Mesopotamia Read Online Free PDF Page B

was me. Hands were crawling up my shirt, and trying to unbuckle my pants.
    I shoved the man backward into a bush outside and locked the car door, but a second guy, some slick-haired kid I hadn’t seen earlier, pulled me out through the passenger door. Then he shoved me backward into my backseat.
    “Just calm down,” he said tensely. “We gonna help you get that story about Missy.”
    “Fuck off!”
    As I fumbled with his hands, the bushed one raced around to the other door just in time for my firm kick to his balls.
    That was when the one in the car walloped me across the jaw and I knew I was in trouble. Yet before he could hit me again, the hand of God seemed to reach into the backseat and yank him out by the neck, throwing him out on his ass. While I was struggling to buckle up my pants, I heard God say, “Haven’t you had enough, Roscoe?!”
    “Bitch karated Zek and tried to rob me!” the backseat bandit said.
    “Oh, is that why you were on top of her?”
    “Ain’t like that, sir,” said Zek, still holding his nuts. “Vern said this chinky chick came by asking questions.”
    “What kind of questions? And don’t lie, cause I’ll check.”
    “Mainly looking into the dead dude, but she was asking about my business too. She got drunk off her ass, so—”
    “I gave you my old car for a reason. Your dad said you had to scat pronto. I thought you were long gone, son.”
    “I was, I just came back for my passport and thought I’d grab a little Chinese takeout.”
    “That little tail you got is all over the place, boy. Now here you are with a drunken reporter, playing with a possible rape and assault charge. Normally I don’t try to come between a fool and his foolishness, but you’re crapping where I eat.”
    In a moment both men were gone.
    “Okay young lady,” the voice announced, “now it’s your turn. Off to bed.”
    I tried to get up, only to collapse drowsily back in the seat. But the big hand snatched me up.
    For the first time, I saw his face and instantly sobered up. He was truly hideous. Scarred and stitched, it looked as though he were Frankensteined together from a series of dead faces. Underneath it all, though, were baby-blue eyes and a thick wave of iron-gray hair. His back was bent and he had a pronounced limp in his right leg, but he was strong as he carefully lifted me out of my car.
    “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, trying to keep the world from spinning.
    “Even if you are a no-good reporter, you’re too drunk to drive and it’s too cold to sleep here, so you can spend the night in the big house.”
    “Where you’ll rape me like some farm animal in a canoe,” I drunkenly mixed my Deliverance motifs.
    “If I were going to do that, I woulda just got on the line, wouldn’t I?”
    He sounded reasonable enough and I was too out of it to resist. Wet leaves, earth, and dark sky curled around me as he carried me up the hill to the large old mansion at the top. Eventually he pushed open a door and set me down on a cozy couch in a vast living room. The interior of the house was dark. Candlelights, or lights no brighter than candles, seemed to fill the old palace. Thick dark velvet curtains, wooden furniture, black walls, old creaky floors—all very goth. I tiredly watched the brutish, heavyset man squatting at the fireplace, assembling a small log cabin of kindling. He struck a match and it went up like a midget’s funeral pyre.
    “This is your house?”
    “No, I’m just the butler.”
    When he stepped out of the room I located my cell and speed dialed Gustavo. It seemed like a healthy precaution to tell him where I was in the event that Jeeves turned out to be a Quasimodo serial murderer.
    “Listen,” I whispered when he picked up.
    “No, you listen! We fucked up!”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Little Earl’s dead.” Earl was his nineteen-year-old nephew. Through tears and curses, he drunkenly explained that Earl had become “the latest casualty in a war