Thriller: Stories To Keep You Up All Night. Литагент HarperCollins USD

      One gun beats two knives.

      He took three in the chest and two in the neck before he dropped.

      The last guy, the guy who’d broken my nose, grabbed my shotgun and dived behind the couch.

      Chck chck. He ejected the shell and racked another into the chamber. I pulled the Glock’s magazine and slammed a fresh one home.

       “Hijo calvo de una perra!”

      Again with the bald son of a bitch taunt. I worked through my hurt feelings and crawled to an end table, tipping it over and getting behind it.

      The shotgun boomed. Had it been loaded with shot, it would have torn through the cheap particleboard and turned me into ground beef. Or ground hijo calvo de una perra. But at that distance, the granules didn’t do much more than make a loud noise.

      The banger apparently didn’t learn from experience, because he tried twice more with similar results, and then the shotgun was empty.

      I stood up from behind the table, my heart a lump in my throat and my hands shaking with adrenaline.

      The King turned and ran.

      His back was an easy target.

      I took a quick look around, making sure everyone was down or out, and then went to retrieve my shotgun. I loaded five more shells and approached the downed leader, who was sucking carpet and whimpering. The wounds in his back were ugly, but he still made a feeble effort to crawl away.

      I bent down, turned him over and shoved the barrel of the Mossberg between his bloody lips.

      “You remember Sunny Lung,” I said, and fired.

      It wasn’t pretty. It also wasn’t fatal. The granules blew out his cheeks and tore into his throat, but somehow the guy managed to keep breathing.

      I gave him one more, jamming the gun farther down the wreck of his face.

      That did the trick.

      The second perp, the one I’d blinded, had passed out on the bathroom floor. His face didn’t look like a face anymore, and blood bubbles were coming out of the hole where his mouth would have been.

      “Sunny Lung sends her regards,” I said.

      This time I pushed the gun in deep, and the first shot did the trick, blowing through his throat.

      The last guy, the one who made like Pavarotti when I took out his knee, left a blood smear from the hall into the kitchen. He cowered in the corner, a dishrag pressed to his leg.

      “Don’t kill me, man! Don’t kill me!”

      “I bet Sunny Lung said the same thing.”

      The Mossberg thundered twice; once to the chest, and once to the head.

      It wasn’t enough. What was left alive gasped for air.

      I removed the bag of granules from my pocket, took out a handful and shoved them down his throat until he stopped breathing.

      Then I went to the bathroom and threw up in the sink.

      Sirens wailed in the distance. Time to go. I washed my hands, and then rinsed off the barrel of the Mossberg, holstering it in my rig.

      In the hallway, the kid I emasculated was clutching himself between the legs, sobbing.

      “There’s always the priesthood,” I told him, and got out of there.

      My nose was still clogged, but I managed to get enough coke up there to damper the pain. Before closing time I stopped by the bakery, and Ti greeted me with a somber nod.

      “Saw the news. They said it was a massacre.”

      “Wasn’t pretty.”

      “You did as we said?”

      “I did, Ti. Your daughter got her revenge. She’s the one that killed them. All three.”

      I fished out the bag of granules and handed it to her father. Sunny’s cremated remains.

      “Xie xie,” Ti said, thanking me in Mandarin. He held out an envelope filled with cash.

      He looked uncomfortable, and I had drugs to buy, so I took the money and left without another word.

      An hour later I’d filled my codeine prescription, picked up two bottles of tequila and a skinny hooker with track marks on her arms, and had a party back at my place. I popped and drank and screwed and snorted, trying to blot out the memory of the last two days. And of the last six months.

      That’s when I’d been diagnosed. A week before my wedding day. My gift to my bride-to-be was running away so she wouldn’t have to watch me die of cancer.

      Those Latin Kings this morning, they got off easy. They didn’t see it coming.

      Seeing it coming is so much worse.

      Heather Graham

      Heather Graham has spent her life in the Miami area and frequently uses her home arena as the setting in her novels. She sometimes considers that it’s quite a bit like living in a theater of the absurd. Where else can you mix such a cosmopolitan, big-city venue with traces of a distant past? The place has it all. Snowbirds blending with the Old South. The Everglades, where proud tribes of Native Americans still live. And the sultry “river of grass,” which affords deadly opportunities for the drug trade and convenient hiding spots for bodies that may never surface again.

      Graham loves her hometown, the water, boating, and one of her main passions, scuba diving. She says that loving Miami is like loving a child. You have to accept it for the good and bad. Graham is known for creating locations that live and breathe—becoming as much a character in her books as the people who propel them. A multi-award-winning author, continually reaching New York Times and USA TODAY lists, she’s glad to work in several venues, including vampire, historical, ghost and suspense. Whatever time or place she’s dealing in, Graham loves to keep her readers on edge. With The Face in the Window she takes characters from her thriller, The Island, and sets them in the midst of an unexpected storm with unexpected consequences.

      The Face In The Window

      Lightning flashed.

      Thunder cracked.

      It might have been the end of the world.

      And there, cast eerily in the window, pressed against it, was a face. The eyes were red; they seemed to glow, like demon eyes. There was a split second when it seemed the storm had cast up the very devil to come for her.

      Startled, Beth Henson let out a scream, backing away from the image, almost tripping over the coffee table behind her. The brilliant illumination created by the lightning faded to black, and along with it, the image of the face.

      Beyond the window, darkness reigned again.

      A lantern burned on the table, a muted glow against the shadowed darkness of night. The storm had long since blown out the electricity as it should have removed other inhabitants from the area. The wind railed with the sharpness of a banshee’s shriek, even though the hurricane had wound down to tropical-storm strength before descending upon the lower Florida Keys.

      Instinctive terror reigned in Beth’s heart for several long seconds, then compassion overrode it. Someone was out there, drenched and frightened in the storm. She had gone to the window to see if she could find any sign of Keith. He had left her when their last phone communication with the sheriff had warned them that Mrs. Peterson—one of the few full-time residents of the tiny key—had failed to evacuate. She wouldn’t leave for a shelter, not when the shelters wouldn’t allow her to bring Cocoa, her tiny Yorkie. Okay, so Cocoa could be a pain, but she and Keith could understand the elderly woman’s love for her pup and companion, and Beth had convinced Keith they could listen to a bit of barking.

      The appearance