Blood Hunt Read Online Free PDF

to abbreviate it to two syllables at most.
    The conversation could only improve from there, and it did, especially when Eddie announced that he was “between appointments” and owned a car. Reeve had been spending a fortune on cabs and other modes of transport. Here was a driver looking for short-term employment. And a big man at that—someone who just might double as bodyguard should the need arise. By that point, Reeve had figured on the need arising.
    Since then he’d been offered money to quit the story. And when he’d turned the offer down, there had been a silent beating in a back alley. They’d caught him while Eddie was off somewhere. They hadn’t said a word, which was the clearest message they could have given.
    And still James Reeve wanted the story. He wanted it more than ever.
    They drove out to La Jolla first to visit the retired pharmacist unannounced.
    It was a white-painted clapboard house (Eddie pronounced the word “clabbard”), a bungalow with not much land around it. It had a green picket fence, which was being freshly redecorated by a whistling workman in overalls. His van was parked with two wheels on the curb, its back doors open to show a range of paint cans, ladders, and brushes. He smiled and said, “Good morning to you” as James Reeve pushed open the stubborn gate. There were bells hanging from the latch, and they chimed as he closed it behind him.
    He’d been here before, and the old man hadn’t answered any of his questions. But persistence was a journalist’s main line of attack. He rang the doorbell and took one pace back onto the path. The street wasn’t close to La Jolla’s seafront, but he guessed the houses would still be worth at least a hundred and fifty thou apiece. It was that kind of town. Eddie’d told him that Raymond Chandler used to live in La Jolla. To James’s eye, there didn’t seem much worth writing about in La Jolla.
    He stepped up to the door again, tried the bell, then squatted to peer through the mail slot. But there was no mail slot. Instead, Dr. Killin had one of those mailboxes on a post near the gate, with a red flag beside it for when there was mail. The flag was down. James went to the only window fronting the bungalow and looked in at a comfortable living room, lots of old photographs on the walls, a three-seat sofa with floral covers taking up way too much room. He remembered Dr. Killin from their first, only, and very brief meeting. Killin had reminded him physically of Giles Gulliver, a knotted strength beneath an apparently frail exterior. He had a shiny domed bald head, the skull out of proportion to the frame supporting it, and thick-lensed glasses behind which the eyes were magnified, the eyelashes thick and curling.
    The old fart wasn’t home.
    He walked back down the path and wrestled with the gate again. The painter stopped whistling and smiled up at him from his half-kneeling position.
    “Ain’t in,” he informed James Reeve, like this was news.
    “You might have said before I went three rounds with that damned gate.”
    The painter chuckled, wiping his green fingers on a rag. “Might’ve,” he agreed.
    “Do you know where he is?”
    The man shook his head, then scratched his ear. “I was told something about a vacation. But how do you take a vacation when you live in paradise?” And he laughed, turning back to his task.
    James Reeve took a step towards him. “When did he leave?”
    “That I don’t know, sir.”
    “Any idea when he’ll be back?”
    The painter shrugged.
    The journalist cursed under his breath and leaned over the fence to open the mailbox, looking for something, anything.
    “Shouldn’t do that,” the painter said.
    “I know,” said Reeve, “tampering with the U.S. Mail.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. But see, you got green paint on your shirt.”
    And so he had.
    Dismissing the offer of mineral spirits, in need of another kind of spirit altogether, he stomped back to the car where Eddie