French Kiss by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page A

up, again closer to her face. His saliva is dripping onto Laura’s cheeks and lips. The kisses begin to feel more like bites. She is certain the skin on her right cheek has been punctured by his teeth. Then more hair pulling. Her vagina is full of pain.
    This time Laura screams. “Stop. Slow down!” She pushes at his fat neck.
    Then suddenly Paulo makes a huge noise—a kind of explosive grunt. His breathing immediately slows down.
    Laura realizes that she doesn’t need to protest any longer. It’s over. He’s finished. He never even entered her. Paulo the Pig begins panting like a tired old horse. He is resting, she thinks. He remains on top of her for a few minutes.
    Finally Paulo rolls off and rests at her side.
    For a moment, Laura becomes a kind of waitress in a sexual diner. “Can I get you anything else, sir?”
    But Paulo Montes merely keeps his heavy breathing pumping. “That was good, very good. Go into the next room. Take what you want. Within reason, of course.” He laughs again. What a comedian!
    Like all the girls who work for the Russian gang, Laura knows Paulo Montes is one of the most significant importers of what are called travel packages: drugs that are smuggled along strange geographic routes—say, from Ankara to Kiev to Seoul to New York to São Paulo—in order to confuse and evade the narcs.
    “No, thank you,” Laura says, slipping into her torn underwear, her jeans, and her shirt. She plucks a few of his many sweaty curly hairs from her stomach.
    “Don’t be ungrateful, bitch,” Paulo says. This time he’s not sounding funny. He doesn’t laugh. “Scag, maybe. I got it in the plastic containers. Or some good China white.”
    “I just need to use the bathroom,” Laura says.
    Paulo snaps at her quickly. “Use the maid’s bathroom at the end of the hall. You can’t use this one. I have personal items in there.”
    Laura simply says, “Okay.” She’s tired and frightened and disgusted.
    “Now go in the next room and treat yourself. Even something simple. Take a little C. Have a party later with your friends.”
    To appease him she says, “Do you have some weed? I’ll take some weed.”
    He laughs again, the loudest of all his laughing jags.
    “Weed? You’re joking. Like Paulo would ever deal low-class shit like that.”
    She watches Paulo on the bed, naked, laughing.
    As Laura leaves the room all she can think of is that line from the Christmas poem: “…a little round belly / That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.”

Chapter 19
    Laura Delarico has finished her story.
    “So that’s it. The clients don’t pay us girls directly. It’s all online, I guess. I don’t really know. When it was over, I just left.”
    Burke speaks. “Detective Moncrief and I want to thank you. We know this has been tough.”
    “I wish I could have helped more,” Laura says. “I’m not afraid. I just…well, that’s what happened.”
    “You’ve helped us more than you can imagine,” I say. Sincerely, softly. “What you gave us was big. I’m fairly certain Maria Martinez visited Paulo’s room as well.”
    Burke agrees. “There’s a very real possibility she was the dark-haired girl he rejected before you.”
    “You don’t know that for sure,” Laura says.
    “You’re right,” I say. “Not yet. But it is a logical deduction. He may have killed her and disposed of her. Or he may have put her body in the bathroom.”
    “The one he wouldn’t let me use,” she says quietly. “I guess that makes sense.”
    K. Burke holds up her hand. “Or we may be completely off base. Maybe it was not Maria Martinez. Maybe we’ve got it all wrong.”
    I cannot resist. I say, “Ah, K. Burke, ever the jolly optimist.”
    I reach over and gently touch Laura Delarico’s hand. She does not pull away. She is so much less frightened than she was a few hours ago.
    “And that is why…” Suddenly, I must stop speaking. Oh, shit. Oh, no.
    I feel my throat begin to burn. I’m having