Cold Dead Past Read Free Page B

eyes blinked as he adjusted to the dim light coming through the drapes.  He let out a sigh as his body slackened.  Jay’s skin was slick with perspiration and when he ran his tongue along his lips, it tasted salted copper where he’d bitten down hard.

             
                                                            CHAPTER 2
     
     
    The grinding buzz of the alarm clock caused Jay to bite into his lip again.  Out of reflex, he came down hard on it with his fist and yelled, "Son of a bitch!" Pain shot up his arm faster than the realization that he’d driven a piece of cheap Chinese plastic into the side of his hand.
    Thin, fresh blood welled up around the plastic and formed into a crimson bead which slowly painted a pinstripe down his wrist.
    "Son of a bitch."  This time it wasn’t so much an angry exclamation as an expression of wonderment.
    He jumped out of bed and ran for the bathroom, cupping his other hand around the wound in an attempt to stanch the blood and keep it from staining the carpet and sheets.
      Jay reached the bathroom sink just as the blood started to dribble from between his fingers.  It speckled the sink and bloomed out into irregular stains as he reached over and turned the tap on full.
    He picked out the plastic with his fingers and tossed it into the trash.  He had to rummage through the bottles in the medicine cabinet until he found the box of gauze pads and a roll of medical tape he’d bought when he’d first moved into the apartment six months before.
    Jay wrapped the tape around his hand a couple of times to hold the gauze tight up against the cut and then tore it with his teeth.  There’d be time to do a neater job later.
    The same nightmare every night for two weeks.  He didn’t know why.  He hadn’t thought about that day and what had happened for years.  Then, one night, in the middle of a great dream involving a blonde and a bottle of olive oil, it was like a fog had descended and he was back on the pond.  Over time, the dream had become more vivid and frightening.  It wasn’t just a dream anymore.  It was three-dimensional, HDTV, living color reality.
      Jay banged his knee on the corner of the coffee table on his way through the living room to the kitchen.  The half dozen beer bottles he knocked over and sent rolling across the table to the floor reminded him how successful the party had been the night before.  Some friends, other people he barely knew who’d attached themselves like barnacles, some people he’d like to get to know more intimately.
    When his book hit the best seller list, he’d suddenly become very popular.  By the end of the evening, he had four new phone numbers in his pocket and one offer to do some sexual tricks he he couldn’t picture without a twinge of pain in his lower back.
    As Jay looked at the overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses spread all over the room, he made a mental note to hire a housekeeper with the money from his next royalty check.
    If there was one.  He’d been waiting for his agent to call about that.  It was amazing how fast money could slip through your fingers.  He’d done without it for years and now that he had a bit of it, he found so many things that were impossible to do without.  The Piaget watch on his wrist.  The new car.  This apartment which cost him three times what any reasonable person would pay.
    Money was his new drug of choice and his royalty checks were his fix.  Like any junkie, the further away he was from his last connection, the more his skin crawled.
    He shoved aside the dirty glasses on the kitchen counter and pulled a clean plastic cup from an open package next to the sink.  As he ran the water to let it get cold, he dug through a cabinet full of odds and ends looking for a huge bottle of aspirin he’d bought.  Five hundred tablets, cheap, at the warehouse store.  Some habits of poverty died hard.
    He found it