Soulless
an excerpt

Sabine Moore looked up from the copy of Cosmo to the opening door, alerted by the soft chime of the bell. Her heart stuttered as she took in the sight of a man bent forward clutching his stomach as if in pain, unshaven and with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead obscuring his face.
A few weeks before, when Sabine was working an evening shift alone, a robber had scared the life out of her, demanding money. The hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and over his head, the blade of a knife visable up his sleeve. Money was regularly put down a chute into a safe beneath the floor so the robber's pickings had been slim. Sabine's nerves however had been shredded ever since. Her hand shook slightly as she slid the magazine onto a shelf beneath the counter.
“Pump three,” he said softly.
“That's twenty.” She said hoping to keep the wobble out of her voice.
“I'll take a scratch-card too,” he reached into the back pocket of his jeans.
Was that blood? Sabine glanced a reddish-brown stain on his shirt. He noticed her looking and pulled his jacket closed. She caught sight of his eyes. Dark, piercing. The eyes of a predator; a falcon, or shark. Eyes that belonged to someone who knew how to bring down it's prey. Quickly she turned to the case beside the till pulling a card from the strip. When she turned back he had gone, the door softly clicking shut. Money sat on the counter top.
She glanced at the scratch-card in her hand. The last thing she needed was him coming back irrate to get it. She rang up the money and hurried out from behind the counter glancing through the long window above the confectionary display. A truck pulled into the forecourt obscuring the view.
On the forecourt she saw him slam shut the back doors of a van.
“Sir. Your card.”
He climbed into the driver's side and closed the door almost running her over as he reversed and screeched onto the main road.
“Hey, tosser,” a weather-faced woman climbed down from the cab of the truck and walked over to Sabine. “He could have killed you. Did you get his reg?”
But Sabine was not listening. She was staring at the patch of concrete where the van had been parked, and more specifically at the haunting photograph of a bound and bleeding woman that had settled there.