Read Online A Is for Apple by Kate Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

body to be hiding under it.
    “Well, it ain’t there now,” Luke said. “Are you sure he was dead?”
    “He had a big slit right across his throat,” Xander said. “And he was sort of bluish.”
    “That might give it away,” I said. I walked over to the sofa, where the blood was dried and congealed. But then it could have been paint for all I knew. “Xander, how long since you’ve been back here? Before this morning.”
    He shrugged. “Three days.”
    “Three days without coming home?” Luke said. “Where have you been?”
    “Friends. Your hotel.”
    Luke flashed a glare at me.
    “Later,” I said wearily. “Xander, this body can’t just have vanished. Are you sure you saw it?”
    “I wasn’t that stoned,” he said indignantly, and Luke cast a despairing look in my direction.
    “What were you on last night?”
    “It was good stuff,” Xander protested, “expensive, I’ve been saving it…”
    “How stoned were you?”
    “Not very. Didn’t have much left.”
    “You hallucinated it,” Luke said flatly.
    “Nah, it wasn’t that good. Look, I know I saw it. I know it was there. I could smell it. It was like dead meat…”
    Like dead meat…
    “Xander,” I said, “what did this building used to be?”
    “I dunno, slaughterhouse probably. Some kind of storage. They swung stuff out of the big windows…” He gestured to the glass, currently covered with taped-up sketches, and I went over to look. The sketches were crumpled and torn in one corner, where the window was open on the catch to let some air in. Or maybe more than air.
    God, even I’m not that stupid, and I’m blonde.
    “Do people still do that? Carry stuff out of windows?”
    “I guess. I don’t know.”
    “So you often see people manoeuvring big bloody things around here? Wrapped in…what, plastic?”
    “Usually,” Xander said cautiously.
    “So no one would have turned a blind eye if someone had walked out of this old slaughterhouse on the edge of the meatpacking district with a bloody bundle wrapped up in polythene?”
    They both stared at me.
    “You’re a scary lady,” Xander said.
    “I don’t like how your mind works,” Luke agreed.
    “At least it does work,” I replied, feeling pleased with myself. “Right. Some time between you calling Harvey and coming over here, someone broke in through the window you left open—”
    “It’s on a closed-in yard!”
    “—and took Shapiro’s body. Why would someone bring him here then take him away?”
    We all looked at each other, nonplussed.
    “Okay,” I sighed, “maybe not.” My grand theories have been known to come to nothing before. At least this one didn’t horribly backfire, as they also have been known to occasionally do. Ahem.
    “Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it,” Luke said to Xander. “Maybe they figured you were out and just didn’t have time to move it or something.”
    “Maybe—” I began, but I never remembered how I was going to go on from there, because the metal door swung open and a man in a shiny suit stood there, looking surprised for a few seconds.
    The same man in the same shiny suit as the guy who’d come after me and Xander yesterday.
    “Shit,” Xander gasped and threw himself to the floor, just as the shiny guy pulled out a gun and fired a shot at him. Luke and I followed Xander’s lead and ducked, and watched in horror as Xander grabbed a gun from under the sofa and aimed at the shiny guy, who was emptying the cartridge from his gun.
    “Xander—” I started.
    “No—” Luke yelled, reaching for his own gun, but Xander had already fired. There was a blast, a flash, then a sharp metal ping and a yelp from Xander.
    The shiny guy ran.
    I shuffled over to Xander, who was bleeding from a cut on his temple. “Ow!” he said indignantly, and I couldn’t meet Luke’s eyes.
    “That wasn’t your own bullet ricocheting back at you, was it?” I asked as sensibly as I could, trying hard not to crack up.
    “Might have