Read Online THE PAIN OF OTHERS by Blake Crouch - Free Book Online Page A

found.
    She considered it a latent character defect that she’d failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a slight reclusive tendency.
    My God, I almost married him.
    She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writing in his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast, of course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle of Lake Norman .
    She thought of his dead mother.
    The exhumed bodies from his lakefront property.
    His face on the FBI website.
    They’d used his most recent jacket photo, a black-and-white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at the end of his pier.
    During the last few years she’d stopped thinking of him as Andy. He was Andrew Thomas now and embodied all the horrible images the cadence of those four syllables invoked.
    There was a knock.
    Scott Boylin , publisher of Ice Blink Press’s literary imprint, stood in the doorway dressed in his best bib and tucker.
Karen
suspected he was gussied up for the Doubleday party.
    He smiled, waved with his fingers.
    She crossed her arms, leveled her gaze.
    God, he looked streamlined today--very tall, fit, crowned by thick black hair with dignified intimations of silver.
    He made her feel little. In a good way. Because
Karen
stood nearly six feet tall, few men towered over her. She loved having to look up at Scott.
    They’d been dating clandestinely for the last four months. She’d even given him a key to her apartment, where they spent countless Sundays in bed reading manuscripts, the coffee-stained pages scattered across the sheets.
    But last night she’d seen him at a bar in SoHo with one of the cute interns. Their rendezvous did not look work-related.
    “Come to the party with me,” he said. “Then we’ll go to Il Piazza. Talk this out. It’s not what you--”
    “I’ve got tons of reading to catch up--”
    “Don’t be like that,
Karen
. Come on.”
    “I don’t think it’s appropriate to have this conversation here, so . . .”
    He exhaled sharply through his nose and the door closed hard behind him.
    Joe Mack was stuffing his pink round face with a gyro when his cell phone started ringing to the tune of “Staying Alive.”
    He answered, cheeks exploding with food, “This Joe.”
    “Hi, yes, um, I’ve got a bit of an interesting problem.”
    “ Whath ?”
    “Well, I’m in my apartment, but I can’t get the deadbolt to turn from the inside.”
    Joe Mack choked down a huge mouthful, said, “So you’re locked in.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Which apartment?” He didn’t even try to mask the annoyance in his voice.
    “Twenty-two eleven.”
    “Name?”
    “Um . . . I’m not the tenant. I’m
Karen
Prescott’s friend. She’s the--”
    “Yeah, I get it. You need to leave anytime soon?”
    “Well, yeah, I don’t want to--”
    Joe Mack sighed, closed the cell phone, and devoured the last of the gyro.
    Wiping his hands on his shirt, he heaved himself from a debilitated swivel chair and lumbered out of the office, locking the door behind him.
    The lobby was quiet for
midday
and the elevator doors spread as soon as he pressed the button. He rode up wishing he’d bought three gyros for lunch instead of two.
    The doors opened again and he walked onto the twenty-second floor, fishing the key ring containing the master from the pocket of his enormous overalls.
    He belched.
    It echoed down the empty corridor.
    Man, was he hungry.
    He stopped at 2211, knocked, yelled through the door, “It’s the super!”
    No one answered.
    Joe Mack inserted the master into the deadbolt. It turned easily enough.
    He pushed the door open.
    “Hello?” he said, standing in the threshold, admiring the apartment--roomy, flat-screen television, lush deep blue carpet, an antique desk, great view of SoHo , probably loads of food in the fridge.
    “Anybody home?”
    He turned the deadbolt four times. It worked perfectly.
    Another door opened somewhere in the hallway and