The Godwulf Manuscript Read Online Free Page A

screw it. Better him than me.
    I got a hand up to her neck and felt her pulse It was quicker-I guessed about sixty. I got her out of the shower and across to the bedroom. I didn't see a robe, so I pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her. Then we waltzed to the kitchen. I got water boiling and found some instant coffee and a cup. She was babbling now, nothing coherent, but the words were intelligible. I made coffee with her balanced half over one hip, my arm around her and the blanket caught in my fist to keep her warm. Then back to the living room to the day bed-there were no chairs in the kitchen-and sat her down.
    She pushed aside the coffee and spilled some on herself and cried out at the pain, but I got her to drink some. And again some. And one more time. Her eyes were open now and her breath was much less shallow. I could see her rib cage swell and settle regularly beneath the blanket. She finished the coffee.
    I stood her up and we began to walk back and forth across the apartment, which wasn't much of a walk. There was the living room, a small bedroom, a bath, and a kitchenette, barely big enough to stand in. The living room, in which the quick and dead were joined; held only a card table, a steamer trunk with a lamp on it, and the studio couch on whose bare mattress Terry Orchard had drunk her coffee. The blanket I had pulled off the bed had been its only adornment, and as I looked into the bedroom I could see a cheap deal bureau beside the bed. On it was a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle beneath a bare light bulb hanging from a ceiling.
    I looked down at Terry Orchard. There were tears running down her cheeks, and less of her weight leaned on me.
    "Sonova bitch," she said. "Sonova bitch, sonova bitch, sonova bitch."
    "When you can talk to me, talk to me. Till then keep walking," I said.
    She just kept saying sonova bitch, in a dead singsong voice, and I found that as we walked we were keeping time to the curse, left, right; sonova bitch. I realized that the broken door was still wide open and as we sonovabitched by on the next swing I kicked it shut with my heel. A few more turns and she fell silent, then she said, half question
    "Spenser?"
    "Yeah."
    "Oh my God, Spenser."
    "Yeah."
    We stopped walking and she turned against me with her face hard against my chest. She clenched onto my shirt with both fists and seemed to be trying to blend into me. We stood motionless like that for a long time. Me with my arms around her. Both wet and dripping and the dead boy with his wide sightless eyes not looking at us.
    "Sit down," I said after a while. "Drink some more coffee. We have to talk."
    She didn't want to let go of me, but I pried her off and sat her on the day bed. She huddled inside the blanket, her wet hair plastered down around her small head, while I made some more coffee.
    We sat together on the day bed, sipping coffee. I had the impulse to say, "What's new?" but squelched it. Instead I said, "Tell me about it now."
    "Oh, God, I can't."
    "You have to."
    "I want to get out of here. I want to run."
    "Nope. You have to sit here and tell me what happened. From the very first thing that happened to the very last thing that happened. And you have to do it now, because you are in very big trouble and I have to know exactly how big."
    "Trouble? Jesus, you think I shot him don't you?"
    "The thought occurred to me."
    "I didn't shoot him. They shot him. The ones that made me take the dope. The ones that made me shoot the gun."
    "Okay, but start with the first thing. Whose apartment is this?"
    "Ours, Dennis's and mine."
    She nodded at the floor and then-started and looked away quickly.
    "Dennis is Dennis Powell, right?"
    "Yes."
    "And you live together and are not married, right?"
    "Yes."
    "When did the people come who did this?"
    "I don't know exactly-it was late, about two thirty maybe."
    "Who were they?"
    "I don't know. Two men. Dennis seemed to know them."
    "What did they do?"
    "They knocked on the door.