The Crime Studio Read Online Free PDF Page B

inscrutable, undead snacks, and shakes which were so narcotically corrosive that spillage resulted in convictions for arson. This intense fare left its customers conversing in the crash position. Grandiose lethargy and insane belligerence were the order of the day, and woe betide the silver-haired gran who dared boast of her grief and frailty.
    Yet Toto had not always been such a bacchanalian figure. He had been energetic and unsuccessful for years before coming to Beerlight, but after an arrest in Seattle for drive-by chuckling he had set upon a fresh life. The family fortune derived from his father’s design patent on Mr Potato Head - this Toto used to acquire the Delayed Reaction on Valentine, though amid the froth-lipped delirium and blistering invective of the bar, he at first displayed a pious and subversive calm. Unlike the denizens of Beerlight, some of whom slashed car tyres with their teeth, Toto was a mild-mannered gentleman possessed of a belief in the common good and a normal hatred of the cops.
    The change occurred when Toto read a newspaper article which estimated that crime was taking place at a rate of one crime every four seconds. Toto had always assumed that crime was constant - like ten or twenty per second - and the revelation of these four-second pauses fired his curiosity. Why four seconds? Why intervals of no crime? Like a scientist who agitates atomic particles to observe their behaviour, Toto decided to study crime on a quantum level by creating wild fluctuations in its frequency.
    He was in the perfect position to do so. The Reaction was slambang on a line between Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop and the Deal Street banks, which were regularly robbed at the point of guns acquired at Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop. The line transected a mile known as the Beretta Triangle and Toto was up to his ears in thugs who exhibited a pop-eyed and bellowing menace. Without provocation the Reaction regulars would batter him with tales of bloody rage and stabbing daggers, and at the drop of a hat would yell in finely-crafted detail what they’d like to do next. A typical exchange would go something like this:
    BILLY PANACEA, BURGLAR EXTRAORDINAIRE: I would like to steal everything, Toto. Leave every home on god’s green earth as bare as the truth, for I’ll have you know as well as I do, property is not theft - we are required to pay and pay, and that is sad in the short term and fruitless in the long. Why can we not exist like the startled rabbits of nature?
    DON TOTO: Well now Billy, have a care. Go around with that finely-crafted attitude and before you know it you’ll be button-eyed and deceased.
    PANACEA: You do not understand, Toto. I would like to steal and steal. Until the world is purified and clean, Toto, picked clean and white like the glossy bones of a buffalo. And there will be no hiding-place for these ultra-monkeys who are not even worthy to clutch the hem of my garment.
    TOTO: Simmer down Billy, I have a suggestion.
    PANACEA: I tell you I will leap off a rumbling bridge if I do not steal something big within the hour.
    TOTO: Well perhaps. And as for bigness my lightweight stick-on friend, I am not unaware of a two-fisted shitpile of a tank just waiting and oh-so-ready for acquisition.
    PANACEA: What are the premises?
    TOTO: The Magnuson-Kramer Military LaughIn off the Loop Expressway, and in regard to firepower I believe we are discussing a 12.7mm turret gun for the purposes of anti-aircraft mania and two 7.72mm bolt-on items which will cause the ultra-monkeys you mentioned not a little distress.
    PANACEA: I’ll be there before you understand it. And as for the getaway it cuts out the middleman, like putting a cigarette directly into a brainfold.
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    Billy burst onto the street drooling like a Hadrosaur, and so did every other crook who exchanged views with Toto. Anyone who entered the bar with even the dimmest notion to misbehave would re-emerge with an ear-shattering