Preview of "SCREAM CATCHER"

Chapter 1

Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 6:30 A.M.

BUT JUDE IS NOT DEAD.

Instead he’s jarred awake to the voices that belong to the handful of boxing students who’ve arrived at the gym for their early morning, pre-work workouts, two of whom promptly assist him off the damp pavement.

Standing awkwardly, out of balance, eyesight blurred to the point of being blinded, he’s become the crippled sum total of his fear. He begins to realize that there is both good and bad news in his situation.

First the good news: the bullet discharged from the killer’s silenced automatic only grazed the right side of his skull. The bullet, while knocking him out cold, did not penetrate the brainpan.

As for the bad news: his skull feels like it’s been rammed into the block wall.

His head rings and throbs with jolts of pain. His swelled brain feels like it’s about to explode out the ears, eyes and nostrils. Something is bothering Jude, too. Something that only a former cop can’t help but contemplate: if the long-haired killer finds out he missed his target, he’ll have no choice but to hunt Jude down, destroy the eyewitness to a murder.

* * *

The Lake George summer tourist paradise is gearing up for another beautiful beach ball-cotton candy day. The newly risen sun has already burned off the predawn rain. Maybe Jude has no way of seeing them clearly, but he can feel the rays warm on his face. Sweatpants and sweatshirt are heavy with the rainwater that’s saturated them; sneakers damp, squishy, his feet itching.

His fellow boxing students do their best to hold him upright and steady, one on each arm. He tries with all his powers to regain his equilibrium while big iron bells relentlessly toll inside a bruised skull. But the imaginary bells are not loud enough to drown out the distressed voices of the boxing students.

Managing to free himself from their grips, Jude stumbles a step forward, gently touches his head wound with the tips of his fingers, comes away with sticky blood. From where he’s standing, he’s able to make out one student who’s crying inconsolably, another student ordering the distraught woman, “Don’t look at it!” referring no doubt to the assassinated T-shirted man. Yet a third student—this one a man—asks him if he’s going to be okay.

“I’m having trouble seeing,” he whispers. “But it’ll pass.”

“Police are on their way,” the same man adds in a shaky voice. “So is Jimmy Mack and an ambulance.”

At the mention of his adoptive father and former L.G.P.D. boss, Jude feels a knot begin to twist itself around his intestines. Not only did he witness a murder, but he froze up, allowed the murderer to get away. That clearly in mind, he isn’t sure if he can bear to look into Mack’s face when the old Captain finds out about it. Maybe he has no idea how Mack will react. But already he can taste the top cop’s disappointment on his tongue, as if he’s just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk.

By the time the first emergency siren can be heard blaring from out of the near distance, the sight is already returning to his eyes.

Chapter 2

Wooded knoll behind Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 6:37 A.M.

BRIGHT BLUE EYES PEER through the narrow tree branch openings.

Eyes focused not on all the people scattered behind the boxing gym, but instead on one man. A man the people sometimes refer to as Jude and at other times as Parish. A former Lake George policeman turned best-selling author. Or so the people whisper to one another.

Blue Eyes sees that Parish stands a bit unsteady, wobbly. The ex-cop is holding his head in his hands. When Parish finally raises his head up, Blue Eyes spots the small but noticeable gash between the temple and the right ear lobe. It’s where the .22 caliber round from the silenced automatic must have grazed him instead of killing him.

Blaring from out of the distance, sirens.

The police are coming . . .

Black Dragon studies the face of Jude Parish, commits it to memory. Black Dragon wants to hear Jude Parish scream.

In his right hand, he grips the iPhone. He turns on the scream catcher app he created himself. He presses play, puts the phone to his ear. He listens to the scream the T-Shirted man made just before his death. The scream sends ice water up and down his backbone.

When the first cop car turns the corner into Sweeney’s back lot, Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox is already bushwhacking back through the woods towards his silver sedan.

“Scream. For. Me.” chants the blue-eyed beast. “Scream. For. Me.”