Killer in the Hills Read Online Free Page A

since I was picking up the tab, but there’s no way the Beverly Wilshire could compete with breakfast at the 101.
    I was the first and only customer when I arrived. It was too early for the hipsters and the rockers and the Hollywood crowd, and the wannabe Hollywood crowd, and the once-was Hollywood crowd, and the never-were-and-never-will-be Hollywood crowd. I had arrived before the coffee shop opened, starved for food and desperate for coffee. I had barely slept, even after four Benadryls and a thousand fluffy white sheep, jumping over fields of Nicki’s green flannel pajamas. When the restaurant opened I took a booth in the back and spent my time waiting for Melvin draining a pot of coffee and studying the menu.
    I had spoken with Nicki briefly, while I was waiting for the restaurant to open and she was on her way to work. I was standing outside, on Franklin Avenue. The rain had stopped, but everything was wet and the sky threatened with low clouds. The cold, clean air felt good, and I was glad to be out of my room and talking to Nicki, but Nicki was still not happy. She had seen the news about Karen Penelope Rhodes.
    “What do you expect to accomplish by staying there?” she had asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Well, what are you going to do next?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “When do you plan to come home?” she said.
    “Have to wait and see.”
    She made a sound, a kind of exasperated sigh.
    “First of all, there’s a high probability the LAPD is going to want me to stick around,” I said. “Why go back home when they’ll probably call me in a couple of days and tell me to come back here?”
    “Because I care about you, and you have no business getting involved in any of this,” she said. “You need to get Joel on it. He’s your lawyer and you need to let him handle it and get out of the way.”
    Her point was arguable, but her point wasn’t the point.
    “Are you speaking as an attorney now?” I said.
    “I’m not your attorney anymore,” she said. “I’m the person who loves you and knows you well enough to worry that you’ll get yourself into trouble. Again.”
    “The trouble came to me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for it.”
    “Stop talking like a character from one of your books,” she said. “I miss you and I worry about you.”
    “I miss you too, and I’ll be back as soon as possible,” I said.
    “And you have no idea when that will be,” she said.
    “No.”
    Another sigh.
    “I’m only going to ask this once, because I know you’ll tell me the truth,” she said. “Is the girl your daughter?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible she is.”
    She didn’t make a sound for half a minute. I began to wonder if the connection was dropped.
    “I understand you feel the need to take care of things yourself,” she said. “And I know why you’re doing it.”
    “Why am I doing it?”
    “Because you grew up without a father and if the girl is your daughter you don’t want to abandon her the way you were abandoned,” she said. “Don’t have to be a shrink to figure that out.”
    “Maybe,” I said. The thought had occurred to me as I had tossed and turned the night before.
    “But it’s so…reckless,” she said. “You’re smarter than that. I don’t know if I can go through that kind of thing again—worrying about you.”
    “That sounds like a threat.”
    “Maybe it is,” she said. “If you get involved in anything dangerous I can’t stand waiting around, worrying. I can’t do it, Jack.”
    “I understand.”
    “I have to go, I’m at work now,” she said. “We’ll continue this conversation later.”
    “Okay,” I said. “What are you wearing?”
    “No,” she said. “You don’t get that.”
    I heard her cut off the call and I put my phone in my pocket and watched the traffic on Franklin until they opened the restaurant and I went inside and ordered coffee and waited.
    Melvin arrives five minutes after I’m seated. We order,