A Simple Plan
Scott Smith
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0307279952
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane–the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. In order to hide, keep, and share the fortune, these ordinary men all agree to a simple plan.
The Spawning (The Hive, Book 2)
Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? (Mostly Ghostly)
and get away with it." I had no idea how to handle this. He was supposed to have just given me the money. Then I was going to make him lie down on the floor and count to a hundred while I ran off to my car. "I'll even be congratulated for this," he said. "Taking a bite out of crime. They'll call me a hero." I continued backing down the aisle. I assumed that the building had an exit in the rear, probably through the storeroom I'd noticed earlier. I thought that if I could just hold him off till
took a step back from him, toward the cooler, and he raised his head. He stared at me, his eyes blinking very rapidly. His breathing made a watery sound in his chest; his lungs were filling with blood. He put his hands on his throat. I took another step backward. I knew that I should hit him again, kill him, knew that this would be the humane thing to do, but I didn't feel like I had the strength to raise the machete. I felt spent, finished. He tried to speak: his mouth opened and closed. There
answer. "I didn't think you'd want to know." I nodded; he was right. Even now I didn't want to know, didn't want to pick through what he'd just said, to weigh its various particulars and decide if I believed them. An onslaught of conflicting emotions swept over me -- jealousy that our mother had contacted Jacob that last night rather than myself; surprise that he'd managed to keep the whole thing so secret from me for all this time; grief over the possibility that our parents -- good,
surprised. It seemed like a bad sign, that we could exist all this time as a closed system, totally satisfying each other's needs, neither of us desiring any outside connection with the world. It seemed deviant, unhealthy. I could imagine what our neighbors would say if we were ever caught -- how they weren't at all astonished, how we'd been so reclusive, so antisocial, so secretive. It was always loners who you heard about committing murders, and that this label might apply to us led me on to
seconds, I was going to set into motion a series of events that would radically transform each of our lives. In my ignorance, my choice seemed straightforward, unambiguous: if I were to give up the duffel bag now, it'd be an irrevocable step -- I'd hand it over to the sheriff, and it'd be gone forever. My plan, on the other hand, would allow me to postpone a decision until we had more information. I'd be taking a step, but not one that I couldn't undo. "All right," I said. "Put the money back."
