Free The Sleepless by Graham Masterton Page A

doing something poor, but I’m doing something honest.’ 
    ‘All right,’ said Joe. ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you.’ 
    He put down the phone, and Michael was left alone, naked, with that lonely continuous tone. After a while, he put down the phone, too; and looked around; and then went quietly back to the bedroom. 
    He was just closing the door behind him when Patsy opened her eyes and stared at him and said, ‘What are you doing up? What time is it?’ 
    ‘Four-thirty,’ he said, climbing back into bed. 
    She cuddled up to him. ‘God, you’re cold,’ she told him. 
    ‘In bed,’ he replied, ‘you can call me Michael.’ 
     

Three 
     
    The morning was just beginning to warm up. Lieutenant Thomas J. Boyle climbed out of his new dark-maple Caprice and buffed some fingerprints off the roof with the cuff of his coat. He crossed the sidewalk, searching in his pockets for his cigarettes, while at the same time picturing them quite clearly on his nightstand beside his bed, where he had left them. Sergeant David Jahnke was waiting for him outside the old brownstone house, wearing a cotton blouson jacket and looking more like Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco than any sergeant had a right to. He offered Thomas a Winston; Thomas took it without even looking at him or saying a word. David lit it for him and waited for him to speak. The door of the house was open; and in the hallway Thomas could see brown-patterned wallpaper and six or seven pictures hanging in frames, although the light was reflecting from the glass so that he was unable to tell what they were. 
    He blew out a thin stream of smoke and looked around him. Already, there were three squad cars and an ambulance parked neatly beside the kerb. Neat parking meant dead already. No point in screeching to a halt right outside the house at whatever angle and running in with a backboard and a trauma kit, and guns unholstered in case of trouble. 
    ‘Nice area,’ he remarked. ‘One block away from the Public Gardens. What are we talking about? Nine-hundred-thousand freehold?’ 
    David shrugged. ‘Out of my league.’ 
    ‘Asshole. I’m asking you to assess it, not buy it.’ 
    David self-consciously brushed his hand through his swept-back hair. ‘Miltjaworski’s inside, if you want to take a look.’ 
    ‘In a while. Tell me about it.’ 
    David took out his notebook and flicked through it. He paused, flicked one page forward and two pages back. Then he said, ‘Okay, here it is. Caucasian female, aged about twenty. Blonde, blue-eyed, no birthmarks. She was found face down on a divan bed in the bedroom, hogtied with razor wire, which had caused severe lacerations to the wrists and ankles. There was severe bruising all over her body, including marks which looked like fingerprints and other marks which looked like cigarette burns and other burns by pokers or branding irons. The divan bed was heavily stained with blood and urine.’ 
    Thomas inhaled smoke and blew it out through his nostrils. He hated smoking, he wished he wouldn’t do it. Other officers could cope with all of the blood and all of the smell and all of the chaos of human life, and they never resorted to booze or Marlboro or crack or XTC. But Thomas needed a crutch. He needed to do something obvious, to show that his psyche was wounded by what he did; and smoking was the least dangerous way that he could think of. He could still remember his mother dying in a cancer ward, puffy and yellow and shuddering with pain; and every morning he promised himself that he would smoke less. But every morning they called him out to look at gunshot victims and families burned by fire and dead molested children; and what could he do but light another cigarette? 
    He was forty-four years old, close to retirement age. He was handsome, in a lanky, bushy-eyebrowed, Abraham Lincolnish way. But he was unreasonably tall, almost six-feet-four, and his height had affected his whole life. At