You Will Never Find Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

but she’s only seventeen. She reckons she’s cool and clued up but, despite all her escapades, we know from the people
we
meet in our professional lives she’s no match for an opportunist. That generation just hasn’t had enough face-to-face experience to know when someone means you harm. So neither of us is going to be happy until we know her situation, and from the last line of her note she knows that too.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜I’m beginning to think this is Amy’s ultimate adolescent battle—to take on her parents at their own game and win.’
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    El Osito came to with a low grunt. He was naked apart from his socks and lying on the bathroom floor between the toilet bowl and the wall. It was daylight. His eyes slid over the glaze of the cheap tiles to the corner and the brush in its ceramic holder for cleaning shit streaks, which he never used. There was a box of pills and a half-empty blister card with the brand name of the benzodiazepine Aneurol. Good. He’d taken a benzo to come down off the coke high. Or maybe not. His head hurt and his thick, heavily muscled body was jammed. Maybe he’d dropped the benzos and fallen, knocking his head trying to retrieve them. He squirmed his way out, hauled his head up to the basin, turned on the tap, scooped water into his dry mouth. He sat on the toilet, relieved himself copiously.
    Things started to come back to him from the night before: the girl in the red dress. Dancing with her in the street in front of his freaks on a bet that he couldn’t pull her. Made it look as if it was his dancing skills when it was the promise of a night of downhill skiing that had done the trick. He knew the ones that liked their blow. He wiped his wet hand down his face and his eyes came blinking out of his head as he remembered getting into a taxi, taking off her underwear in the cab, talking to the driver. He focused on his trousers, which he’d trodden out of last night, saw the girl’s knickers stuffed in the pocket.
    His brain flickered nervously with jolts of memory. The cab dropping them off at the Pan Bendito Metro station. He never let cabs take him to his door. The walk from there. The girl, a foreigner, not knowing where she was, the grimness of the neighbourhood. Staggering up the path behind the Bar Roma. The cracked glass, the lift, he’d sensed some fear there, had to shove her.
    He shook himself and turned to the basin and for the first time saw the blood on the back of his hand, raised his head. Blood on his face and chest. He remembered his favourite scorpion belt snapping through the loops of his jeans, heard it in his head. The buckle whistling through the air.
    â€˜No, please . . . ’ a voice whimpered in his head.
    He washed his hands, his face, his chest. The water swirled red down the plughole. He ran his wet hands through his hair, cooling his hot scalp, the heat building in his head.
    The corridor was dark and empty. The blinds were down in the rest of the apartment, just cracks of light here and there. A smear of something down the wall. He headed towards the living room. Silence. Had she gone?
La guapita? La puta inglesa?
He checked the kitchen. The light squeezed behind the blinds made everything grey and grainy in the hard white room. No blood there. He crossed the corridor into the living room. Only one or two cracks in the blinds. He would have to turn on the light. He didn’t want to turn on the light. There was a smell in the room.
    El Osito lashed out at the light switch. She was lying on the floor with the red dress up around her neck, her unhooked bra twisted in it. Her legs were apart. There was something . . . He didn’t want to look. He slashed the lights out.
    Back to the kitchen. He gripped the sink as a dark pressure took hold in the pit of his stomach.
    It came to him in an instant. He knew exactly what he had to do.
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    â€˜I’ve