Read Online High Life by Matthew Stokoe - Free Book Online Page A

the spirit, Jackie.”
    Ryan put his gun away, screwed the top on the jar, and held it up to the light.
    “Nice and thick. Must have a high sperm count.”
    “Can I go now?”
    “Soon.”
    “Jesus, what now? A stool sample?”
    “Getting smart with me ain’t smart, Jackie. Did she know any doctors?”
    “Her client list wasn’t in my top-ten chart of great books to read.”
    “I’m trying pretty hard here, Jackie. Right now it’s the only thing pointing away from you.”
    “How’s that?”
    “You saw the way she was cut. Coulda been someone with surgical experience. A doctor, no?”
    There was something so majorly unkosher about Ryan I was reluctant to tell him anything, let alone stuff about illegal kidney operations. But I figured a little info might put me in a better light.
    “Maybe she did mention one. Over in Malibu, I think.”
    “Oh, really? Got a name? An address?”
    “No. She didn’t talk about him. It was just like comments she made. I don’t even know if his place was on the beach or in the hills.”
    “You get a look at him? He ever come by to pick her up?”
    “No.”
    “Did she keep an address book, any sort of record of the guys she fucked?”
    “Not Karen. She wasn’t that organized.”
    “This ain’t good. Not for you, anyway. Doesn’t give me anything to go on. I guess I’ll just have to stick with you. Tell me, what was it like being married to a whore?”
    “Not good.”
    “Could be it pushed you a little too far? Maybe she fucked a guy with a big dick one night, came home and told you about it. And ’cause you ain’t so long you flipped out with something sharp?”
    “I didn’t kill her, Ryan.”
    He smiled for a moment then nodded at the photo of the dead girl.
    “A present.”
    He got out of the car and walked off into a night that wasn’t distant or insulated anymore. Everything in it was sharp and immediate and dangerous. The kind of environment that looked like it would suit Ryan just fine.

Chapter Six
     
    Daytime, on the bed. I was interfacing, but at one remove, blurred and borderline irritable behind a filter of pills. Lorn on the TV, on a tape. As perfect as the teen sex visions on Nintendo. Talking about things that possessed me. I lay on the bed like one of those slovenly filter-feeding fish, gulping it in too fast to taste, but drawing bedrock nourishment from it all the same.
    Then Royston turned up to collect the rent—a little weasel of a guy who owned a couple of properties along the coast and liked to keep a handle on things via personal connection. He had a habit of pushing his head forward and up that made the front of his neck bulge like the underside of a penis. Black-framed coke-bottle glasses, hair that looked synthetic, a thin white body that seemed to be always coiling and twisting and trying to escape its clothes. He was in his thirties, but it was hard not to think of him as a child—an idiot child, protected from life by his inability to appreciate the hassles the rest of the world suffered.
    I found it almost impossible to stay civil around him.
    “Hiya, Jack, it’s that time of the month again.”
    He laughed like he’d made a joke, a sort of braying noise.
    “Yeah? I haven’t started bleeding yet. I must be late.”
    “Oh, Jack, you’re wild. Come on, you know what I mean.”
    He threw an air punch and made a growling noise like he appreciated me playing along with him.
    “This isn’t a good time.”
    “Oh, wow, I can see that. You really should try to keep the place a bit cleaner, you know. Is that chocolate pudding on your chest?”
    “Didn’t you hear me?”
    “Why don’t you open the blinds? It’s such a lovely day outside. The sun’s shining, the birds are singing, and God’s in his heaven. That’s what my mother used to say. The sun’s shin—”
    I walked out of the room to get a beer from the fridge. I looked at the pill jar and wondered if I could take enough to pass out before Royston managed to bring