Open Season by Linda Howard Page A

anyone Sykes had ever met; he didn’t pretend that he couldn’t sully his hands with murder—though Sykes didn’t exactly call killing Mitchell
murder.
It was more of an extermination, like stepping on a cockroach.
    First, though, he had to find the bastard. With a cockroach’s talent for self-preservation, Mitchell had gone to ground and hadn’t turned up at any of his usual haunts.
    Since Mitchell was already spooked, Sykes decided to play this low-key. While it would have been satisfying to simply walk up to the bastard’s trailer and put a hole between his eyes as soon as he opened the door, again, things like that tended to attract attention. For one thing, Mitchell had neighbors, and in Sykes’s experience neighbors were always looking out the window just when they shouldn’t. He could dispose of Mitchell in far less dramatic ways. With luck, he could even make it look like an accident.
    Mitchell knew his car, so Sykes borrowed one from a pal and cruised through Mitchell’s neighborhood, if you could call two ramshackle trailers and one dilapidated frame house, surrounded by junk, a neighborhood. They were the types of places inhabited by women with frizzy hair who wore tight, stained tank tops that showed their dirty bra straps, and by men with long, straggly hair, yellowed teeth, and an unshaken belief that life had done them wrong and owed them something. Sykes didn’t openly look at any of the three places as he drove by; with his peripheral vision he searched for Mitchell’s blue pickup, but it wasn’t there. He’d drive by again after dark, see if any lights were on, but he didn’t really expect the cockroach to turn up again so soon.
    Seeing how Mitchell lived always reminded Sykes of how narrow his own escape had been. If he hadn’t been smarter, made better decisions, he might
be
Mitchell. Now, that was a scary thought. But he came from the same trashy background; he knew exactly how Mitchell thought, how he operated. In his work that was a plus, but Sykes never wanted to actually live that way again. He wanted
more.
Hell, Mitchell probably wanted more, too, but he was never going to get more because he kept making those stupid decisions.
    With an eye to the future, Sykes salted away every dollar he could. He lived simply, but cleanly. He had no expensive habits or vices. He even played the stock market a little, with conservative stocks that didn’t perform spectacularly, but nevertheless always posted a gain. One day, when he had enough—though he wasn’t certain exactly how much was enough—he would walk away from everything and move where no one knew him, start a small business, settle down as a respected member of the community. Hell, he might even get married, have a couple of rugrats. His imagination couldn’t quite conjure up that picture, but nevertheless it was possible.
    Mitchell wasn’t jeopardizing just Sykes’s immediate future, but all of his plans. Those plans were what had gotten him out of the trash dump of a house where he’d grown up, what had given him a goal when it would have been so much easier to just let himself drift in the sea of waste. It was always easier to do nothing. Don’t worry about cleaning the house or cutting the grass, just drink another six-pack of beer and smoke another joint. Never mind there’s no food in the house for the kids; when that monthly check comes in, first thing, you gotta get your booze and drugs, before themoney gets gone. It was easy. It was always easier to blow the money rather than spend it on things like food and electricity. The tough ones, the smart ones like him, figured out that the hard road was the road out.
    No matter what, Sykes would never go back.
    Once he took on a project, Todd Lawrence was an unstoppable force. Between trying to get her house ready to move into and Todd commandeering every other spare minute she had, Daisy felt as if she had been caught up in a tornado that refused to let her drop. The only