Briarpatch by Tim Pratt Read Online Free PDF Page A

wheelchair.”
    Orville didn’t quite understand what happened then. He didn’t exactly feel her touch him, but somehow he was rising, as if lifted by a strong wind, IVs tugged from his arms, a white fog filling his vision and receding, and soon he was sitting upright, and there was a flash of pain coming up from his legs, like being stung by a bee, and it seemed a harbinger of worse pain to come. The dead woman—what was her name?—was behind him, and the wheelchair was moving forward, through the door, into a white corridor.
    Orville thought he should be worried, but the drugs wouldn’t let him. And anyway, how likely was it that any of this was even happening? He was probably just in a coma, dreaming, or even drowning to death in the bay, imagining all this. “Where are we going?” he asked.
    “Into the briarpatch,” she said, and Orville couldn’t tell if he heard anticipation or fear in her voice.

Arturo Has a Sweet Ride
    1
    Darrin stepped off the bus after his long trip back across the bay. During the ride he’d tried to wrap his head around what he’d seen, and he’d passed beyond disbelief into a kind of profound numbness. Bridget was dead. She’d jumped from the bridge. That chapter of his life was now completely closed. He trudged from the bus stop down by the high school on Park Boulevard toward his street, across from the 24-hour grocery store—Bridget had always called it the “grab and stab” or the “loot and shoot” because it seemed like the kind of place that probably got robbed a lot—and up the steep hill, past stucco apartment buildings with white-painted wrought iron gates.
    He wondered when he’d see Echo next, what he’d say to her when he did. They had no plans, but she often dropped by unexpectedly. She would hold him, at least, and would offer whatever other comforts he was willing to accept. She didn’t like hearing about Bridget, anymore than any lover relished tales of her predecessor, but Echo understood the impact Bridget had made on Darrin’s life. She would try to help him get
past
this grief though—she wasn’t one for brooding. Those were the things Darrin liked about her: her spontaneity, her honesty, the remarkably short distance that existed between her thoughts and her actions. Those qualities certainly made sex with her wonderful—athletic and ecstatic, anyway, if seldom exactly intimate—but it could make more delicate emotional matters difficult to navigate.
    Darrin paused by a car parked a block down from his building. It was painted a bone-coloured off-white, a battered-looking, four-door landshark of a sedan, probably from the ’70s, though the chrome grille that seemed to silently snarl and the pop-eyed oversized headlights were more like something from the ’50s. The car’s back seat was filled with paper, heaped from floorboards nearly to the ceiling, and the passenger seat was similarly piled, papers spilling onto the wide dashboard and encroaching onto the driver’s side a bit. Darrin frowned, peering inside. He’d never seen anything like this—was it some kind of gypsy recycling wagon? There were takeout restaurant menus, old tax forms, handwritten letters, torn envelopes, catalogues, advertising circulars, bills, bank statements, cancelled cheques, coffee-stained contracts, and all other manner of paper paraphernalia. There must have been hundreds of thousands of sheets, and hundreds of pounds of paper, and when Darrin stepped back to look, he saw the car was riding low on its axles, fenders weighted halfway down the tires. He walked around the vehicle, its strangeness temporarily distracting him from his more serious concerns. He thumped the trunk, wondering if it was similarly stuffed, and if the car’s owner had some sort of deeply arcane filing system, or if it was, as seemed more likely, simply the vehicle of an obsessive crap-hoarder.
    Then he noticed the car’s name. There was the familiar winged Chrysler logo in the middle of the