REX (standard:horror, 2276 words)
Author: Lev821	Added: Sep 16 2009	Views/Reads: 3310/2074	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A money-making pet kidnap scheme should not try and capture 'Rex'.

It was brilliant. In fact, it was genius. He surprised himself at just
how great his idea actually was, and it led him to ponder whether or 
not all great ideas came from the murky depths of a mind fuelled by 
alcohol. He was fast on the way to becoming drunk, as he certainly 
wasn't sober. Did all great philosophers and inventors get their ideas 
from the shadowy realms of the subconscious? he wondered, presented to 
them in exchange for giving their brain cells heightened senses of 
pleasure by whichever drug they had ingested. This was not on the same 
level as any great scientific breakthrough. It was a money-making 
scheme. The idea was sparked by what he was looking at in a newsagent's 
window. His alcoholic mind gave him the rest of the pieces, and fitted 
them together perfectly. There was no way he was going to tell anyone. 
This was his, and his alone. 

In the window, there was an A4 sheet of paper, the top half of which
featured a photograph of a kitten. Below which, in bold black 
lettering, the word: MISSING. Twinkle. Have you seen this cat? Reward 
£200. £200, he thought, for a kitten. Easy money. All he had to do was 
kidnap a few animals that looked like they were well looked after by 
their owners. Then wait for a reward sign to go up in a window, then 
return the animal and collect the cash. The idea was so great to him, 
that he forgot the fact that he was going into the newsagents to pick 
up twenty cigarettes. He turned, and headed straight for home. Ian 
Marlow was a 23 year old miscreant. He was well known to the police, 
mainly for his dabbling in petty crime. Minor theft and bouts of 
aggression had seen him inside a police cell more than he would care to 
remember. Ill thought through scams and dodgy dealings had led to him 
gaining a reputation as a repeat offender. Someone who may one day 
being seeing the inside of a prison cell for a very long time if he 
wasn't careful. He was quite an affliction on the town's residents, and 
an embarrassment on their reputation and name. The place where he lived 
was in a suburb of a main city, an area that could easily be described 
as settled between upper and middle class. So why Ian stayed here, 
where there were not many like him, he had never pondered. He could be 
described as quite a loner, and outsider. He had half an hour's bus 
ride into the city centre to be amongst his like-minded friends. 
Perhaps the reason he stayed was because of where he lived, a 
semi-detached house with an unkempt garden and lawn, with grimy 
windows, virtually out of sight from the road behind a high privet 
hedge. When his mother had died eight years ago, he had stayed on. She 
had left it in her will to him. His father was down in London, serving 
18 years for a double murder. He had been an only child, and barely 
managed to look after himself, surviving mostly on state handouts, and 
various other benefits he found himself entitled to. Some he wasn't 
entitled to, but obviously he said nothing. He knew how the things like 
that worked, and how to ‘screw the system' as it were. That was the 
extent of his intelligence. Whenever any bills came through the door, 
he simply put them straight in the bin. No-one ever came knocking. 
Still though, benefits and other questionable income was never enough. 
He always found himself without much money, or skint as it were, and 
always tried to make money through unconventional methods. A legitimate 
job had never appealed to him. The fact that he had to answer to 
somebody had turned him off. He was somebody who often said: ‘Nobody 
tells me what to do'. He always wanted to be his own boss. Answerable 
only to himself. 

At his house, on the kitchen table, on a piece of paper, Ian wrote down
a list of possible targets. He came up with four. Surely there must be 
more than that, he thought. He decided that he could probably come up 
with more during the next few weeks. These were simply starters. He 
knew he also had to think about where to keep the animal, and that he 
had to feed it until he heard about a possible reward. He'd forgotten 
that he would have to buy food. Nevertheless, he mused, it should be 
worth it. The reward money should easily cover any costs. There was Mrs 
Abbott, who lived two minutes walk away whom he had often seen out 
walking her Labrador. If that disappeared, he guessed, she might put up 
quite a substantial reward. How to go about it though, that was a 
problem. Sometimes when he passed by her house, the dog would be in the 
garden, looking out from behind the closed gate, or looking over the 
wall at the world passing by. He thought that that was probably the 
best time to take it. All he had to do was open the gate and put a lead 
on the collar and lead it away. He finished the last of his lager, and 
set about obtaining the necessary items. 

The following day, Ian was looking at Brewster the Labrador, upstairs in


Click here to read the rest of this story (116 more lines)