The Crime Studio Read Online Free PDF Page A

tied him to the radiator she wondered how she could have fallen for it. Everything felt unreal, like a modern novel. Time flies when you’re having trouble staying out of the penitentiary.
    Sally’s next stop was Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop where she picked up a firearm powerful enough to send a man into space. There was a sneering new Ferrari 348 parked out front of Billy’s place. Sally blew her gourd. Billy was watching the Hair Bear Bunch when his apartment was shaken with gunfire - windows exploded and walls crumbled - the place was being reduced to a hotel. Billy was embarrassed to find himself calling the cops almost immediately - partly to confirm whether it was the cops who were shooting at him. He’d never given Sally a key because he himself never used one. Sally blew the lock with the semiauto as the cops pulled up - she entered the living room and fired at Billy, who dived like a pike - Sally filled the davenport with beans. Making her escape, Sally aired two cops and ran over a third in Billy’s Ferrari, leaving a mark in the drive like a fumbled pizza.
    She was across the border before Chief of the Cops Henry Blince could count to ten, and during this three-day interval Billy Panacea thought up a cover story, all the while shaking like a leaf in a shredder. He said he’d damn well asked to be shot at by Sally, as he’d tried to remove her shades against her will. Billy was put away for assault and Sally began a spree of armed robberies which stretched decorously from coast to coast. The thing is that Billy hadn’t set her up at all and had in no way stolen the Ferrari - within seconds of Billy’s arrival at the showroom the salesman had intimidated him into buying the vehicle for a hundred and fifty thousand smackers.

BLOCK WAR
    It was a joke downtown that Eddie Slam’s desire to kill everyone was buried so deep in his subconscious as to be hardly relevant. The apartment building where Eddie lived was like something out of Metropolis - the walls glistened and the tenants were pale. It had a communal rat and a clientele of crazed barbers who hadn’t worked in years. Merit stars were awarded for the fastest and scariest whole-body convulsion. Eddie had to wade through uneaten seaweed to reach his door, behind which there was barely enough room to change his religion. He was going stir-crazy and he knew it. It was like being awake during an operation.
    Eddie’s only friend was the unrecognisable, Jurassic janitor Ivo Beak. When Eddie first met him Ivo was spending all his time carving miniature figurines out of frozen snot. His face could only be done justice by the glare of a hurricane lamp and his DNA probably resembled popcorn. He was so amorphous Eddie could never determine what he was wearing. When Eddie asked him to define a snail he described it as a ‘small, hard, electric child’. Eddie had been strenuously teaching him to read and now Ivo had written a haiku of Woyzeck to save people sitting through the whole thing:
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    Flying cat - catch!
    Mad bugger -
    stab girl!
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    Ivo left this with Eddie and went to stoke the coal-gas furnace in the basement. As Eddie read and re-read the poem he felt a strange loss of gravity. The sky outside the window flickered like a dodgy computer screen. When god wants to reward a man, she first deprives him of all his reason. Eddie started lighting his cigarettes in the middle. He created a device which ate bagels, and trained his dog to shout accusations at passersby. He wrote a letter to the New York Times about his eyelids, and claimed in addition that his earlobes belonged to some other guy. Eddie was barking mad as a hare and thus almost indistinguishable from those around him.
    Eddie perceived the galloping drabness of his undead domicile with a new clarity. The furniture had obviously been grown in the darkness of a mushroom cellar. The blackleather desk in the foyer had, it seemed, been surgically removed from a bison.