Read Online Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set by F. Paul Wilson, Blake Crouch, Scott Nicholson, Jeff Strand, Jack Kilborn, J. A. Konrath, Iain Rob Wright, Jordan Crouch - Free Book Online

home, Charlie.”
    “Let me be, Emilio.  I’m settled in here.  I’m not bothering anybody.  I’m actually happy here.  Just tell Dad you couldn’t find me.”
    “That would be lying, Charlie.  And I never lie...to your dad.”
    He grabbed the boy under his right arm and began to pull him from his seat.  Charlie tried to wriggle free but it was like a Chihuahua resisting a pitbull.
    The guy in the other half of the booth stood and gave Emilio a two-handed shove.
    “Get your mitts off him, fucker!”
    He was beefier than Charlie, with decent pecs and a good set of shoulders under the T-shirt and leather vest he wore, but he was out of his league.  Way out. 
    “No me jodas!” Emilio said and smashed a right uppercut to his jaw that slammed him back into the inner corner of the booth.  He slumped there and stared up at Emilio with a look of dazed pain.
    Emilio turned and started dragging Charlie toward the door, knocking over tables in his way.  He didn’t want a full-scale brawl but he wouldn’t have minded another maricon or two trying to block his way.  But most of them seemed too surprised and off guard to react.  Too bad.  He was in the mood to kick some ass.  He saw the bartender come out from behind the bar hefting an aluminum baseball bat.  Decker and Mol intercepted him, and after a brief struggle Mol was holding the bat and the bartender was back behind the bar.
    Once he was free of the tables, Emilio swung the stumbling Charlie around in front of him and propelled him toward the door.  Decker and Mol closed in behind them as they exited.  Emilio heard the bat clank on the floor as the doors swung closed.  Half a dozen steps across the sidewalk and then they were all inside the limo, heading uptown.
    Charlie opened the door on the other side but Emilio pulled him back before he could jump out.
    “You’ll get killed that way, kid.”
    “I don’t care!” Charlie said.  “Dammit, Emilio, you can’t do this!  It’s kidnapping!”
    “Just following orders.  Your father misses you.”
    “Yeah.  Sure.”
    Charlie folded his arms and legs and withdrew into himself.  He spent the rest of the trip staring at the floor.
    Emilio kept a close eye on him.  He didn’t want him trying to jump out of the car again--although that might be a blessing for all concerned.
    He sighed.  Why did the Senador want this miserable creature around?  He seemed to love the boy despite the threat posed by his twisted nature.  Was that parenthood?  Was that what fathering a child did to you?  Made you lose your perspective?  Emilio was glad he’d spared himself the affliction.  But if he’d had a child, a boy, he’d never have let him grow up to be a maricon .  He would have beaten that out of him at an early age.
    What if Charlie did die by leaping from a moving vehicle?  Or what if he fell prey to a hit-and-run driver?  A major stumbling block on the Senador ’s road to the White House would be removed. 
    Emilio decided to start keeping a mental file of “accidental” ways for Charlie to die should the need suddenly arise.  The Senador would never order it, but if the need ever arose, Emilio might decide to act on his own.
     

 
     
    I was two decades and a half in the desert when they came to me.  How they found me, I do not know.  Perhaps the Lord guided them.  Perhaps they followed the reek of my corruption. 
    They too were in flight, hiding from the Romans and their lackeys in the Temple.  The brother of He whose name I deserve not to speak led them.  They were awed by my appearance, and I by theirs.  Barely did I recognize them, so exhausted were they by their trek.
    I was astounded to learn that they had brought the Mother with them. 
     
    --from the Glass scroll
    Rockefeller Museum translation
     
    FOUR
     
    Father Dan Fitzpatrick strolled the narrow streets of his Lower East Side parish and drank in the colors flowing around him.  Sure there was squalor here, and