Kill City Blues: A Sandman Slim Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

to a palm tree and come out in the hall by Garrett’s suite. I put my ear to the door and listen. Nothing. Just the steady hum of the hotel’s air-conditioning system. I go into the suite through a shadow around the doorframe.
    The room isn’t too bad. Almost human in a show-offy kind of way. Gold carpet and drapes. Reds and earth tones for the pricey furniture. But even in Richie Rich hotels the art stinks. It’s all vague impressionist scribbles, like minimalist portraits of whoever the artist was hitting on that day. They’re not make-you-want-to-throw-up bad, they’re the kind of art designed not to offend or appeal to anyone. White noise in a classy frame. If I was staying here I’d have to cover them up like I was in mourning.
    The room looks lived in, like Garrett’s been here awhile. Room-service menus and magazines on the coffee table. Clothes hung up in the closet and tossed over the backs of chairs in the bedroom. A half-empty bottle of Laphroaig and two glasses, one with lipstick. So he’s had company. But the most interesting things are the bird and the bedside table.
    The bird is a raven and it’s fake. How do I know it’s fake? It hasn’t shit all over the floor. It’s a mechanical familiar and a nice one by the look of it. It cocks its head and stares at me with its shiny black eyes, letting me know that this is its space and it’s not going to move. In the bedside table I find a calfskin wallet, keys, a phone number in a feminine hand on a cocktail napkin, a thick wad of twenties and hundreds held together with a gold money clip, and five passports, all with different names but the same picture. I’m guessing Garrett’s. As I lay the goods out on the bed the bird cranes its head around and I’m reminded how stupid I can be.
    I was so distracted by Garrett’s goods that I didn’t check out the whole suite. I don’t have to turn my head to know what the raven is looking at. Instead, I duck as a bullet from a silenced pistol flies by my head.
    Garrett gets off another shot and hits the bedside table. That gives me just enough time to slip the black blade out of my waistband at the back and throw it. I don’t want to kill him. I just want him to stop shooting so I can ask him questions. Garrett flinches when he sees the knife, but he’s not quite fast enough. The blade hits the barrel of the gun and knocks it from his hand. But it doesn’t fall far enough away. He dives for it. I toss an easy chair at him and follow behind it, hoping to get to the gun first. Funny thing about hope. It seldom works out. That’s why they gave it a stupid name like “hope.”
    Garrett gets to the pistol just as I reach him. Still on the floor, he tilts the barrel up and fires. My eyesight goes black for a second as the pain hits and almost doubles me over. I have enough momentum that I go over Garrett and hit the wall behind him. He looks me in the eye, but before he can swing the gun around, I clip him good on the temple with the heel of my chic loafer. Garrett flops onto the floor and the gun falls from his hand.
    Having just had some sense shot into me, I grab the pistol and check to see that Garrett is really unconscious before I go into the bathroom to look at my wound.
    I’m a nephilim. Half angel, which makes me hard to kill. And I’ve been hurt worse than this. Hell, just in the past year Kasabian shot me in the chest, Aelita stabbed me with an angelic flaming sword, and a Hellion cut off one of my arms. Garrett was packing a light, quiet .22. Not a shoot-out weapon. More like something a hit man would pack. A .22 shell might bounce off the thick part of your skull if it was coming from any distance, but put a slug in right behind the ear, it’s pennies-on-your-eyes time. So it seems like Declan and Brendan are both comfortable with killing when things don’t go their way. At least Brendan does his own dirty work.
    I sit on the cool tile of the bathroom floor with a towel pressed to my side. The