Kill You Twice Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    He looked up. A fine mist of his saliva floated in front of him, sparkling in the light. Beyond it, on the other side of the sunbeam, was a couch, and on the couch sat four girls. The girl
who’d spoken sat on the floor in front of the couch. The facial piercings were gone, and her hair had grown out and was bleached blond, with two inches of light brown at the roots. A colorful
Indian skirt pooled around her legs. Tiny mirrors were sewn into the fabric and they reflected the sun, projecting bright spots above their heads onto the plaster ceiling, like a disco ball. Her
thin round shoulders pushed forward and she smiled at him.
    She’d Tasered him once. The fifty thousand volts of electricity had dropped him to the floor.
    “Hi, Pearl,” Archie said.
    She was supposed to be in Salem, back with her foster parents. Archie wondered how long that had lasted before she’d run away again. A month? Two? She’d been sixteen when
they’d met and already an epic pain in the ass. Archie was guessing that a year had not mellowed her.
    “You look old,” she said.
    Yes, still a pain in the ass. “I feel old,” he said. He cleared his throat and glanced around at the other girls. They gazed sullenly back at him. No tearstained cheeks. No
histrionics. No loss of innocence at the violent death of someone they knew. These girls had already seen the bad the world had to offer. So they weren’t surprised. It would be different,
Archie thought, if they had seen Jake Kelly’s mangled body hanging from that tree.
    Pearl was tapping a plastic pen against her front teeth, tap, tap, tap. The fans whirred and heaved. Archie’s eyes felt dry.
    “I’m Detective Archie Sheridan,” he said, for the rest of them. He skipped the usual get-everybody-comfortable small talk. It was too hot in there. “Did any of you see
anything out of the ordinary this morning?” he asked.
    The girls shook their heads or shrugged, or stared blankly, which meant the same thing.
    “Did any of you see or talk to Jake Kelly?” Archie asked.
    More head shakes. “He works in the kitchen,” a girl with an orange Mohawk said, like it meant something.
    Bea Adams took a small step forward from her position against the wall and said, “The girls aren’t supposed to fraternize with the volunteers.”
    Especially the male ones, thought Archie.
    Pearl was chewing on the end of the pen now, working it between her teeth at the corner of her mouth like a dog with a strip of rawhide.
    “None of you saw him this morning?” Archie said.
    “I shuttled the food in and out of the kitchen,” Bea said. “The girls weren’t back there at all.”
    Archie returned his attention to Pearl. She caught him looking at her and stopped savaging the pen. “What?” she said. She lowered the pen to her lap, holding it between her first and
second fingers, a substitute for the cigarette she really wanted.
    “Can I see your hand, Pearl?” Archie asked.
    She looked down at her hands and then back up at him, mouth uncertain. “Why?” she said.
    Archie smiled. “Just a hunch,” he said.
    Pearl considered this for a moment and then threw a defiant look around the room and shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. She held her left hand toward Archie. As she shifted forward, the
disco lights reflecting off her skirt spun dizzily around the room.
    She’d been holding the pen in her right hand.
    “The other hand,” Archie said.
    Pearl hesitated; then extended her right hand, palm up.
    Archie stood, walked over to where Pearl sat, and knelt in front of her. Then he took her hand in his. It seemed tiny, the nails bitten to the quick. No rings. A tattoo on her inner wrist
consisted of a single plainly printed word: lucky .
    “The news said that you saved that kid,” Pearl said. “Someone kidnapped him and you saved him. Patrick somebody. I heard about that.”
    Archie lifted her palm to his face. Her veins pulsed against the pale skin of her inner wrist, the tattoo still