Constantine Read Online Free PDF Page A

you.
    Hennessy swallowed and said, “Okay. Okay, for you, John. Like… back in the day. Right.”
    Hennessy took another swig.
    Constantine felt a tingle on the back of his neck. Someone was watching him, from up in the apartment building. Someone who flipped a gold coin, a very old gold coin, from finger to finger… Someone…
    Sensing the peculiar metaphysical quality of that scrutiny, Constantine turned and looked that way but that someone had gone.
    Constantine found Chaz punching out the dent in his opened hood, hammering it from below.
    “Not improving it much.”
    “John, it’s not my cab. What’s wrong with you?”
    “I told you to move it.”
    “Well, maybe if you’d told me you were dropping a fucking three-hundred-pound mirror with a pissed-off demon in it, I would have moved it further…” Chaz slammed the hood shut and got into the car. Constantine got in beside him.
    “What you think they’ll call it this time?” Chaz asked, hearing the sirens approaching. “PCP? Crystal meth?”
    “They’ll call it something. They always do.”
    Coughing, chewing up another cough drop, Constantine poked a finger through the litter of books on the dashboard. Aleister Crowley. Eliphas Levi. Dion Fortune. Manly P. Hall. “Los Angeles… never ceases to entertain.”
    Chaz started the taxi and drove into the street, the sudden motion making books fall on Constantine’s lap, just as the cops and the ambulance arrived.
    “Take Alvarado…” Constantine said. “I know how to go, okay?”

THREE
    Echo Park, Los Angeles

    D etective Angela Dodson, LAPD, was running, gun in hand, and she hated to do that. Hated to run with a gun, worse than running with a knife. You run with a knife, you probably only hurt yourself. Run with a gun and trip and it goes off, you might kill anyone. She wore Hat shoes with her civvies, with her suit-skirt, white blouse and purse - but she could still trip.
    No time to worry about it. The guy who’d just shot three people at random, including her young partner, Xavier, was somewhere up ahead, she was sure of it - though she wasn’t sure how she knew. There Xavier - she’d heard him right on the walkie-talkie: he was lying on his back in a pool of blood, near the base of a tree.
    “Get away from here!” Angela shouted at the onlookers, running toward the fallen man. She pulled the badge from her purse and waved it. “LAPD! Get out of here!” Xavier gasping, pale.
    Wounded in the left shoulder. “Get down - get under cover!” Angela shouted at a family gaping at her as she knelt.
    Where was her backup? There were supposed to be two bicycle cops in this neighborhood.
    The shooter, serial killer, whatever he was - had he shot the bike patrolmen, too?
    She pressed an improvised compress against Xavier’s wound, and with her free hand reached to take away his gun. He wouldn’t let go of it.
    “You’re down,” she said. “Let go.”
    “’ Cold dead fingers’, Angie,” Xavier said hoarsely, ruefully quoting the old NRA slogan, fingers tightening on the .44.
    She nodded, scanning the crowd. Checking out the faces. Feeling that the shooter was still here. She stood, drawing her badge, on a slender strap, from under her shirt. “LAPD! Get down!” she shouted.
    He’s here. The shooter’s still here, Angela thought.
    She was sure of it. Xavier was still alive. And she could feel it: the killer wanted to finish him off.
    Turning around, looking at the faces around her, muttering, “Where are you? Where are you?”
    Most of the people nearby on the pier had run off at her warning, but there were still gapers: a pleasant-looking blond man in a gray suit and a puzzled smile, standing behind a woman and her two children, near a vendor’s cart.
    Angela heard Xavier catch his breath at the pain and Angela realized caught up in the sense that the gunman was still at hand-that she hadn’t called an ambulance yet. She got her little walkie-talkie from her purse. “Officer down. One