Read Online Scream Catcher by Vincent Zandri - Free Book Online

Elated to depressed in two-point-three seconds. If he didn’t get it before, he gets it now. Cop Job: Jude’s very own testament regarding his fear, his lack of grace under pressure. What Lino is trying to say of course is that Mann considers Jude unreliable at best—a man who could very well have passed out from fear before the murder even occurred.
    As if sensing his son’s disappointment, Mack gives his son a glare that Jude immediately interprets as Let’s get the hell out of here .
    “There’s something you should see,” he says.

13
     
    Wild Bill’s All Day/All Night Video Arcade
    Tuesday, 12:10 P.M.
     
    Moving through the gauntlet of chain-smoking teens loitering outside the glass entry, Mack leads Jude into a dimly lit game room. The old Captain shoots and scoots around the dozens of stand-alone game systems like a pro running back through high school-level linebackers. Only when he comes upon a game that occupies a space of honor in the building’s far corner does Mack stop.
    Jude swallows a lump of bitter anxiety.
    Stepping up behind his father, he’s surprised to see that a young boy is playing the game. The nine or ten year old kid’s face is glued to the big screen while he uses both hands to maneuver the game’s colorful buttons and controls. Unhindered by the adult intrusion, the boy plays on as if Mack and Jude do not exist. And Jude can only guess that for a young boy wrapped up in a fantasy cyber world, they don’t.
    “Keep your big brown eyes peeled to the screen,” Mack whispers.
    That the video game has been set inside a kind of dark tunnel is obvious to Jude. The game’s object however, is not. But the walls, ceiling and floor appear to be a computer animated rendering of concrete, like Hitler’s bunker or the basement of a maximum security prison. Caged wall-mounted light fixtures give off an eerie glow. But when a small circle of bright white light appears, Jude knows that the game is about to begin.
    We see a man.
    He’s been designed to look like a grotesquely skinny, raggedy kind of man, dressed only in white briefs. Tighty Whitey. Long, pale, almost glowing face is waxed with fear and pain. Eyes wide and enormous; cheeks not sunken but caved in; wild straw hair; protruding chin; skin pockmarked or blanched with big black and blue welts. Tighty Whitey is breathing harder than hard as he runs away from what Jude now sees as a second more mysterious man. This one dressed entirely in black. By the looks of it, the dark man’s purpose in video game life is to chase the skinny man through the dark corridor.
    Assuming the role of the first person player, the little boy controls the dark man by making him shoot Tighty Whitey in the back with a pump action shotgun.
    Kid shoots and shoots.
    But instead of falling dead, Tighty Whitey issues forth a series of shattering screams while he is miraculously able to take shotgun blast after shotgun blast to the back. Meanwhile, an electronic scoreboard located at the bottom right hand of the screen rapidly accumulates hit points.
    Those screams. Are they the real thing?
    Jude gets it. That is, he gets why Mack brought him out here in the first place. It’s all about Hector Lennox’s backstory; about his scream catching. It’s about who Lennox really is and what he’s done. Lennox, acting as his alter ego, the Black Dragon, is the major suspect in two previous kill game-style murders. One that took place somewhere in and around the Hudson River and before that, inside an abandoned tanning factory.
    The dark concrete bunker setting of this video game…could it be an abandoned tanning factory? What the ex-cop must ask himself is this: is this video game a computerized reproduction of an actual thrill kill that took place four years prior, curdling screams and all? By making Jude witness this game, is Mack not only revealing a murder site, but the actual murder itself?
    Times are changing.
    It’s no longer good enough for a killer to steal off