body out into the snow and slammed on the brakes. They screeched and squealed as the truck slid to a stop on the packed ice.

  Then Lou was gone again, fading through the shadows into the next truck in the caravan. These men were as easy to dispatch at the first. But then the other trucks were stopping, brakes squealing. Men spilled into the night and ran toward Lou on either side of the caravan. She remained in her seat until the last moment.

  Then she slid through the dark to the truck’s underbelly. Her knee pressed into the cold snow as the men tore open the doors and wrenched out the bodies.

  Lou spared a bullet for every leg she could target—five in all. Then she shifted through the dark again to the front of the next truck.

  As the men scrambled, trying to find the source of the attack, Lou picked them off one by one until only she prevailed.

  The caravan idled in the desolate road. No noise remained but the gentle hum of engines and the crunch of frosty grass beneath her boots. No witnesses saw the twenty murders, except the large, unblinking moon.

  She opened the back of one of the trucks and peered into its belly. Pallets of heroin sat crammed in tight, each laden with plastic bricks.

  She tossed in a grenade and slammed the door shut. She escaped to the next truck before the expected Boom! lifted all four wheels off the snow.

  Then she did it again and again, watching as each truck was thrown flaming into the air before crashing down again. She felt the heat even from a safe distance.

  She watched the drugs burn.

  As the flames died to a lazy smolder, Lou searched the glowing moonlit fields. Silence rang in her ear. She counted the bodies heaped on the snow, their blood sprayed out behind each. It gave the impression that they had fallen from the sky, landing broken.

  Something moved.

  One hunched form dragged itself away from the wreckage. Lou closed the distance, white smoke fogging in front of her face.

  It was a young man, shot and bleeding. The snow beneath him was black with it.

  “Будьте добры!” he cried. On his back, he held his hands out in front of him like a shield. Bright crimson burned in his cheeks and his eyes shone in the moonlight. Snow collected in his blond hair.

  “I don’t speak Russian,” she said, and pointed the eye of her Beretta.

  “Please,” he said again, in English. “I didn’t want this. My father—”

  The shot rang out. He spoke no more.

  1

  Two Months Later

  Lou woke with a start. Bolting upright, she found herself on the edge of her mattress, her feet bare on the cool wooden floor. She stared at her blood-crusted arm, at her flaking skin without seeing it.

  Instead she saw the boy on the snow. It had been the same dream for months. When she’d finally fall asleep, she’d find herself in the snowy night again. Every detail of the dream had felt real. The frost on the back of her neck and the warm blood steaming on her hands.

  And it always ended the same way. From the flat of his back, he begged for his life. The moment before she shot him, he’d turn into her father. She pulled the trigger anyway.

  It was the gunshot that sent her careening into wakefulness.

  Her head hurt. Her upper back hurt. She rolled her neck and elicited a thunderous crack up each side.

  She shouldn’t have engaged that sixth attacker in the parking lot last night. Not in her condition.

  She could still smell the beer on his breath as she’d wrenched his head back, staring into his wide, fearful eyes. But she hadn’t pulled her gun, hadn’t been able to.

  What was the point?

  Every night this week she’d roamed the streets. Sometimes she walked for hours through the most dangerous districts she knew. If anyone made the mistake of approaching her, she’d take them on.

  Not with her gun. She’d slam her fist over and over into muscle and bone. She’d split skin—her own and theirs—until blood ran.

  Yet she couldn’t pull her gun.

  The cold, quiet rage she needed to lift her Beretta from its holster never came, never overtook her the way some demon overtook its host before feeding.

  She blamed Konstantine. And her aunt. Even King was far from innocent. They’d churned these waters. Now it was too murky to see where she stood.

  Her father’s vision of the world had been easier.

  Here were the bad guys. Here were the good.

  When she’d found the desire to pull her gun, her mind was the betrayer.

  What if he has a child at home? What if she loves him? What if killing him breaks her the way Jack’s death broke you?

  Her mind had taunted her with these unanswerable questions and the man at the end of her Beretta’s sight had run. He’d run from the bar parking lot into the darkness and she’d let
him go, finding she could only watch him disappear.

  The heat, the thirst to kill had left as quickly as it came.

  The insomnia wasn’t helping. How could one have a clear head with endless sleepless nights? When was the last time she’d slept? When was the last time she’d actually put her head on this pillow, closed her eyes, and let the exhaustion take her?

  She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since her aunt Lucy died. Three months of nothing more than power naps and treating her body like a punching bag.

  It’s going to catch up to you, a familiar voice warned. It was her father. She didn’t need advice from the dead.

  They weren’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. She dragged her hand down her face, trying to get out from under the weight of exhaustion.

  A knock sounded through her apartment.

  I’m dreaming, she thought. She regarded the front door as if she’d never seen it before.

  Perhaps that was because in the six years she’d lived in this apartment no one had ever knocked on it. The only person who had even known the address was Aunt Lucy. This wasn’t Christmas Eve. No ghostly visits scheduled.

  A second knock tapped out its rhythm and her heart leapt to life in her chest. She was awake and someone was here.

  Without thinking, Lou crossed her living room. Past the mattress on the floor, past the sofa and glass coffee table, and stepped into her linen closet. Her back pressed into the wooden walls.

  The darkness softened around her, falling away. She slipped through it.

  Another set of walls formed around her. She pushed open the door and stepped into the empty apartment down the hallway. This kitchen reeked of pine-scented cleaner. Her bare feet padded silently across the cold floor. Once she reached the front door, slowly she cracked it enough to see her own door down the hallway.

  It was a boy knocking.

  He was eighteen maybe, with a courier bag slung over his shoulder and a bicycle helmet hanging in one hand. Shifting his weight, he sighed, clearly annoyed.

  He rapped on her door for a third time before calling out. “I’m not a Mormon or anything, okay? And I don’t want to sell you shit. I have this letter for you.” He held the letter up to his face, squinting at the small print on the front of the envelope. “Ms. Thorne, I need you to sign for it.”

  Lou eased the apartment door closed.

  As if you would have shot him anyway, a cruel voice chided. You haven’t shot so much as an empty can in two months.

  The vacant pantry returned her to her own apartment. It took only a breath to slip through the darkness again and find her warmer home as she’d left it.

  She placed her Beretta on the kitchen island as she crossed to the door. When she opened the door, she found the kid was halfway down the hall.

  “Hey,” she called out. “I’m here.”

  He looked relieved, even though he had to come back. “Thank god. This building has a thousand steps and no freaking elevator. No offense, but I didn’t want to come back.”

  She only regarded him, extending her hand for the letter.

  “Oh right.” He pulled a plastic blue ink pen from behind his ear. “I need you to sign this sheet.”

  She waited for him to pull the folded sheet of paper out of his coat pocket. She signed it against the door jamb, the grain pressing through the paper and making her letters wobble on the page.

  “Thanks,” the kid said, his thin lips pulling into a bright grin. “Here you go.”

  He handed over the envelope. It was cream, a nice thick paper with red lettering in the top right corner. Her name was printed in black ink, slanting forward.

  Hammerstein, Holt and Locke Attorneys at Law it said in the return corner. Lou wondered if she would have to murder a band of lawyers tonight.

  The kid was staring.

  Lou followed his gaze to the Beretta on the kitchen island and then to the blood drying on both her arms. She didn’t think it was the thick, black grime under her nails that had doubled the size of his eyes. She looked like she’d clawed her way out of hell.

  Kill him, the cruel voice taunted. You can’t let him go. He could tell someone. He could bring them back here.

  “Anything else?” she asked him, searching his eyes for danger.

  He shook his head vigorously. “Nah, we’re cool.”

  He backed away.

  You’re making a mistake. He could end you tonight.

  Yet Lou didn’t move.

  “H-happy New Year,” the kid said and ducked through the door beneath the marked EXIT sign as if he expected her to give chase.

  New year, she thought, closing and locking her front door.

  A BOOM, HISS rose suddenly.

  The first firework of the evening exploded in the sky, raining orange ribbons of light over the dark Mississippi river.

  She turned the envelope over and slid a thumb under the flap.

  2

  King scrolled through his BlackBerry, checking his messages as he stood in line for coffee. He deleted the junk from his inbox and sorted the messages that required more attention than he could give right now into his priority folder.

  They were two days from opening The Crescent City Detective Agency for public inquiries. Not that his desk wasn’t already overflowing with opportunities, mostly freelance from his old contacts in law enforcement looking for help with the cases they were building.

  “Robbie,” a woman chimed.

  King looked up from his phone and saw Suze, tall, blonde with a bright smile behind the Café du Monde checkout counter. Her apron was dusted with flour and powdered sugar. The lines by her eyes crinkled with her bittersweet smile. She reached her hand across the counter palm up in offering.

  He took it and squeezed her hand. Granules of flour and sugar rubbed between their palms. She had strong hands. No doubt from making donuts every morning for twenty years.

  “What are you doing behind the counter?” he asked. “Aren’t owners supposed to have their feet propped up in front of the fire, watching the profits roll in?”

  She laughed. “You’ve clearly never run a business, Robbie. Besides half my girls are out sick with the flu and the rest of us are pushing to close early.”

  “For New Year’s?” he asked, slipping his phone into his pocket.

  “Yes, though I’ll be out cold before ten.” She tapped her pen against the notepad. “You want your usual?”

  “A large black coffee, yes.”

  “What about the beignets? Full order or half?”

  He patted his flat stomach. “I’m getting the jump on my resolution.”

  Though in truth, King had cut back on the cream and sugar and all his sweets before October. And the last of his cravings had been cut short with Lucy’s death.

  Grief robbed him of his appetite. Among other things.

  “How you holding up?” Suze asked, as if sensing his mind’s dark shift.

  “I’m fine,” he said and wondered if he really was. Or if he’d only said this line so many times he was now able to deliver it convincingly. “The agency opens in two days.”

  “Congratulations,” she said, pouring out the large coffee in one of their Styrofoam cups, a green logo stamped into its side. “It’ll be good to keep your mind busy.”

  She handed over the coffee, but also a greasy sack of hot beignets despite his protests.

  Suze refused to take them back. “Give them to the girls if you want, but take ‘em.”

  He put his $10 bill on the counter, thanked her and walked away before she could give him change.

  Once out of the protection of the overhead umbrella, the cold winter wind struck him across the cheeks, pulling water from his eyes. The line for coffee and donuts was so long now that it snaked out from beneath the green canopy and into the French Quarter surrounding it. The bodies, huddled for warmth, followed the wrought iron outline of the café’s patio.

  King felt the heat radiating from the sack of donuts in his cold fist a
s he crossed Jackson Square. He was about to turn onto Royal Street when a dirty bundle stirred at his feet.

  A man emerged from under his threadbare blanket. He eyed the greasy white sack in King’s fist enviously.

  King held it toward him. “You like donuts?”

  The dirty man nodded hesitantly as if he expected King to pull back the bag and laugh.

  It hurt King to see it. “Here you go. They’re yours. Where’re your socks?”

  He pointed at the man’s bare feet.

  “Ain’t got any.” The man opened the sack to peer inside. His fingers smeared dirt across the white paper. “Someone stole ‘em while I was sleepin’.”

  “I’ll fix that,” King said. “You need anything else?”

  The man seemed to consider the question seriously. “Nah. Just some thick socks.”

  “Will you be around here?” King asked, gesturing to the square.

  “Yeah, for a bit.”

  With a nod, King turned down Royal Street, and ambled toward the St. Peter intersection. He sipped his coffee, feeling the warmth slide down his throat and fill his chest. He should’ve given the man the coffee too. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him and now he felt shame for having overlooked the obvious.

  It would’ve warmed him better. I could’ve done better.

  Are you talking about Lucy or the homeless man? he asked himself.