Fletcher Read Online Free PDF Page A

eye.
    Valerie Gravewood was weird. Few other words describe her so fully. She was abjectly odd in ways that could never be reconciled with normal society. Long before 2012, she had worked in a morgue, until she eventually had her medical license revoked for carving poetry into the rib cages of cadavers. She paid special tribute to the works of Edgar Allen Poe, as I recall. Annabel Lee was her favourite, by far.
    Personally, I thought the entire thing was a riot. Unfortunately for Valerie, her superiors thought very differently of her desecration. Little did they know the full, wonderful extent of her crimes.
    The lack of a license did very little to keep her away from the medical field. She began to flit between shadier organisations and mercenary groups, working as a field doctor during missions and operations. She eventually settled down—to use a phrase loosely—in a quiet part of town, working as a no-questions-asked surgeon. Need a bullet extracted, but your face is all over the news? Valerie can help you out. A friend is overdosing, but you don’t want to go to the hospital? Dr Gravewood is your girl.
    I met her in a professional context. I’d been involved in a shoot-out with three bodyguards and one of the CEOs of an international munitions company. While I had both eliminated my mark and gunned down two of his personnel, the third guard managed to get me in the shoulder. With my situation getting desperate, and the law closely monitoring any hospitals in the area, I turned to the rumours of this enigmatic surgeon working out of sight and under the radar.
    One quick operation and a hefty fee later, I was dosed up on enough morphine to put a small mammal down. Scalpels seem to be a conversational aphrodisiac for personalities such as ours, and we got to talking.
    Three years later and here we were: best friends (relatively speaking), partners in crime (of more than I’d care to mention), occasional lovers (in the most masochistic sense of the word) and sporadic confidants (generally through tales of conquest and glory).
    In short, we worked well together.
    She grinned at me. At least, I assumed she was grinning: her medical mask kept that part of her face hidden. The eyes gave it away, though. I knew exactly what that calculating green glint meant.
    “So. Now that I’ve stopped you from bleeding out: how can I help you?”
    I rolled my eyes. Valerie always knew when I needed something. She also never held back in explaining how she knew. I let her continue.
    “High levels of degraded livewire in your system, low levels of glucose. Means you’ve been awake for a long time. Not only awake, but working: no time to eat properly. So, you’ve been on the job. You’ve been busy.
    “Your coat is clean, relatively speaking, but you’ve definitely been wearing it for a day at least. That means that whatever job you’ve been on hasn’t been hands on. So, the job is an investigation of sorts. Murder, theft, surveillance. Something that takes time but not strenuous work...”
    I zoned out. Valerie was prone to these rants. It was her way of strutting, and I never thought to take that away from her; my own special kindness.
    “Finally, your abuse is always proportional to whatever’s on your mind. During the bank security case, you force-fed an epileptic hypno and put a hook through his hand. I think he’s still in a coma. During the hit on the Minister of Defence, you bit off someone’s ear before collapsing from alcohol poisoning. Last night? You send a girl to me on a stretcher, practically overdose on straitjacket and get a suitor to open his wrists, all before the sun rose.
    “Something’s up. Now spill.”
    I smiled. Despite her rambling, she was good.
    “Take a look.”
    I handed her the photographs from the house. She paged through them with an air of indifference, but I could see she was interested.
    “There’s only so much I can do without getting my hands on the bodies. What I can tell you from