Dragon's Teeth Read Online Free PDF Page A

secretarial job had been the steady income in the household. With that gone—well, he was going to need that ten grand. If it came through.
    Late that Wednesday night, as he was driving back from the storefront church and contemplating a collection of less than twenty dollars, the back of an armored car in front of him had popped open and a bag had fallen out. The armored car rolled on, the door swinging shut again under its own momentum as the car turned a corner. There was no one else on the street. No witnesses, either walking or driving by.
    He stopped, and picked up the bag.
    It was full of money; old worn bills of varying denominations; exactly the kind of bills people put into the collection plate at a church. There were several thousand bills in the bag.
    They totaled exactly ten thousand, two hundred, and fifty three dollars. Not a copper penny more.
    He drove straight to the bank, and deposited it all in his savings account. Then he drove straight home, took out the papers Brother Lee had given him and began to read.
    Before he was finished, his mind was made up.

    The ritual called for some nasty things—not impossible to obtain or perform, but unpleasant for a squeamish man to handle and do. Dancing around in the nude was embarrassing, even if there was no one there to see him. And although he was certain that this motel room had seen worse perversions than the ones he was performing, he felt indescribably filthy when he was through.
    Still; if this really worked, it would be worth it all.
    If . . .
    “Now how could you possibly doubt me?” asked a genteel voice from behind him.
    Lester jumped a foot, and whirled. Mr. Lightman sat comfortably at his ease in the uncomfortable green plastic chair beneath the swag-lamp at the window. Lester thought absently that only a demonic fiend could have been comfortable in that torture-device disguised as a chair.
    He was flushing red with acute shame, and terribly aware of his own physical inadequacies. Mr. Lightman cocked his head to one side, and frowned.
    “Shame?” he said. “I think not. We’ll have none of that here.”
    He gestured—not with his index finger, but with the second. Suddenly Lester’s shame vanished, as if the emotion had been surgically removed. And as he looked down bemusedly at himself, he realized that his physical endowments had grown to remarkable adequacy.
    “A taste of things to come,” Lightman said easily. “You must be a perfect specimen, you know. People trust those who are handsome; those who are sexy. Think how many criminals are convicted who are plain, or even ugly—and how few who are handsome. People want to believe in the beautiful. They want to believe in the powerful. Above all, they want to believe.”
    Lester nodded, and lowered himself down onto the scratchy bedspread. “As you can see, I’m ready to deal,” he told the fiend calmly.
    “So I do see.” Lightman snapped his fingers, and the neatly-typed pages of Lester’s contract appeared in his hand. He leafed through them, his mouth pursed. “Yes,” he murmured, and, “Interesting.” Then he looked up. “You seem to have thought this through very carefully. Brother Lee was not quite so—thorough. The late Brother Lee.”
    Lester nodded; then took in the rest of the sentence. “The—late?”
    Lightman nodded. “His contract ran out,” the fiend said, simply. “Perhaps he had been planning to gain some extra years by bringing you into the flock, but he had not written any such provision into his contract—and a bargain is a bargain, after all. The usual limit for a contract is seven years. I rarely make exceptions to that rule.”
    Lester thought back frantically, and could recall no such provision in his own contract.
    But then he calmed himself with the remembrance of his loophole. The very worst that would happen would be that he would live a fabulous life and then die. That prospect no longer held such terror for him with the hard evidence of an