Act of Evil Read Online Free

intuition—or maybe just a hope. “Hold it there,” he said, “I’ll be right down.”
    The desk clerk had the envelope waiting. It looked used, stuff having been crossed out and replaced by his name. Inside was an old department store invoice—scribbled on the back, two words.
    SORRY—MATTIE!
    Plus a phone number.

three
    The night beyond the house was as dark as the wrong side of the grave. Had Fitz not lived on this land all his life, known every square foot like he knew the warts and wrinkles of his own aging carcass, he wouldn’t have had a fool’s chance of doing what was necessary.
    There was no sign of them yet, but they’d be coming, he was convinced of that now. When people like that were frustrated, when they’d used every means of persuasion or coercion and still hadn’t got what they desired, they didn’t just give up.
    The same rogues, he now knew, had been behind the big development near Nanaimo, the Island’s second largest city. In that case, a large parcel of land which had been extracted from the province’s sacred Agricultural Land Reserve—pretty surely by political chicanery—had been slated for an expensive new subdivision. The land was on a promontory overlooking the water, making it ideal for an exclusive gated community, the problem for the developers being that the owner of a key piece of access land had refused to sell. That individual thus became the darling of conservationists and those against the ever increasing urbanization of Vancouver Island—a lone knight against the forces of the developers and crooked politics. But one night the knight’s castle had mysteriously burned, with himself and his family inside. Although the fire was undoubtedly arson, no one was apprehended, and a while later the crucial land was sold and the development quietly went ahead. That’s the way things were done in this part of the world: everything civilized and quiet—with the big operators winning out in the end.
    Fitz was the one in their way now.
    Sitting on the porch of the big old house, looking out toward his invisible domain, he absently stroked the stock of the shotgun resting across his knees. It was a side-by-side twelve gauge, as ancient as himself, and probably hadn’t been fired in half a century. Coming upon it in the attic had been blind luck, and right now he could use every bit of that he could get.
    He reached over and took a swig of rye. Strange to think that the root cause of this debacle was the stock market boom of the 1920s: that and his dad’s laziness and ill-judgment. Stranger still to remember that once the family had owned half the land around here, much of the south end of Maple Bay. Fitz’s grandfather, William, had bought the property back in the 1880s, cleared it, farmed it, loved it well. But he’d worked too hard and died too young and his son hadn’t loved it at all. Seeking a life of ease, George Trail had sold off most of the farm, retaining only a small parcel overlooking the bay, which included the house over which his son now stood guard.
    The irony of this piece of history was threefold. First, the stocks purchased by the sale of the land became valueless within a year, wiped out by crash of ’29; second, George got his sought-after leisure all right, but only because he couldn’t find the work he then desperately needed—he’d been saved from actual starvation by produce from the piece of land he had retained; third, that remnant not only came to be loved by his own son, Fitz, but, because of its strategic location, became the cause of the present problem.
    Also, it had be admitted, the fault was as much Fitz’s own. He hadn’t taken the early overtures seriously. Of course, he hadn’t known they were from a development company, and the offers weren’t high enough to alert his suspicion. Only later, when he discovered that a lot of