Read Online Renewal 6 - Cold by Jf Perkins - Free Book Online

idea at the time, and I got a couple of counties worth of scared morons to show for it,” the Dragon said with obvious pride.
    “Good for you, I guess. Why not just ride in with a typical band of pirates, shoot a few innocents for the fear factor, and steal what you want?”
    “Well, the interesting part is that it not only works on the morons, it works on my people as well. Some of them actually believe in that shit. Just to keep ‘em happy, we cleared the region of non-whites years ago. I figure if you’re killing for show, might as well have a show.”
    “What about your boy? Does he believe in it?”
    “Hell, no. I taught him better than that. He believes in nothing, except taking whatever he wants. I guess you know... The next thing he wants is that asshole you sent to kill me.”
    “Yeah, I heard. The interesting part from my end is that I sent Bill Carter to find out what happened. If he missed your show, odds are he would have headed straight back here to report, and by the time we got our act together, you would have been long gone. After you decided to burn two good men to death, he felt morally obligated to stick around and kill you.”
    “He missed,” the Dragon said with a snarl.
    Charlie pulled out a case of cigarettes he had brought, though he didn’t smoke. “Want one?”
    “Why not? Nobody lives long enough for cancer these days.” The Dragon got up from his bunk, and took three slow steps across the cell. He ended up facing Charlie from eighteen inches away, legs spread in a defiant stance and head tilted back to look the taller man in the eye.
    “So, I’m just curious. We only have witnesses for the last two, but how many men have you killed?” Charlie asked, as the Dragon took a cigarette and waited for Charlie to light it.
    “Myself, just a few. Like I said, I have people for that.”
    “Ok, how many have you had killed?”
    “Hundreds... Thousands, maybe... Who knows? Who cares? You can’t hang me for any of them. Hell, you can’t hang me for the rapes, or the robbery, or the towns I burned to the ground. None of it,” the Dragon said with the demeanor of a man who just won an Olympic medal.
    “You’re right, Dragon. I can’t, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I will rid the world of you and save all the victims you haven’t touched yet.”
    “Whatever helps you sleep, big man.” The Dragon took a long drag on the cigarette, and leaned his head back to blow the smoke into the air. His arrogance was incredible. “Personally, I thi...”
    Charlie’s silenced bullet entered below the Dragon’s jaw, passed right through his reptilian brain stem and erupted from the back of his skull with a small spray of bone, hair, blood, and gray matter. The Dragon dropped like a sack of horse feed.
    Charlie made two more mistakes, aside from the obvious. The silenced gun was not nearly as quiet as he had believed. The sharp, slithering crack echoed off every hard surface in the cell jail. He expected the door to open any second, but it did not. The second mistake was that the Dragon’s body fell in a way that left the hands well inside the cell. After slipping on a pair of leather gloves, Charlie had to drop to his hands and knees, stretching his arm to the limit in order to place the tiny pistol in the Dragon’s dead hand.
    The Attorney General was feeling the need to finish the job. He peeled the gloves and strode back to the Judge’s cell. Charlie fought the strong urge to put a bullet in the man’s back and to run out the door. Instead, he rapped on the Judge’s bar with the pistol, and put it back inside his coat. Jerry Doan Jenkins stopped snoring, and looked over his shoulder at Charlie.
    “... The hell...” the Judge muttered.
    “Get over here, Jenkins. I got a couple questions for you.”
    “You can just bugger off.”
    “You’re not going to want to miss what I have to say. It concerns your family.”
    The Judge’s eyes opened wide. He rolled off the cot