Kill You Twice Read Online Free PDF Page B

few lights were on inside. The developers
were carving livable apartments out of the brick warehouse one apartment at a time, and only a few were occupied. When Archie saw the blonde, for a moment he thought she was inside his apartment,
standing in his window, looking down at him. He had to remind himself that Gretchen was locked up. Then, after a startled second, he realized that she was standing in the window a floor below his.
She was five stories up, but when she stepped back suddenly he was certain that she’d seen him looking up at her.
    It made him feel strange, like a peeper, when in fact hadn’t she been looking down at him?
    Another blonde. That was the last thing Archie needed.
    He kept his eyes on the ground and hurried across the street. It had been three months since the floodwaters that had damaged much of downtown had receded, but the smell of it still lingered, a
wet rot that crawled down Archie’s throat and settled in his clothes. The heat only made it worse.
    The building had been built as a produce warehouse, with offices upstairs. Back in the thirties they had distributed apples from Oregon farms. Truckers from California would load up their trucks
and then race back south. The first few loads got paid the most. After that, the novelty passed and the price dropped. Truckers died all the time on that route. They fell asleep at the wheel or
took a turn too fast. These days most of the world’s apples came from China.
    Archie went through the oversized door on the loading dock and took the old freight elevator up to the sixth floor.
    His cell phone started ringing again as soon as he opened the door to his apartment. He pulled the phone out of his pants pocket, but didn’t pick up the call. Instead he set it on the
table inside the door. He glanced at the screen as he walked away. He had twenty-two missed calls.
    Archie walked around his apartment turning on fans and opening windows. It was a familiar routine, the same order every time. The feeling of air moving gave, at least, the impression of the
temperature dropping. The stink from the flood was bearable up here. He unbuttoned his shirt and walked down the hall to the living room, and stood looking out his window. He wondered if the blonde
was still standing at her window, one floor below. Outside, the sky was layered in pastels and the Willamette River looked almost lilac. Portland was a city painted in bold colors—deep green
trees and stark white mountaintops, red brick and blue water. Then you’d blink, and it would all go pastel—pink sky, lilac river, silver skyline, a French Impressionist Portland. It was
this Portland that somehow always ended up on postcards. It didn’t help that the second tallest building in Portland, at forty-two stories, was a big pink glass skyscraper.
    Archie smiled. Portland. Known for its blush-tinted scenery, and its serial killers.
    Beyond the roofs and old wooden water towers of the produce district, Archie could see the twin glass towers of the convention center and the ribbon of interstate that paralleled the river.
Straight ahead, beyond it all, was Mount St. Helens, an hour north in Washington State. The mountain had erupted back in 1980, and killed fifty-seven people, and still spit out a plume of steam
once in a while just to remind everyone she was there. An old coot named Harry R. Truman had refused to leave his home on the mountain when authorities came calling. They never found his body.
    The phone rang again. Archie glanced back at it. He could only avoid the calls for so long. He felt a pain under the scar on his chest, told himself it was just in his head, and walked over to
the table and picked up the phone.
    “You don’t give up, do you?” Archie said.
    There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Detective Sheridan?” said a man’s voice uncertainly. “This is Jim Prescott at the Oregon State Mental
Hospital.”
    “I know who you are,” Archie said as he walked