Tom stopped and turned around. Jessie was holding up the issue of Skateboarder in her hands. “The photo in this magazine proves it.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want the truth. And your help.”
Tom paused. He felt nervous, but he was doing his best to keep his poker face. He glared at Jessie from across the parking lot. “Like I said, you’re wasting your time. Give it up, Jessie. It’s over.”
Jessie Archer placed the magazine back in her purse, her features grim. Her gaze never broke from Tom’s face. “If that’s the case, I will then. You were my last hope, Detective Jensen. I wanted to do this the right way.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. Why did he still feel nervous in her presence?
“Next time you talk to Danny, tell him to call his old friend, Jerry, down in Sierra Madre and give him the message that Jessie Archer says hello. Will you do that for me?”
Tom started at the name of the town; Jerry Valdez had moved down to Sierra Madre, which was a small village on the southern tip of Baja California, six weeks ago. Tom hadn’t spoken to Jerry, but Danny still did. He’d talked to Danny a few days ago and Danny told him Jerry and his family were settling in quite well and, more important, Jerry had not fallen off the wagon.
Jessie beamed; he could tell she knew she’d gotten to him. Her lips curved slightly upward in a smile. “And would you congratulate Danny for me on his upcoming marriage, as well?”
“What?” A cold feeling swept through Tom’s body. Three days ago when they’d spoken on the telephone, Danny told him he and Karen were getting remarried in a few weeks.
“It’s unfortunate you and I can’t work together,” Jessie resumed. “I’m sorry.” She turned and began walking away, but then stopped abruptly and turned back toward Tom. “Oh, one more thing. The next time you and Danny talk, please tell him to be careful when he walks the kids home from school. That neighborhood they’re planning to move to? The traffic near the elementary school is awful. Commuters seem to ignore the posted speed limit signs all the time. Kind of like that area where Alex Dunning was killed. I wouldn’t want to see the same thing happen to Danny and his lovely children.”
Then she turned and walked away.
And Tom Jensen watched her leave with a growing sense of unease and fear.
She knows Danny and Jerry killed Raul. I don’t know how she knows or found out, but somehow she knows, and she isn’t going to stop at anything. She knows where to find them and somehow I think she’s just oh so subtlety suggesting that she has the resources and the means to kill them and their families if I don’t cooperate with her, and oh dear God, I think she just suggested she had Alex Dunning killed and made it look like an accident. Jesus Christ!
And as Tom Jensen watched Jessie Archer walk calmly to her solid black Mercedes Benz and get into the vehicle, he realized with a growing sense of dismay and fear that if she knew as much about Danny Hernandez and Jerry Valdez, she obviously knew a lot about him, as well.
And that if push came to shove, she would find a way to make his unexpected death look like an accident.
Tom Jensen stood in the parking lot and watched as Jessie Archer drove away, his stomach an empty slab in his belly, trying to decide if he should continue doing what he swore to do and keep Danny and Jerry’s secret safe, or if he had to change tactics and think about saving his own skin.
It was a choice he wished to God he didn’t have to make.
But he would have to make it.
What am I going to do? Tom thought, his mind racing.
As Tom Jensen drove home, these thoughts chasing each other in his mind, he realized there was no real right or wrong answer. All he could do was think about what Jessie Archer had suggested.
He sat at home that night, drinking beer after beer, dwelling on what Jessie Archer told him. Wrestling with the decision, trying to make the right one.
Finally, that evening, very late, with the television turned down, Tom Jensen sighed. He didn’t want to make this decision; he was more scared now than he’d ever been in his life, but he had to do it. He reached for the phone on the end table near the sofa and pulled it toward him. He rummaged for his contact sheet and flipped through the pages, looking for the phone numbers he’d jotted down during his time spent working on the Valesquez case. When he found it, his thumb rested on the first three phone numbers he had to call. Then, heart heavy with dread and fear, he began making the phone calls to put his plan into action.
November 15, 2003 - September 21, 2004
Lititz, PA
King of Prussia, PA
About J. F. Gonzalez
J. F. Gonzalez is the author of over fifteen novels of horror and dark suspense including They, The Corporation, Back From the Dead, Primitive, The Beloved, and is co-author of the Clickers series (with Mark Williams and Brian Keene respectively). His short fiction is collected in four volumes, of which the latest, The Summoning and Other Eldritch Tales, is available as an exclusive digital title. He also works in other media including film and the technology sector. A native of Los Angeles, California, he currently lives with his family in Pennsylvania and is working on his next novel. For more information, visit him on the web at www.jfgonzalez.com.
Also by J. F. Gonzalez
Clickers
(Co-written with Mark Williams)
Click Click Click Click
Phillipsport, Maine is a quaint and peaceful seaside village. But when hundreds of creatures pour out of the ocean and attack, its residents must take up arms to drive the beasts back.
They are the Clickers, giant venomous blood-thirsty crabs from the depths of the sea. The only warning to their rampage of dismemberment and death is the terrible clicking of their claws. But these monsters aren’t merely here to ravage and pillage. They are being driven onto land by fear. Something is hunting the Clickers. Something ancient and without mercy.
Clickers II: The Next Wave
(Co-written with Brian Keene)
The first wave was just the beginning...
The United States is in ruins. It has just suffered one of the worst hurricanes in history, the people are demoralized, and the president is a religious fanatic. Then things get really bad - the Clickers return.
Thousands of the monsters swarm across the entire nation and march inland, slaughtering anyone and anything they come across. But this time the Clickers aren’t blindly rushing onto land - they are being led by an intelligence older than civilization itself. A force that wants to take dry land away from the mammals.
Those left alive soon realize that they must do everything and anything they can to protect humanity no matter the cost.
This isn’t war, this is extermination.
Clickers III: Dagon Rising
(Co-written with Brian Keene)
They thought it was over, but the second wave was only the beginning. In the aftermath of the Clickers and Dark Ones’s siege and a coup against an insane President, America rebuilds. Change has come, and a better future is promised to all. But promises can be broken and there may be no future at all because deep beneath the ocean a new terror awaits. Dagon, god of the Dark Ones, is waking up...and if humanity doesn’t stop him, then mankind will face extinction.
Trapped on a South Pacific Island, the cast of Clickers and Clickers II: The Next Wave join forces with a mysterious group of occult agents to face off against the Clickers, the Dark Ones, Dagon, and an all-new threat - the deadly obsidian Clickers. The stakes have never been higher. Dagon is rising...and humanity will fall.
Survivor
Author’s Preferred Edition
Before Hostel...before Saw...there was Survivor.
It was supposed to be a romantic weekend getaway. Lisa was looking forward to spending time alone with her husband, Brad, and telling him that they are going to have a baby. Instead, it becomes a nightmare when Brad is arrested and Lisa is kidnapped. But the kidnappers aren’t asking for ransom. They want Lisa herself. They’re
going to make her a star - in a snuff film.
What they have in mind for Lisa is unspeakable. They plan to torture and murder her as graphically and brutally as possible, and to capture it all on film. If they have their way, Lisa’s death will be truly horrifying...but even more horrifying is what Lisa will do to survive...
It Drinks Blood
New Castle, Pennsylvania, during the tail end of the Great Depression.
Robert Brennan has never completely forgotten those days, even though he has tried to forget them. But when the nursing home he lives in receives a patient he remembers from those dark darks, it takes his mind back to a period marked by terrible, blood-soaked violence...the very kind marked by the twisted perversity of the stories he used to write for the weird-menace pulps...the kind marked by the real-life fiend that stalked the hobo jungles in search of fresh blood!
Primitive
It began as just another day for David Spires and his wife Tracy: coffee, breakfast, and getting the kids ready for school. Then the bottom dropped out of civilization.
The world ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with a dizzying downward spiral. Instead of the rat race of commuters scurrying to beat the clock, humans are now packs of animals reduced to snarling primitives.
David, Tracy and their daughter Emily, along with fellow survivors, leave Los Angeles for the safety of the country where fewer people means fewer primitives. But as they venture farther away from the city, they realize an unnatural force is at work. Civilization didn’t just fall apart...it was overtaken by an ancient evil that was present before the first cave paintings. Human history has no formal record of it, but the dark presence that’s fueled nightmares since time began has crept out of the shadows...and its influence is growing.
The Summoning and Other Eldritch Tales
The Summoning contains seven collected tales of Lovecraftian-inspired nightmares from J. F. Gonzalez. Featured in this collection are two original pieces: "Holes" and "The Summoning" (co-authored with Mike Baker).
This exclusive digital collection of stories includes:
Opening The Way: An Introduction
Tattoos
Going Home
The Revenge of Cthulhu
Holes
The Man Who Had a Death Wish
The Summoning
The Watcher From the Grave
Each story contains special story notes penned by the author!
Back From the Dead
Tim Gaines was the town pariah. Mocked and teased continuously since he was in the sixth grade, he approaches his senior year of high school with a sense of cautious trepidation. Years before, when he was in the sixth grade, a group of boys led by Scott Bradfield - a popular, well-liked kid from well-to-do parents - spread a vicious rumor that he was a devil-worshipper. The rumor stuck, and is believed by most of the students and even a few of the teachers and administrators. It’s a rumor Tim can’t beat, and one he sometimes feels he’s brought on to himself due to his love of horror novels and movies.
Now Tim has become friends with a loose-knit group of kids who have also become social outcasts thanks to other rumors about them by the student elite. With their mutual support, Tim has begun to come out of his shell. He’s going out with them, being invited to parties, and even begins to have a romantic interest in a girl, something he never thought would happen to him in high school.
But all that will change when Scott Bradfield and his friends set their sights on Tim again. Only this time, they need his help. Like most of the student body of Spring Valley High School, they sincerely believe Tim Gaines is a devil-worshipper. And they believe he has a dark power. Now they want to use him and that power for their own sinister plight...
...To bring back the dead homeless man they’d kidnapped and brutally beaten to a pulp in the guesthouse that resides on the Bradfield residence.
They want him brought back not because they're scared of getting caught for his murder, but so they can savagely beat and murder him again...
...and again...
Fetish
Something is in search of human prey in the gang-ridden communities of Los Angeles...
When the member of a notorious street gang is found decapitated and dismembered at the bottom of the LA River, it quickly becomes apparent something is amiss. Detective Daryl Garcia connects it with the murders of six other gang members killed in the same way. It looks like the work of a serial killer, but the gang members don’t think so. They believe the murders are the work of rival gang members.
Someone has a dark desire of the most depraved fetish...
Detective Garcia becomes determined to find the killer at any cost. Together with Rachael Pearce, a journalist he falls in love with, he searches for the killer through the gang underground and the world of prostitution and drugs. And as suspect after suspect is released with no solid evidence to connect them to the crimes, the search for the killer becomes more urgent as the gang-infested areas of the city reach a boiling point to the brink of rioting. In a community of gang members – who are killers themselves – how does Detective Garcia find the most monstrous killer he has ever encountered?
Madness wears many faces...
Do Unto Others
Jim Cornell used to believe in God.
But when things went bad – his daughter getting cancer, his layoff from his well-paying job, the strain of his marriage – he began to have no use for God anymore.
When Jim’s forced into a situation that will require his participation in another man’s murder, his faith will be tested. Because while Jim used to believe in God, he’d never given that much thought to the Devil.
Now he’s going to have to. Because, like it or not, Jim is involved with people who have a deep religious faith, too.
Jim is about to discover that where there is light, there must be darkness. There’s more than one kind of religious faith and his is about to be put to the ultimate test.
The Corporation
Michelle Dowling found her dream job. The offer on her desk from Corporate Financial Consultants included a high five figure salary, generous benefits and cushy perks. Finally, after escaping the psychological abuse of an emotionally cold mother and a series of dead-end jobs, she could start planning for a future with her fiance, Donald.
However, Michelle forgot the cardinal rule for any job offer; always read the fine print. She really should have gotten more details about her overtime hours, company policies, and exactly what they meant when they said “Welcome to the Corporate Financial Family”.
Michelle isn’t afraid of hard work. She’s a dedicated employee, the kind any manager would want for his firm. But this Corporation requires much more than just dedication...
The Beloved
You've seen her before. Perhaps somebody you know is dating her, getting himself into debt by taking her out to fancy restaurants and buying her expensive gifts. Yet you see her for what she really is.
Elizabeth Weaver saw it in her brother Ronnie's new girlfriend, Diana. Something about the woman rubbed Elizabeth the wrong way. She refused to get a job and help Ronnie around the house and seemed to bask in the attention and expensive gifts he showered her with. And as Ronnie began neglecting the rest of his family, they finally took notice, only Elizabeth saw what the others didn't - that Diana wasn't quite human.
And neither were her children.
Don Grant has tracked the creature for years, ever since it turned his wife into something barely more than a living zombie. He's traced its history through the centuries. It feeds off our lust for it, the violence it goads us into creating, and it grows stronger and seductive with each new victim. Now Don has caught up with it and he has to stop it fast, or the nightmare will be unleashed on a whole new family.
Shapeshifter
Mark Wiseman thought he had his curse under control. He thought he’d kept it secret.
He was wrong.
Bernard Roberts is a wealthy, influential man, and he knows all
about the curse that runs through Mark’s veins. He knows how Mark’s parents were killed eight years ago. If Mark wants Bernard to keep this knowledge to himself, he’ll have to do what Bernard wants. He’ll have to use his curse to kill.
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