Night Kills

An excerpt from Night Kills "...escalating events of mounting suspense tied together by a difficult to detect common denominator. NIGHT KILLS is true suspense that scares the audience at every twist and turn." --Harriet Klausner, Romantic Times

"Hughes'clear language is a pleasure to read...-- ---Publishers' Weekly

NIGHT KILLS

CHAPTER ONE

She was beautiful, even though the pills and booze had left her facial muscles slack and her mouth hanging open so that she reminded him of a baying mare. Stunning was the word that came to mind when he gazed at her, thanks to a plastic surgeon in Hilton Head who'd cut away the scars from years spent with a husband who tended to use his fists when he drank. And he'd drank often.

Conversation stopped when she entered a room. People stared. At thirty-five, she passed for a woman in her late twenties. Women envied her as much as they despised her. She had taken more than one married man to bed, only to flaunt the affair in his wife's face afterward.

She was ruthless. And he hated her for it.

He approached her bed, a hideous, Chinese-red lacquered thing with cylindrical posts, each topped with a brass lion's head. A leopard-skin bedspread had been thrown back, exposing red satin sheets purchased from a specialty house in Atlanta. Overhead, an ornate mirror had been affixed to the ceiling so she could watch herself mate like an animal.

A whore's bedroom.

A steady beating filled his head, like the sound of war drums. He realized it was his own heartbeat. His anger escalated; he choked it back. It would not do for him to lose control. Not now. Not when he'd planned this so carefully.

The smell of expensive scotch whiskey and cigarette smoke mingled with the ever-present scent of gardenia, her signature fragrance. In spring and summer, the saccharine-sweet flowers grew in abundance in the flower beds surrounding the house. Inside, they found homes in tall Waterford vases and antique water pitchers. That smell was in her soap and talcum power and perfume, even the white Jaguar she drove carried a hint of it.

There was no escaping that smell, just as there was no escaping what she was.

She shifted in her sleep, startling him. He took a step back, watched her for a moment. Her black slip rose high on her thighs, exposing a black garter belt and silk stockings. The black dress she'd worn earlier was a shapeless wad on the floor. She began to snore.

Whore. Whore. Whore.

The pillow case he held suddenly felt heavy. In it was everything he needed. He cocked his head to the side and studied her face as an art lover would a masterpiece. He almost regretted what he had to do.

She awoke while he was taping her mouth with duct tape, and she managed to get out a couple of good screams before he silenced her with a blow to the temple. He'd been thinking ahead when he'd removed the blunt paperweight from her writing desk.

She was unconscious when he strapped her wrists and ankles to the bedposts, but the first cut to her face yanked her out of her stupor. A brief moment of confusion, then stark terror when he held the box cutter before her eyes. She bucked on the bed, tried to pull free, but the tape held fast, just as he'd known it would.

The blade flashed in the light as he brought it down and went back to work. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets; the veins on her forehead bulged beneath her porcelain skin.

He laughed softly. "Relax," he said. "I'm going to give you a new look."