A Passing Curse (2011) Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, “One week.”
    After Carsabi left, Reese dialed the mother’s Kansas City number. A message informed him that the phone was no longer in service. No longer in service. It had a ring to it. It was how he’d been feeling for a while.He smoothed the edges of the art paper and considered the sketch of the Anaheim Vampire. The suspect looked almost benign. Was Bulow slipping? What had Melissa said? A doll?
    At the copy machine, he put the sketch face down on the glass. On a nearby counter, he saw a greasy box of pizza, half full. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette in one of the slices. He closed the copier’s lid, set the counter to a thousand, and pushed the start button. The machine hummed, cloning the face of death. He selected a fairly clean slice of pizza, ham and pineapple, and walked back to his desk. Melissa Cunningham had been dead three hours.
    3
    The day was clear, almost warm. The steady breeze brought soap and licorice from the manzanita and wind-broken stalks of fennel. Ajax Rasmussen sat at his walnut and ebony desk. With a crimson glass he toasted the new day. Through bronze windows, slightly open, he searched the Pacific’s horizon for a sign of change but saw none. The town of Santa Marina huddled before him, caught between mountains and endless sea.
    The canyons were dusty green with chaparral and spotted ocher red from the poison oak. The horseshoe shape of the harbor and the long stick of the wharf pointed past the horizon to the other side of the world.
    The blood he now drank, like his life for many years, countless years, was sterile, homogenized and tasteless. To quote Masefield, he had become a eunuch of time.
    He picked up the nearly deflated vinyl bag and squeezed the last drops from the 500cc plasti-pak made at his plant in Mexico for a mere fifty cents. His bags were a special blend of various poly-vinyls that could withstand inside pressures of 100 psi. He recalled jumping on a bag filled with blood to show a group of U.N. doctors working in Africa how strong his bags were. He’d given the U.N. a few free cases. He could afford it, especially the good will. He sold the fifty cent bags in the U.S. and Europe for $30.95, more if it was a government contract.
    His desk held one plain black phone and one studio print, circa 1936, sepia tinted and encased in a silver frame, a Twentieth Century Fox publicity still of Raul Pavoni, erstwhile leading man of a long chain of forgettable films. Seventeen, to be exact.
    Pavoni posed in the fashion of the time, oily black hair, his sharp aquiline features obscured by the smoke of a cigarette held casually, a man mocking destiny.
    Several Hollywood agents, movie producers, directors, and a handful of movie critics had considered him the natural successor to Valentino. His star had been rising.
    Unfortunately, before reaching any prominence, Pavoni had disappeared off Santa Catalina Island, his tiny motorboat swamped during rough seas. What he’d been doing out in such bad weather had never been explained. Neither had the brutal deaths of five Hollywood starlets, their throats slit, all rumored to have been recent triumphs of Pavoni.
    Newspapers at the time claimed the starlets had been drained of blood. Headlines screamed: STARLETS OR STRUMPETS? BUTCHERED AND BUMPED OFF!
    A Los Angeles detective, square jawed and square headed, as he now remembered, had been close to arresting Pavoni for the five killings. That the detective had disappeared before he could jail Pavoni was a fact vastly overshadowed by Pavoni’s death.
    Curiously enough, the detective had also drowned, but in his own blood, rather than the salt water that had reportedly taken Pavoni.
    The photograph looked much better than he did now. He still possessed the deep black hair and the profile that had rivaled Barrymore’s. But he was deteriorating. His time had come. Even immortality was finite.
    The call came, as expected. “It’s Harbinger, Sir,” the young man said to Ajax, as if