Prey by Andrea Speed Read Free Book Online

toast, and he saw the bottle of ginger pills on the counter near the toaster. Both the drugs and the change could leave you feeling nauseous, so he always had a bottle of ginger pills in the kitchen—it was a vital part of his (and Paris’s) recovery kit.
    There used to be an acupuncturist with a clinic across the way from the office, and he had become good friends with the main practitioner, Mei Ling, who told him that ginger pills would cure nausea faster than anything on the market. He thought that was homeopathic bullshit, but he was actually desperate enough to try it once, and he was shocked to discover she was right; it worked better than Dramamine. Just because of that, he gave acupuncture a shot when his headaches came back, and it actually seemed to help. Mei Ling had to close up shop a couple months ago and move to San Francisco to take care of her aging aunt, which he was sorry about, as he liked her. Sure, her English was a bit broken, but she seemed extremely tolerant, and knew lots of obscure things. He liked people who knew weird things, just because it seemed to hint at some odd inner life.
    Before Paris could ask more about the dead man, Roan told him about the Nakamura case. Paris listened intently, although he never stopped eating, and at one point got up to get a soda from the fridge. Paris tossed him a can of decaf tea, and Roan wondered if the fact that he’d had too much caffeine was obvious.
    As soon as he was done, Paris took his seat, cracked open his soda, and decided to play devil’s advocate. “This is all supposition, you know.
    Maybe he was a bit obsessed with infecteds, but ran off to join the Hare Krishnas.”
    “Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Roan replied, playing along.
    “The Evangelicals.”
    “The Mormons.”
    “The Shakers,” Paris insisted, raising his eyebrows in a comic manner.
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    Andrea
    Speed

    Oh no, he wasn’t laughing now. “The Scientologists.”
    “Oh shit, you win. I can’t top that.”
    Roan pumped his fist in sarcastic triumph. “Mock the sacred Xenu if you want, but you won’t believe how much claiming you’re a Scientologist gets you out of conversations.”
    Paris snorted a laugh in remembrance, and almost choked on a fry. “I remember when you told that guy that, as a Scientologist, you celebrated Christmas differently. I thought he was gonna have you arrested.”
    “Which one was this?”
    “The one where you claimed to dance naked around a pyre where you burned the remains of a sacrificial chicken.”
    “Oh, right, and ate the still beating heart of a baby goat under a gibbous moon. Right. I thought I was particularly inspired that night.”
    Paris chuckled, shaking his head. “You just have contempt for everyone and everything, don’t you?”
    “Not every thing ,” he protested. “I have no problem with Terry. Well, today.”
    Terry was the name of the toaster. All their appliances had “Hello, My Name Is” adhesive name tags slapped on them, with the appliance
    “names” scrawled in the boxes in Magic Marker. The toaster was Terry, the blender was Bob, the stove was Frank, the microwave Chiquita, the refrigerator Steve. This was all due to the fact that he loathed name tags.
    Roan had a friend, Phil, who was in charge of a large
    detective/private security firm in Springfield, and a client had wanted Phil to provide security for a big software expo. But Phil didn’t have as many people as he wanted to cover the floor, so he’d hired him and Paris as
    “floaters,” incognito security that circulated with the crowd. All the crowd wore stupid-ass name tags, though, and as they were supposed to be just like everyone else, they wore tags. Roan hated it, and when he got a chance he pocketed a whole bunch of blank name tags, although to what end he wasn’t sure. But one night, slightly drunk and insanely bored, he slapped them on their appliances. If people ever asked about it, they claimed that since they couldn’t have pets (they