White Apples Read Online Free PDF

you're not going to tell me more. So I've got to find him and compare notes. That's a plan. That makes sense, right?"
    He looked up from his tapping fingers but Coco was no longer there. He remembered her saying she was cold. He assumed she'd gone to put on something warm. He sat there making a mental list of things to do next. He didn't feel good but he felt better. Ettrich was a pragmatist. He had more questions for Coco but was pretty sure she wouldn't answer them. He would just have to figure these things out on his own.
    But there was one thing he had to know before he could pro•ceed and only she could answer it for him. He couldn't go on with his planning until she gave him some kind of answer. Suddenly impatient, he stood and went to find her.
    For a Guardian Angel or Grim Reaper or spirit or whatever she was, Coco chose to live in a pretty meager apartment. One bed•room, a living room that doubled as a dining room, kitchen, bath•room, basta. It took Ettrich all of two minutes to walk through her place and discover she was gone. It didn't even surprise him. He could only shrug. What did it mean? Was she gone for good or had she just disappeared for now?
    A white couch sat under a window in her living room. In front of it was a round glass table. Ettrich saw two things lying on it he knew hadn't been there before. Coco didn't like things on the table. She had told him that. He walked over and saw they were photo•graphs. One was the picture he had already seen of Big Dog Michelle and Tillman Reeves laughing. The other was a close-up of Coco's neck with the Bruno Mann tattoo on it.
    Holding one in each hand, he looked back and forth between them. A tattooed neck and two black people laughing. The images meant little but he knew they were his new beginning. As he walked back to the bedroom to get dressed, it came to him that if he couldn't find Bruno then he would next go looking for Michelle Maslow.

Lost at C

    When he got back to his apartment, Vincent Ettrich looked at his possessions and surroundings with the kind of cocked head a dog makes when it hears the sound of a harmonica. As he sat down at his desk, his eyes fell on a thought he had written on a Post-it note and stuck on a lamp: "Some women are meant to be worshipped, others are meant to be fucked. Men's greatest problem is they keep mistaking one for the other."
    Some people are defined by their job, or the damage they do, the children they have, the legacies they build, the way they see the world, or the way they trick the world into seeing them as other than they are. Vincent Ettrich would not have minded if someone said he was defined by the number of women he had known and sometimes loved in his life. Now that he was dead, or had been dead and was back alive for whatever reason, he looked at that quote and thought nothing is different. I still feel the same about women. I still feel the same about life. If I was sick and died but don't remember any of it, then what good does it do me? What have I learned? What I want today is the same thing I wanted yesterday— an interesting job, a few bucks in my pocket, and some women in my life I like to hang around with. So what did it matter that he had no heartbeat anymore and this impossible knowledge about him•self if he could do nothing with either?
    He remembered an article he'd read about reincarnation. An expert on the subject was asked, if reincarnation really exists, then why can't we remember anything about our past lives? The expert's answer made Ettrich laugh because it was so appropriate. "I can't even remember what I had for lunch two days ago. How am I supposed to recollect what it was like to live in ancient Egypt?"
    Remembering this, Ettrich smiled a little and let his eyes wander around his desk. He saw an old letter from Isabelle in Austria and was reaching for it when he noticed the light on his answering machine blinking. Someone had called while he was out. He leaned to his left and