Cryptozoica Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked Mouzi, “Did you really have to kill him?”
    She shrugged. With a flick of her wrists, she returned the knives to her back pockets. “Guess we’ll never know.”
    Kavanaugh turned toward the bar, putting his elbows atop it. “A gin and tonic. Light on the tonic, heavy on the ice.”
    As Jarlai mixed the drink, Kavanaugh’s eyes passed over the half-dozen flyspecked photographs framed on the rear wall. One of the largest had been taken a couple of years before. It was of himself and Howard Flitcroft. Howard still had a full head of wheat-white hair and a toothy grin split his bland, boyish face. He held a cashier’s check from Maxiterm Pharmaceuticals made out to Cryptozoica Enterprises for the sum of fifty million dollars.
    The frame beside it held not a photograph but a front page from the Weekly World News. The red-ink headline read: “When the Rich Feel Poor, Billionaire Vows Ancient Drug Will Restore Youth!”
    Dominating the rear wall above the liquor shelves was a lurid, yet bizarrely fascinating black-velvet portrait. Enclosed within an ornately scroll-worked frame, the image rendered in garish hues of gold, green, red and Pepto-Bismol pink depicted a Siamese dancer.
    She wore the traditional conical headpiece of a temple dancer that rose to a high, ball-tipped spire. The hat, gilded and gem-bedecked, had an almost three-dimensional quality. Beneath it, the dancer’s face was a fixed white mask of heavy green eye shadow and lips painted in blazing scarlet. Black hair cascaded down almost to her hips. A dozen gold hoops encircled the slender column of her throat.
    Although she wore white panungs—baggy Siamese bloomers—the dancer was nude from the waist up. Her arms, held at stiff angles, barely concealed her bosom. Emblazoned on her torso was the sinuously looping body of a python that stretched up from her waistband and twisted between her breasts, extending over her left shoulder and along her arm. The scales of the serpent were edged in white.
    No matter how many times Kavanaugh looked at the portrait, he always experienced a disquieting combination of sexual arousal and intestinal distress.
    Jarlai placed the glass down on the bar before him just as Kavanaugh heard the door open. He turned around to see Augustus Crowe striding in. The big man loomed well over six feet tall and like Mouzi and Kavanaugh, he wore a Horizons Ultd T-shirt.
    The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds. The stub of an unlit cigar jutted from between his teeth and a black Greek fisherman’s cap was perched at a rakish angle on his head.
    “What’s this about another throat-cutting?” he demanded.
    Still dabbing at Sanu’s abrasion with a cotton ball, Mouzi said cheerfully, “For such an underpopulated shit-hole, word sure gets around fast in this place.”
    Crowe grunted and sat down on a stool beside Kavanaugh. “Especially if it’s about hookers, sex and murder.”
    “It wasn’t murder,” Mouzi protested. “Not in the first degree, anyhow. And it never got around to sex.”
    “Cutting somebody’s throat has that effect on horniness, I guess,” Kavanaugh commented dryly.
    Jarlai placed an open brown bottle of Guinness before Crowe.
    “What did you do with the body?” Crowe asked, removing the cigar from his mouth and lifting the bottle to his lips.
    Kavanaugh took sip of his gin. “Are you asking me or Slingblade Sally here?”
    Crowe swallowed a mouthful of the dark beer and answered, “You.”
    “I pushed him into the canal, just in case.”
    “Just in case what? Her story didn’t add up?” Crowe reached across the bar and took a book of matches from a glass jar. The cover showed stylized illustrations of criss-crossed palm trees superimposed over the bright yellow Cryptozoica logo.
    “That’s basically it,” Kavanaugh replied.
    Crowe