Broken by Matthew Storm Read Free Book Online

mirror didn’t look like the me I remembered. Dan had said I
looked like a skeleton and he wasn’t all that far off. My cheeks were hollow
and I’d lost a ton of weight, but the most troublesome thing was my eyes. They
had a lifeless glaze I’d seen before, but only at crime scenes. In the eyes of
the dead.
    How long
could I live like this, realistically? Six months? Nine? Another year didn’t
seem all that likely.
    I made a
halfhearted attempt to brush my hair. After thirty seconds I found that I
didn’t care enough to keep at it. I looked marginally better, but I could
probably still be mistaken for a homeless person if I went for a walk downtown.
    My vodka
glass was still in the bedroom where I’d left it. I was disappointed to see
that it was empty, but I decided not to fill it right away. I had some things I
needed to do before I knocked myself out again.
    There
was a 7-11 at the intersection about a block away from my house. I walked there
slowly, trying to push past the weakness in my legs. Inside I picked up a box
of instant noodle soup and two cans of V-8. I needed calories if I was going to
be able to function, and this would be a good start.
    When I
got back to my house I put water on to boil and drank half a can of V-8. That
would get some vitamins in me, at least, and it was easier than trying to make
a salad. When the water was ready I tore open a pouch of the soup and dumped it
into a coffee mug, then added the hot water. It smelled strangely appealing,
certainly more than any soup that came out of a pouch had a right to.
    I sipped
the hot soup slowly as I went into the dining room. I had to clear more garbage
off the table to make a spot for the file Chandler Emerson had given me
earlier. It would take several more Hefty bags to make the rest of the house
livable, but the living room had been enough of a start for now. Everything
else could wait. For now I needed to read.
    As I’d
suspected earlier, there wasn’t all that much in the file. The first page had a
photocopy of Heather Davies’s driver’s license. She was 34 years old, had blue
eyes, blonde hair, and weighed 128 pounds. That eliminated maybe half the
female population of San Diego, leaving me the other half to wade through. I
wasn’t going to find Heather by driving up and down the streets and looking for
her.
    The rest
of the paperwork was background information. Heather had worked as a dancer at
a place called Pogo’s, which I assumed was a strip club. I’d never heard of it.
She and Davies had been married twelve years ago. They’d been legally separated
for a year with joint custody of their daughter, but there was no divorce
paperwork in the file. Maybe they really were trying to work things out. Or
maybe Davies just hadn’t included that part.
    A family
tree that looked like it had been printed off of a website was included among
the papers. Several of the names, including those of her parents, were marked
as “deceased.” Others had addresses and phone numbers attached, but none lived
in California. The closest family she had was an uncle in Utah. Somehow I
doubted that was where she’d gone.
    Heather’s
current address was in La Jolla, an upscale enclave just north of San Diego. I
was surprised to see that the condo itself was leased by a company called “A.
N. Davies Holdings,” and Chandler Emerson’s name was on the paperwork as an
officer of that company. Her husband was paying for the condo, then. I wondered
if that were part of the separation agreement.
    Emerson
had taped a key to Heather’s condo to the inside cover of the file. At least, I
assumed it was her condo. I supposed it could be a key to his house and
he’d been making a very ambitious pass at me, but that seemed unlikely.
    All together,
there was very little in the file I could use other than Heather’s current
address. Was this what passed for a dossier these days? It seemed like James
Bond always got more to work with.
    Or had
the paperwork been