Read Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die for Free Online

forehead. She opened his folder and glanced at his test scores:
Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Solved 58 matrices in 40 minutes. He worked quickly, asked few questions. Conclusion: intelligent, thorough and effective
. Her eyes skipped down to the Wechsler-Bellevue:
Total IQ—135
. She wondered why a bright intelligent person should come on as a crude, unlettered clod. She wondered why she spent so much time with him. Perversity of some kind. The sheriff had called, asking when the patient would be returned to the custody of the court. He acted like the stereotype of a countysheriff, but his eyes, no-no, they didn’t match his words. He was hiding something …
    A male voice broke the eye contact. “Birch here.”
    “This is Elizabeth. I have a patient here—Dan Bollinger—who complains that the medicine gives him the blahs.”
    “What’s he on?”
    “Thorazine—” She glanced at his card and pursed her lips. “Five hundred milligrams, t.i.d.”
    “Is he lethargic?”
    “Unresponsive. I’m trying to interview him.”
    “Okay. D.C. the Thorazine. Make it … eight hundred Mellaril, b.i.d. Write out the order and I’ll initial it later.”
    She hung up the receiver, undipped her pen from the pocket of her tunic, and scribbled the notation on his card. “You start Mellaril tomorrow.”
    “How much?”
    “Eight hundred.”
    He winced, hunching his shoulders—then leaned back with a sigh. “Okay. What’ll we talk about?”
    She reached out and turned on the recorder. “Let’s start with when you came back from the war.”
    “A bunch of us went down to Mexico. Just some dudes who got discharged from the hospital together. We got disability but we could all walk around and had … you know, nothing serious.”
    “What did you do?”
    “We had a nice scene on the coast north of Acapulco, little place called Las Catas. I left after a couple years.”
    “But what did you
do
?”
    He looked down, rubbing his palms together, feeling the dead callous roll up in little cordlike strings. Christ, what could you say to her? You sit on the beach and watch the sea giving itself up in long coils of froth, white claws scratching the yellow sand. Wish I was there now, riding my slider down the long tube of liquid glass. The walls are alive and I can put out my hand and touch the smooth power of Mother Sea. I’m inside her now and she’s writhing, twisting, trying to roll me up like an enchilada. NowI come shooting out of the pipe and it’s like getting born all over again, I rise out of my crouch and stand wet-glistening in the sun and the booming sea wind pulls tears out of the corner of my eyes …
    “I did a lot of surfing, mostly.”
    “Your friends, what were they like?”
    “I dunno. You want ages, hair color? What?”
    “Whatever you remember most vividly.”
    He looked up at the ceiling and squinted his eyes. He could see Craig strumming his guitar while the firelight flickered on his burn-scarred forehead. The Learned Doctor plunked the African thumb harp and passed the roach, coughing up phlegm from his rotting lungs. And there was Frog, six-feet-four of friendly fat, filling his pipe with cinnamon-red Kona curls. Three puckered scars like rooster’s assholes ran diagonal across his bloated belly and you wondered how the slugs went through without killing him. Lona floated up out of the lagoon with water hyacinth in her hair, I laid her in the warm sand and her skin was cool but inside she
burned …
    “Let’s go on to the next question.”
    “All right. Why did you leave?”
    “Wo got rousted.”
    “What?”
    “Busted. Popped. The greasers gave us the heave-ho.”
    “Do you remember well enough to describe the scene?”
    Yes, he remembered. The Mexican Secret Service raided the camp, guns drawn and fingers itching to blast holes in gringo-meat, the L.D. stood in the door of the hut, toking up on a final joint and passing it down, saying, “Make it last, Danny, it’s gonna be a sweaty