Bloodstone Read Online Free

he came up with the same answer; he didn’t know.
    As they passed through Chadbourn he tried speaking to her. “You know I don’t mean to hurt you.”
    He was sure she wouldn’t reply, but after a moment, she said, “I don’t know anything.”
    “You can trust me. I know I haven’t given you much reason for it, but you can.”
    “Can I trust these?” She held up her arms, exposing the cruel purple bruises that ran around her tiny wrists.
    “Okay,” he said quietly. “I deserved that. I won’t handcuff you anymore. Just don’t run.” It was all he could say. Please God, don’t ask for anything else . She was so pale, so thin andfragile. It seemed impossible that she could have survived what he had put her through, was putting her through.
    “I won’t run,” she said simply.
    He wanted to say, So you do understand? You know that I would do anything to stop this? That I would take myself in your place, if it would do any good? “Are you hungry?” he asked.
    “I could eat.”
    And so they stopped at a Burger King, and he forced himself to walk without looking at her, without touching the handcuffs in his pocket, without searching the crowd of empty faces for the one who would sense the distance between them and call the police.
       
    For Billy Smith, the nightmares had begun one night about a year after he had been let out of jail. He was working at the time in the kitchen of a little Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. It was the third job he had held in the past four months. He was in the midst of a depression that held him in its grip like some sort of creature from the deep; a depression born out of equal parts self-pity, and self-loathing for what he had done.
    He was a convict. He had been to prison, had watched what men did to each other there, primed the depths to which mankind could sink. He wondered if you could see it in his face; if there was some sort of clue to his past written in the pattern of his flesh. Yes, he had suffered, he had felt his own soul ripped away and dipped in something foul and stuffed dripping back into place; and he wondered if the smell clung to him like cigarette smoke. He watched the eyes of people passing him to see if a spark of recognition would alight on him and begin to burn.
    But San Francisco swallowed thousands like him every day, and he finally realized two things. The first thing was that most people did not give a damn who he was or where he’d been. The second was that ending up alone in a citysuch as this one was as good as a suicide attempt. No smoking gun, but suicide all the same. Every morning he walked the short distance from the restaurant to his apartment in the lower hills, and every evening he walked home, thinking how easy it would be to simply disappear, how the world would go on without missing a beat. If he had not been born, would anything have been different here? It wasn’t likely. His life was like a grain of sand against the ocean, and the tide was relentless and all-powerful.
    And then he would think about the three lives that would have been saved if he had never existed. Three lives that had been worth so much more than his, an orphan child who had been cursed from the very first breath he took into his lungs.
    He went on because there was nothing else to do. He thought sometimes about ending his life, but the details of the act were too much. It seemed funny to him that even in a life such as his, the will to survive was too strong to overcome. In the restaurant, he was a good worker, silent, a loner. If the others in the kitchen ever noticed the prison tattoo on his upper arm, they did not mention it. If there was something in his sweat that stunk of the hole, they did not show it. There were plenty of ex-cons working in the grimy little shops of Chinatown. Some of his co-workers were ex-cons themselves. If nothing else, there was strength in numbers.
    But he was restless. Later, he would begin to understand how he had been