Call Me Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

inquired, they'd agreed to let me sleep on the couch. But they'd had a huge fight and Jared, the boyfriend, had kicked Izzy out. When I'd turned up there yesterday, he'd told me to get lost.
    So I'd ended up crashing for the night at Mom’s. LaVerle’s.
    Which would have rocked, if I hadn’t made the mistake of going out with Ray to pick up a couple pizzas, some beer, and some gas for his car.
    I still couldn’t believe that creep had grabbed me and come on to me. Yuck! I’d not been prepared for that at all. Ray was old, drugged up, and besides, he was LaVerle’s honey.
    The stranger on the other side of the pump last night had looked safer than Ray, who’d had a shovel and a shotgun in the back seat of his Buick. It had been hard to tell in the pouring rain, but Griff had seemed a better risk than a guy who possessed the tools both to slaughter and bury me.
    To his credit, my savior had acted fast, getting us both out of there before Ray could stop us. I hated to think what might have happened if Griff had not showed up at that gas station when he did. Or if he’d refused to give a soaking-wet crazy girl a ride.
    I wanted to do something nice for him. To thank him. I looked around the place, wondering if there was anything he needed. There had to be some way I could pay him back for his hospitality.
    I used the bathroom and pulled some clean clothes out of my backpack.
    That was when I got my first bad shock. My laptop was gone. For a few seconds I panicked. Just about everything that was worth anything to me was on that computer. All my work, all my email and private messages from friends, and even the games that I enjoyed. My own pathetic geekiness was overwhelming at times. Almost my entire life was digital.
    He had it. A quick check of the rooms I had access to proved that he must've taken it into his bedroom.
    My anxiety receded as I considered the matter. OK. From the faint sound of snoring coming from behind that closed door, I knew he was in there. Taking my laptop to bed with him was a smart move. The rig was expensive and I certainly wasn't leaving without it.
    I didn't know him and he didn't know me. He’d found me in a crap part of town and given me shelter. If I've been a druggie or thief I could've made off with some of his stuff while he was sleeping.
    Not that his stuff looked all that valuable. Whatever he did for a living, he wasn't making the big bucks. His computer was OK, though. Typical gamer. Gamer freaks were likely to spend money on electronics that they wouldn't even spend on food.
    I made another round of the apartment. The place wasn’t bad. I looked out the window and discovered we were at the end of a cul-de-sac. Thick woodlands extended for as far as I could see behind the house. There were other homes on the street, but nothing close.
    I went out into the entrance hall and discovered the building had another apartment upstairs, but there was no name plate on the mailbox, no second car in the driveway, and I hadn’t heard any sounds coming from up there.
    Maybe I’d gotten lucky? This might be the perfect place to go to ground. I had a week and a half before classes started up again, and I needed to be away from the stress of my last semester, grades, antsy professors, and job hunting vs. grad school decisions.
    Not to mention my family—the real stressors in my life. My mother had threatened to show up with her entourage and make a spectacle of my graduation. If there was a grand prize for embarrassing mothers, mine would win every time.
    I don’t know why I let them all get to me the way I did. Too sensitive, I guess. My friends always say I project as tough, but that’s superficial. A defense mechanism or something. Yeah, I can stand up for myself, I guess, but inside I’m emotionally gooey.
    Sometimes I have to leave all my stormy emotions behind and just veg out for a while. I needed to find something new to think about, some new problem to solve.
    I found the pieces of my