In a Heartbeat Read Online Free PDF

very little about Ed’s private life.”
    “How much stock?”
    “As you know, Vincent Property Developers is a privately owned company. The stock division is like this: seventy percent is owned by Ed. Twenty percent is mine. And the remaining ten percent is divided among the employees. Ed figured he wasn’t only buying loyalty that way, but that everyone was getting a fair share.” He smiled, showing those perfect white teeth. “That’s just the way Ed was, Detective.”
    “The way he still is, I hope,” Camelia said. “And exactly how much did he transfer to Melba Merrydew?”
    “Thirty percent.”
    Camelia stared at him, stunned. Then he got to his feet, thanked Estevez, said that he might need to talk to him again, and said good-bye.
    He left with the thick green address book, which he knew would keep him up all night, and a bunch of information that would probably lead nowhere and be of no help to him. And of no use at all to poor Ed Vincent.

9
    At seven the following evening, Ed Vincent was still alive. He was in a private room, wired up to a bank of monitors with tubes leading into his body. Only now there was an additional one. A shunt had been inserted into his head, draining excess fluid from his brain. His heartbeat ticked slowly on the monitor, pumped by the machine, and his pulse fluttered, weak as a sparrow’s. He was not in good shape.
    Detective Camelia paced the long, empty, highly polished corridor outside Ed’s room. Twenty paces one way, twenty the other, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, like royalty at a funeral.
    Ed was not expected to last the night, but Camelia wanted to be there in case he came around again. He wanted a chance to check that name Zelda with him. Sounded like a crime of passion to him, a “woman scorned” scenario.
    Last night he’d gone through every name in that darned green-leather book and there was no mention of her. And no mention either of a Melba Eloise Merrydew. Strange that Zelda’s number wasn’t in Ed’s book, though. Nor was Melba’s. That’s where a man usually kept the names of his lady friends.
    Camelia stroked his bristly chin, peering out into the gathering dusk. Could the mysterious foreign bidder have wanted to eliminate his rival? This was big international business. Billions of dollars were at stake. You never knew. But so far, all efforts to trace the identity of the mysterious bidder had drawn a blank. There was a curtain of obfuscation between the United States and certain foreign countries in the Far and Middle East, as well as in Latin America, that was impenetrable. He sighed again. Life was not easy. Not for a detective. And certainly not for the poor bastard lying in the hospital bed.
    Ed could hear his own heart beating. It sounded so slow he found himself waiting for the next leaden thunk, wondering if it was going to make it. Drugged with morphine to ease the pain, he felt a kind of false peacefulness, hardly aware of his physical self except for that slow-thunking heart.
    He drifted between a state of conscious thought and periods of time when there was simply blackness: a dark, warm feeling, like the blood being pumped through his body by that machine. And then there was another layer under that blackness, a hidden part that never surfaced in his day-to-day life. Hadn’t for years . . . not since he was a boy and had buried those memories. . . .
    He was thinking of the past now, though unwillingly, wondering if this was what it meant to have your life flash before your eyes in the final seconds.
    Oh, God,
he thought,
I don’t want to remember this, I’ve buried it all in the past. . . . I want
to be back in the Cessna, my sturdy little winged
horse, flying back to Zelda again. . . . Oh, God,
Zelda, why, why . . . why?
    Camelia took another sip of bitter coffee from a paper cup. Feeling that familiar acid twinge in his stomach, he tossed the cup into the trash can. He wondered how many such drinks he had consumed in