Karim al-Zib - Wild in the country book four

If Khalid had come back later and done it, why was he dead? Or was he really dead? Had he somehow faked his death? But how could he have profited from buying huge amounts of stock in dying companies? No, Khalid had been paid off for his losses in a pound of lead this morning, as a lesson to the next guy entrusted with the terrorists' money. No, Khalid would never ride another camel, or another young unbeliever again.

Unbeliever. Buchanan looked down at the couch, still stained with male ejaculations and female secretions. She had been here, asleep over there with her belly filled with the semen of three men, the same three men who were now destroyed by the events of the preceding day. Had she really been asleep? He wondered. He had not logged off after showing the computer file to his two associates. Could she have been listening? Did she really hate them enough to do this to them, after her countless orgasms and cries of joy? Of course, women said no, but they really meant yes, didn't they? She had loved it, hadn't she, all those big cocks sliding up into her tight pussy?

He looked again at the couch. She had hated it, and she had found a way to get even for the time before when he had seduced her in bed with her own husband and the time when he had shared her with the other two men. For fuck sakes! She had already set him up for a fall when he had brought her to his room on Friday morning! When Harry had called and she was sitting on his cock, she had known what Harry was talking about. Because she had done it. The bitch had done it! To him! If it weren't so horrible, so final, so devastating, it would have been funny. In one fell swoop she had avenged herself on the three of them.

Buchanan looked up at Fields. He was wiping his cheek with a handkerchief, trembling and breathing heavily, looking pitiful. To Buchanan, it was not the biggest surprise in the world when Fields grabbed his chest and fell over.

He was looking at the VDU, at the email that had been sent on Friday morning and being read by Harry Wickes just as he was easing his big cock into DesirЋe Denning's wet vagina. Besides the numbers that didn't add up, which the broker had had to reconcile, there was something else that didn't look quite right. There. There it was. She had corrected his spelling. The fastidious little bitch had corrected two misspelled words, words he had always spelled differently.

He looked up. The paramedics were wheeling Reg Fields out, performing CPR. Buchanan wasn't accompanying the fat man to the ambulance. He was already flat-lining and there was little hope. Let the hospital break the news to his wife. Whether they would let her keep the life insurance money, with all the huge liabilities the fat man now had, was another question.

Score two now for DesirЋe.

What was he going to do now? He couldn't let the little bitch get away with what she had done. First, he would have to see Mark Denning ruined, and there were a dozen ways to accomplish that, but she would have to pay with her life. But slowly. Maybe a few years in an African brothel would do. Sure, her father was rich and powerful, now much richer than Buchanan, but he would never know. Even poor men could get revenge. DesirЋe herself had done it for free.

As for Buchanan, he now had to figure out how to get himself out of this mess. The stock exchange would have this house before long. He wished he had more squirreled away in Bermuda. But he was smart, much smarter than either Khalid al-Mazkum or Reg Fields, and he would make a comeback. Then little DesirЋe, and her na•ve husband, would be dog meat. All he needed to do was set up some shell corporations and get some people to front for him. Build up his strength and get straight with some of his investors. Most of the money he had lost had been his own. It had been a decision born out of greed on one hand – he had wanted all the profits for himself – and on the other the necessity to be discreet about his inside information.

He was making plans when the door to the study opened.

"Nigel, bring me a lobster sandwich," he said.

For a long moment there was no reply, so he finally looked up. It was not the butler, but a man he had never seen before, a swarthy man who looked very much like Khalid al-Mazkum.

"Mr. Buchanan."

"Yes?" Sid said, beginning to rise.

"A message from my brother Khalid," the man said, bringing an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer out of his jacket.

Buchanan was about to make a hasty plea for mercy when the gun popped and put a bullet through his throat. The next one hit him squarely in the solar plexus and slammed him back into his expensive, leather chair.

They had immobilized his upper body so as not to tear the newly stitched wound, and the back of his thigh was incredibly sore because of the flesh he had lost there. He would need physiotherapy and lots of exercise before he could get back on the trail of the two remaining dogs, but hunt them he would, for Devereaux had raised the bounty on Lobo and Bruno astronomically. Of course, with Priscilla gone he had little else to do with his considerable fortune and his revenge would one day be sweet.

Of course, there were Rodney's pictures that told a story Devereaux would not be pleased to learn, those showing Clete shooting the now-dead girl with his revolver. He had blamed her wounds on dead Billy Canning, and the rich ranch owner had given him a check for a hundred thousand dollars without much thinking about it. Accompanied by a weeping, distraught Robyn Young, he had paid his respects and thanked the sheriff, who felt himself nonetheless to have been within his duty to stop the crazed auburn-haired beauty from murdering DesirЋe and him. Besides, the money was for the dogs, and not for keeping Priscilla alive. She had essentially committed suicide by her evil acts.

Still, Clete had coerced Rodney into giving him the negatives of the two photos that showed him firing and hitting Priscilla.

Clete could still smile through his pain. Nancy had just spent a lot of time with him, and had told him she thought she was pregnant and was going to the pharmacy for a home test. The idea of fatherhood had raised his spirits and they had immediately begun making plans for a quick wedding, to be carried out before he left the hospital. A call to Nancy's uncle and some bold negotiating on his part had secured a deal with the family over the abandoned Pace mansion. If Clete put up the money from his bounty to either dig a new well or have water piped in, he would be allowed a long lease on the property, which he now thought would be a good place to raise the brood that they appeared to have already started with Nancy.

He knew now that his obsession with DesirЋe was insane, and he felt his love for Nancy renewed by thoughts of his hopes for the future. In spite of his race, he was a respectable citizen now, a local hero, and perhaps a national one. He had had calls today in conjunction with Rodney's syndicated accounts of the Pickford's Meadows saga. The graphic photographs of yesterday's massacre had had to be sanitized for public distribution, and Clete had laughed to see the faces of the naked women victims and their private parts covered with big black rectangles.

Amazingly, and laughably, Mark Denning had no knowledge of what had happened to his wife, nor of the brief, passionate affair she had had with Clete. Except for the unfortunate episode when Lobo had invaded their bedroom in the middle of their love-making and taken the bride for himself, Mark believed his DesirЋe to be completely faithful. Perhaps she was, for she had never actually sought sex with anyone outside of her marriage. And, she had told Clete, while holding him and waiting for the ambulance, that the time they had had sex at the Pace mansion had been because she had been abducted there by Sam and Billy. She had begged him not to tell Mark about any of it.