Kill You Twice by Chelsea Cain Read Free Book Online Page A

eyeliner was starting to run again. Susan
could feel it leaking down her face. Why did she even bother? This was so classic. She barges in, sweaty, with her frizzy orange hair and raccoon eyes, and then gets caught going through his
medicine cabinet. This was the problem with Archie. She didn’t know where the boundaries were. One minute he was saving her life, the next he wasn’t returning her calls. She had been
dead. She had been clinically dead. And he’d saved her, and now she was alive. So what was she supposed to do with that? Put it in a box and tuck it away somewhere? Bury it in the
backyard?
    Susan turned toward Archie and nodded at his hand. “Have you washed that?”
    He looked down at his toilet-paper-bundled hand. “No.”
    “Put it in the sink,” Susan said.
    He watched her for a second and then unbundled the blood-soaked toilet paper from his hand and held the hand over the sink.
    She could see the extent of his injuries now. The skin of his first and second knuckles was smashed raw, leaving dime-sized open wounds. She held his hand under the faucet, but every time she
moved it from the water, dark blood filled the wounds and snaked around his wrist and then trailed down the bowl of the sink. If it hurt, he wasn’t showing it. It must have been a hell of a
phone call.
    “Did it help?” she asked. “Breaking your phone and smashing up your hand?”
    “Actually, yes,” Archie said.
    “Sit down,” she said, and she guided him to the toilet seat next to the sink. “This might take a minute.” She shot him a quick wry smile. “I wrote an article about
first aid once, so I’m practically a paramedic.”
    She turned off the faucet and pressed some toilet paper against Archie’s wounded hand to stop the bleeding while she found a tube of Neosporin in the first-aid kit. Then she lifted the
toilet paper and squeezed out some Neosporin gel onto the places where Archie’s skin was open.
    He could do it himself. Obviously.
    She was kind of amazed that he was letting her. Maybe he felt bad about not returning her calls. Maybe he felt embarrassed for her, catching her snooping like that. Maybe he felt bad . . .
generally. She didn’t know. He seemed distracted, but that wasn’t exactly breaking news. He was always 15 percent somewhere else. Plus, it was a hundred degrees in his apartment. Her
forehead was starting to sweat. How he got any sleep in this sauna, she didn’t know.
    The Neosporin slowed the bleeding a bit. Susan found a roll of gauze and pressed the end of it into Archie’s palm and then began wrapping the gauze around his hand.
    “I noticed something that might be important,” she said.
    “Right,” Archie said. “The local news.”
    So he had listened to her message. That was good. At least he wasn’t deleting her messages on sight.
    “Local news is often very revealing,” Susan said.
    “What did you notice?” Archie asked.
    Susan moved his hand from the edge of the sink to his lap, and knelt in front of him, still circling his hand with gauze.
    “The trees,” Susan said.
    “The trees on Mount Tabor,” Archie said.
    The roll of gauze was smaller now, most of it forming a misshapen white mitten on Archie’s hand. Susan leaned her face close to the bandage, took the gauze in her teeth, and ripped it.
“The guy, your victim, he was tied to the tallest tree.”
    “The tallest tree.”
    “Not the tallest tree. That would be a sequoia named Hyperion in Redwood National Park. It’s over three hundred seventy-nine feet.” Susan caught herself.
“Sorry.” She had been a newspaper feature writer for so long that sometimes these facts just bubbled out of her. “Yes. The tallest tree. In the crime scene area. On Mount
Tabor.”
    “And you know this because?”
    Susan took the end of the gauze, where she had torn it, and tucked it inside the rest of the bandage. “Because I saw it on the local news. They had aerial footage of the scene. Review the
tape. It’s