Blood Falls Read Online Free Page A

halfway back, on the driver’s side, cleared a patch of condensation with his index finger and peered through the glass.
    Danny was standing at the entrance to the university car park, thumping his leg in frustration as he gazed up and down the street. In Danny Morton’s world, buses were strictly for the poor and the weak. It wouldn’t occur to him that Joe might escape on something so slow and inefficient.
    As the bus nosed out into the traffic, Joe’s last glimpse of Danny saw him stalking towards the railway station, one fist rubbing angrily at the scar on his cheek. Joe let out a long sigh and shut his eyes for a moment. Too close for comfort .
    Then he made a call on his mobile. Ryan answered, his voice subdued: ‘You’re all right, then?’
    ‘Just about, but they won’t be happy. It occurred to me that they might pay you another visit.’
    ‘Yeah, same thing crossed my mind. I’ve rescheduled a couple of inside jobs for this week. And I just recruited my cousin Dex to help out.’
    ‘The bouncer?’
    ‘Cage fighter, he is now.’ A short laugh. ‘He’s a crap decorator, but he’ll watch my back.’
    ‘Ryan, I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess.’
    ‘Not your fault, really. I just hope you manage to find a way out of it. I mean, you can’t live all your life on the run, can you?’
    The comment provoked a rueful smile from Joe. ‘Actually, I thought I could. More fool me.’

Five
    SHE WOKE TO a headache like nothing she’d ever experienced. Her first waking breath was a gasp of pain. She longed to be unconscious again, but it seemed like a hopeless ambition.
    Her eyes fluttered, and might have opened, but no light came in. She shut them tightly, kept her breathing as shallow as possible, her whole body tensed and utterly still, as if immobility would lessen the pounding in her skull. It made no difference.
    Some time passed, and maybe she did drift off. Not sleep, but a kind of disassociation. She stepped away from the pain, moved to a state where she could assess it with some objectivity.
    A blow to the head, perhaps. But surely that would be more localised? This was a sensation that seemed to fill her skull to bursting point; it went rolling down her spine, it leaked from her eyes like tears, or blood.
    Blood . She lifted a hand to her face, touching the skin reluctantly, as though it belonged to someone else. It felt hot and puffy, damp in places and slightly sticky. But she didn’t think it was blood; more like sweat and grime.
    Beneath her head, then? She couldn’t lift it, not when her skull was filled with molten lead, but she could turn it, she could feel the dry scrunch of her hair as she moved. It felt normal, withoutthe tight, gloopy sensation that she associated with lying in a pool of blood.
    She wasn’t bleeding. She wasn’t stuck, or restrained. So why …?
    She drifted off again. Her brain was clogged up, as though submerged in oil. Every thought came out tarred, contaminated by the greasy after-images of a nightmare: dirty jokes and dirty hands; street lights sliding beneath the roof of a car.
    If she wasn’t injured, had this been self-inflicted? God, she’d had hangovers before, dreadful ones, but nothing like this. She imagined her parents, offering their usual caution about drinking to excess: ‘Now then, ———, we know—’
    The memory came to a grinding halt.
    Her name was missing.
    What was her name?
    She might have laughed, if she hadn’t been so afraid. She had forgotten her own name, the way you sometimes forget the name of an actor on TV. Her mum was always doing that: Isn’t he the one who was in that thing with what’s-his-name, the detective? In real life he’s married to the woman from those silly adverts, you know the one I mean. She’s got long hair and a really irritating voice …
    Okay. Start with Mum and Dad. They worried about her overdoing the booze. She worked to produce a picture of them in her mind, but all she could summon was a