Read Online Benefit of the Doubt: A Novel by Neal Griffin - Free Book Online Page B

seconds for the tension to ease from his arms, and his breath was labored. After a moment’s pause, Harlan pulled back the pillow and looked at the dead woman’s shattered face. The bullet had caved in her forehead around a star-shaped hole big enough to stick his finger in, and he resisted a perverse desire to do just that. The body convulsed more than he thought it would, but he told himself the whore was dead. No one could live through an injury as traumatic as that. Sure enough, her legs and arms went still and her wide-open eyes were fast going dull.
    The rashness of his action concerned him. This was an unplanned kill brought on by the woman’s comments about Lipinski and, to a lesser degree, her overall irritating disposition. He gazed up at the mirrored ceiling and spoke to himself in a placid tone. “Keep this shit up and you’ll be locked up by the end of the week.”
    Giving no thought to panic, Harlan sat on the bed next to the dead prostitute and planned his exit. The gun had been effectively silenced, muffled by the pillow. He took a fistful of hair and lifted her head. The exit wound in the back of her skull meant the bullet was likely buried somewhere deep in the mattress. It’d take some effort and luck to find it. “Fuck all that diggin’ around.”
    She had picked the hotel and was probably a regular. No one would come looking for the room for a few more hours. He hadn’t been seen at check-in. The car in the parking lot was stolen from the next town over but clean of prints. He dug through her purse and smiled. Not only did he recover his own money but three hundred on top of it.
    “No surprise there, sister. You were a talent.” He gave her a hard swat on her bare ass and stood.
    Harlan spent ten minutes wiping down anything he might have touched, all the while carrying on a one-way conversation with the silent girl in bed, explaining how it was he’d come to be so ill-tempered. He stuck the bottle of Wild Turkey into his backpack and dropped the drinking glass onto the hard floor, shattering it into thousands of unprintable shards. He stopped to consider the body and thought for a moment, hands on his hips.
    “Bottle of whiskey is one thing, but I sure can’t be takin’ you along with me.”
    An idea came to him, and he carried the nude, lifeless prostitute to the bathroom. She dripped blood heavily along the way, but Harlan was cautious where he stepped. Small, she slid into the damp tub with room to spare. Harlan took hold by the scruff of her neck and pulled down on the jaw, opening her mouth to its full extension. The head lolled back and forth, making him lose his grip.
    “Hold still, bitch.” His voice was low and lightly laced with affection.
    Harlan turned the tap on full force, shooting water down her throat. Membrane and tissue bubbled out past her lips and cheeks; some pieces got caught in her open eyes and long hair. Harlan canted the head back and forth to clear away the more sizable chunks. Much of the water followed a path to the large exit wound, where it ran out red, then rose, and finally clear. For the mirth value he shot some water through the bullet hole before returning to her mouth and counting off another thirty seconds. He was amused to discover that he actually filled her. Her stomach bloated out and water gushed from the gaping mouth like a sheared-open fire hydrant.
    “That oughta rid ya of anything I left swimmin’ around.” He looked the corpse up and down. “Glad I didn’t go pokin’ around the rest of ya unsheathed. That’d been a mite more difficult situation to deal with.”
    He dropped her head against the porcelain bottom of the tub, where it landed with a strange tonk. She lay there, still warm and, from the neck down at least, not at all hard on the eyes.
    Harlan let the water run for another minute, using the showerhead to spray her down thoroughly. When he figured she was washed clean of him, he closed the drain and cranked the water to