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Category:
Crime
Publisher: Susan Swain
ISBN-10: 1491292989
Type: Fiction
Pages: 148
Copyright: Aug 2013
ISBN-13: 9781491292983
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
It’s all about money and the prize is a magnificent estate called Bounty.
Perce is used to getting what he wants and he wants Bounty, but getting it isn't going to be easy. The current owner won't give it up without a fight. And when Perce falls victim to a serious illness, there is something very suspicious about the man who suddenly wants to be his friend. Who is the man called CJ and what does he really want?
Excerpt
He lay propped up on pillows in a nursing home bed. The bed head, positioned to the right of the picture window, placed his back to the skeletal stemmed winter rose garden. Despite the comfortable room temperature, he drew the baby blue coverlet closer to his body. Perce peered round the room with resignation. Beside the bed, visitor chairs and a cluttered night stand competed for floor space. The photograph of a sign that read Bounty lay carelessly discarded among drinking vessels and medications on the night stand. A red brick ranch house sprawled behind the sign. Unrelieved, green grass grew in the back yard of the house. In the privacy of his room, Perce’s eyes moistened at the memory.
Across from him, on the other side of the window, his latest and last, all channels package wide-screen television, though muted, dominated the corner room. A Zimmer frame had been discreetly parked beside it. Out of reach atop a chest of drawers lay a paperback novel. Plumbed in before the door, a white wash basin contrasted with the blank screen of the nursing home television mounted above it.
Although in need of assistance, Perce didn’t press the nursing home buzzer button he fumbled between his thumb and forefinger. The button would summon Ivy and the end of his life. His cell phone no longer lay within reach on the night stand. He suspected Poison Ivy had pocketed the phone. Perce wondered where his wallet was. He couldn’t remember when he’d seen it last. While out of sight, Poison Ivy was always within hearing. So he lay quietly counting last breaths.
But on a promising spring morning two years earlier, he received a call on his cell phone from Ivy at Bounty. It signaled the end of another life. His wife’s life. While his older wife endured bad health, he enjoyed good health. Perce looked forward to taking control of her estate and cashing in on the generous insurance policy he’d taken out on her life. After an indecently short period of mourning, Perce intended to openly pursue his long-term love interest, Kitty. She was a thirty something, short, slender, single mother with dark brown eyes and shoulder length black hair. He’d banked on this one’s returned interest in him. But before Kitty, he’d set his cap for Bounty.
Perce regarded himself as lucky. Lucky that Luce had hired him. He’d phoned her about the advertisement she’d placed for the position of Handyman and Groundsman in the Work Available column of the local newspaper.
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