Read Online Murder Is My Racquet by Otto Penzler - Free Book Online

dream. Like some tennis player driven deep into a corner of the court, left with only one unavoidable shot.
    He watched Julie glare out her window into the dark field where he stood. He watched her talk. This girl who was neither his flesh nor his blood, this alien creature who for fifteen years had lived within his household and who was now prospering only because he had wounded the wrong daughter. His own girl, her will broken, her precise, predictable, tireless stroke forever ruined. While this cheap impostor flourished.
    He watched Julie Shelton talk on the phone. He watched her shake her head in disdain and spit a few words into the receiver and jerk it away from her ear in a fit of disgust. Then he watched her pop to sudden attention, her face drained of allbut a last flicker of contempt. He watched her drop stiffly out of sight. Then he shifted his gaze to his wife, as Molly lifted her head and stared up at the ceiling where she must have heard a crash against the bedroom floor. He watched her cup her hand to her mouth and call out her daughter’s name. He watched her throw her dish towel down and hurry to the door, then halt abruptly and send one backward glance toward the window that looked out on the darkened field. Her eyes touching his for an icy instant.
    Roger Shelton stepped backward into the shadows and lowered his rifle. He listened to the fading echo of his shot. That single blast rippling through the humid air, loud and final, but already dissipating, in just those few seconds the waves of sound spreading outward, breaking up and scattering, until finally the blast was lost in the endless racket of the night.

PROMISE
    J OHN H ARVEY
    A t Wimbledon, Kiley found himself sharing overpriced strawberries and champagne with Adrian Costain, a sports agent he’d brushed up against a few times in his soccer days, and when Costain rang him a week later with the offer of some private work, he thought, why not?
    So here he was, ten years down the line from his twenty-five minutes of fame, a private investigator with an office, a computer, pager, fax and phone; a small but growing clientele, a backlog of successfully resolved, mostly sports-associated cases.
    Jack Kiley, whatever happened to him?
    Well, now you know.
    • • •
    K iley was alone in his office, August 3. Two rooms above a bookshop in Belsize Park. A bathroom he shared with the financial consultant whose office was on the upper floor.
    “So what d’you think?” Kate had asked him the first time they’d looked round. “Perfect, no?” Kate having been tipped off by her friend, Lauren, who managed the shop below.
    “Perfect, maybe. But rents in this part of London… there’s no way I could afford it.”
    “Jack!”
    “It’s all I can do to keep up with the payments on the flat.”
    “Then let it go.”
    “What?”
    “The flat, let it go.”
    Kiley had stared around. “And live here?”
    “No, fool. Move in with me.”
    So now Kiley’s name was there in neat lettering, upper- and lowercase, on the glass of the outer door. The office chair behind the glass-topped desk was angled round, suggesting his secretary had just popped out and would be back. As she might, were she to exist. In her stead, there was Irena, a young Romanian who waited on tables across the street at Cafe Pasta, and two mornings a week did Kiley’s filing for him, a little basic word processing, talked to him of the squares and avenues of Bucharest, excursions to the Black Sea, of storks that nested by the sides of country roads.
    In Kiley’s inner sanctum were a smaller desk, oak-faced, an easy chair, a couch on which he sometimes napped, a radio, a TV whose screen he could span with one outstretched hand. There was a plant, jasmine, tiny white flowers amongst a plethora of glossed green leaves; a barely troubled bottle of single malt; a framed print Kate had presented him with when he moved in: two broad bands of cream resting across a field of mottled gray, the