Once Bitten Read Online Free PDF Page B

represented the time I had left. Seventy beats a minute, 4,200 every hour, one hundred thousand or so every day. What was that a year? More than thirty-five million beats. So how many did I have left if I lived for fifty more years? I did the sums in my head and it came to about 1.8 billion. Durr-rum, minus one.
    Durr-rum, minus two. Durr-rum, minus three. This wasn't like counting sheep and easing myself into sleep, this was chipping away at my life bit by bit, alone in a double bed, and the thought filled me with cold dread.
    I moved my head again and this time I felt my right shoulder grate as the arm moved in the socket, the sign of cartilage wearing thin from too many games of tennis and squash. It never used to make that noise, the sound of bone against bone, or maybe it was only recently that I'd noticed it.
    The cartilage in my knees made cracking noises when I got up and occasionally my hips would pop if turned suddenly. Please God, I prayed, don't let me get old and don't let me die. Let me stay as I am right now. Or if you're feeling extra merciful, let me stay as I was five years ago, when I was in my prime. When I was young. I took a deep breath and I could hear the air rushing down into my lungs and when I breathed out it made a wheezing noise like the wind whistling through the branches of a dying tree. What must it be like, I thought, to stop breathing? That was the way people usually went when they died, I guess, the lungs stop functioning first, then the heart, and only then would the brain start to realise that it wasn't getting freshly-oxygenated blood like it was supposed to, like it had been for the past God-knows how many millions of heart beats. Would the body panic, or would it go quietly and surrender peacefully to the infinite oblivion?
    I tossed and turned but I couldn't sleep, not because I wasn't tired but because dark, depressing thoughts kept slipping into my mind and pushing out everything else. Thoughts of sickness, of aging, of death. I switched on the television at the foot of the bed and watched a detective show where two young women private eyes in expensive convertibles cornered a drugs ring, survived two car chases and a shoot-out without smudging their make-up. It depressed me even more so I went to the kitchen and got myself a Budweiser and drank it in bed, propped up with pillows because I didn't want to lie down and listen to my heartbeat any more.
    The Apartment I don't remember falling asleep but I must have done because the next thing I remembered was waking up with my neck at a painful angle on the pillow and two empty cans of Budweiser on the bedside table. The television was on and a blonde with blow-torched hair was telling me that there had been seven murders in downtown Los Angeles and the police were expecting more, what with it being a full moon and all. It was seven o'clock in the morning, an hour or so before I normally got up, but I showered, shaved and dressed and sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and a couple of apples. My briefcase was on the desktop where I'd left it the night before and I opened it and took out my laptop computer and ejected the floppy disc on which was stored the data on Terry Ferriman and Henry Kipp. I normally write up my reports in my office but I wanted to make an early start because it wasn't going to be too long before the phone rang, not if there had been seven homicides overnight. I was one of four psychologists employed by the LAPD, but one was in hospital having her breasts lifted and another had gone skiing in Aspen which meant double the workload for me and the other guy left behind, Anton Rivron.
    The department insisted that all homicide suspects were examined by a psychologist as soon as possible, and had done since the early nineties. It was supposed to be in the interests of justice and all that fair play crap, but it was little more than a cost-saving exercise. There was no point in mounting a full Homicide investigation