The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

hated the universe that mocked him, the once-mighty brought low.
    Mostly, he hated Jack.
    “You aren’t supposed to
be here.”
    He looked up as two men
approached; one tall and lanky, skin like black coffee, face etched with the
lines of a life poorly spent. The other’s skin was the color of tarnished
bronze, old and neglected, eyes glazed, the mind behind them faded. He read
them with a perfunctory glance, their stories superficial and unimaginative. He
would have dismissed them outright, but for the simple fact that they were
standing before him and would not go away.
    God, how he hated Jack!
     
    *     *     *
     
    Lucas Bertram stared
warily at the man squatting in a precarious cave of junked cars, a crooked
staff in one hand, a piece of paper clutched in the other. “Benway don’t like
people hanging around the junkyard. Pays us to make sure of it. Now get lost.”
    Lucas stared evenly and
tried not to appear uncomfortable. He actually couldn’t care less if people
hung out in William Benway’s precious world of garbage, but Benway paid them
each ten dollars a week to make sure Benway’s Scrapyard didn’t become a
“hangout for riffraff.” And make no mistake, Lucas and his friends were
included in that category. There were rules: stay out of the yard between ten
and six; take nothing; no drugs, alcohol, or hookers; and the employee washroom
was off-limits. Lucas got the impression that Benway slept better at night
knowing he helped the less fortunate.
    But it was easy money; who
in their right mind would steal trash?
    The trespasser inclined
his head, staring up at them from under a wide, drooping hat like a traveling
lightning rod salesman. “You’re telling me that you are the guardians of
garbage?” he asked, bemused. “I’ll grant you, that’s a new one on me.”
    Lucas continued to stare
at the man atop his throne of bald tires shaded by a canopy of flake board, his
lord’s staff of tarnished copper and iron in one hand, his kingly robes a
battered gray overcoat. But the man held his chin high, and he spoke like an
emperor with an accent that might have been British, or maybe just snooty
American. And while he talked crazy, he had remarkably clear eyes; different-colored
eyes .
    Crazy Moses.
    That was how Lucas knew
him; how everyone on the street knew him.
    Honestly, no one actually knew Crazy Moses. No one even knew his real name. He never mentioned it,
and everyone was afraid to ask, the man an enigma in the sub-strata of the
indigent.
    Like his friends, Lucas was
the residue scraped from the bottom of society’s collective shoe. That kind of
callous disregard made you stick tight to your fellow refugees, if only because
no one else would. He’d grown accustom to them just as he’d grown accustom to
his world, small though it may be. He knew the dealers and the players. He knew
the restaurants that threw out old food and the restaurants that dowsed their
scraps in Clorox—to keep away vermin, they said. He knew the prostitutes who
wouldn’t give his sort the time of day— high-nosed bitches —and he knew
the whores he could get a hand job from for twenty bucks. He didn’t have twenty
bucks, but it was always nice to know where a man could get a good hand job. All
except for Marco who had his back this morning; Marco’s pecker was so bad off,
he sometimes cried when he peed. The whores wouldn’t touch Marco for anything,
not even the junkie whores who would do things for a fix that most people, in
good conscience, could not even imagine. Marco wasn’t long for this world, and
Lucas suspected this world didn’t much care. Piss on you, Marco. The world has
eaten you up and shit you out; all that remains is to bury you in the kitty
litter.
    “I theen thith guy
before,” Marco chimed in. Marco could not remember his age or even his last
name, and his words were garbled by missing teeth and killed brain cells, but
he remembered being married once to a woman named Tina