The Graveyard Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

happen?”
    “Yesterday afternoon.”
    “The place must be swarming with techs trying to find out how it happened. How’d you get away?”
    “Well, I had business up here anyway and I thought—I thought you knew about her, you see, so you might have an idea where she’s being kept. It was one thing to learn about her arrest and feel awful for years, but then to see her! Suddenly I just couldn’t stand it anymore. As for how it happened, well, isn’t it obvious?”
    “No. Would you mind letting me in on the little secret?” said Joseph harshly. “Because in—what, twenty-odd thousand years of going around the block?—this is the first time I’ve ever heard of anybody defying the laws of temporal physics!”
    Lewis looked at him miserably. “It was Mendoza, Joseph. She’d become a Crome generator.
She
set off the temporal wave. You didn’t know that either?”
    Joseph was silent for about thirty seconds. Then, moving too quickly for mortal sight, he leaped to his feet and hurled, his beer bottle across the room. It smashed against the brick wall. The waiter looked at him reproachfully.
    “Let’s get out of here,” croaked Joseph. “I need to do myself some damage.” He pulled out his wallet and withdrew a fifty-dollar bill, which he thrust at the waiter as he shouldered past him. He ran clattering down the stairs, Lewis following him closely.
    The waiter thrust the money into his pocket and, sighing, got a couple of paper napkins from the cutlery stand. Careful not to stepin the broken glass with his bare foot, he crouched to shove it all together in a small pile between the two napkins. He scraped up as much as he could into the napkins. Looking around, he finally dropped them down the dumbwaiter shaft. The rest he pushed up against the baseboard, into a spacious crack there. Wiping his hands on his apron, he put on his sock and shoe again and limped downstairs. His corns hurt.
    There are a lot of strange people in San Francisco, and if you work there, you soon grow used to occasional peculiarities in your customers; but the girl behind the cash register at Ghirardelli’s decided that this took weirdness to new heights. Two executives in tailored business suits were sitting at one of the little white tables in the soda fountain area, glaring hungrily at the fountain worker who was preparing their eighth round of hot chocolate. They had marched in, put down a hundred-dollar bill, and told her to keep the drinks coming. On the floor between their respective briefcases was a souvenir bag stuffed with boxes of chocolate cable cars, and the table was littered with foil wrappers from the chocolate they had already consumed.
    To make matters stranger, they had the appearance of junior delegates from opposing sides of a celestial peace conference: the dark one with his little diabolic beard and the fair-haired one with his fragile good looks. As she watched, the devil jumped up the second his order number was called and went swiftly, if unsteadily, to take his tray. He grabbed the cocoa-powder canister on his return. Sitting down across from the angel, he added a generous helping of cocoa to his hot chocolate. Then, apparently seized by an afterthought, he opened the canister and shook out a couple of spoonfuls onto the marble tabletop. Giggling guiltily, he pulled out an American Express card and began scraping the cocoa powder into neat lines.
    “Danny!” She stopped the busboy as he came through the turnstile. “Look at him! Is he really going to—?”
    He was. He did. The angel went into gales of high-pitched laughter and fell off his chair. The devil sighed in bliss and leaned down for a pass with the other nostril.
    “I don’t know what’s wrong with them,” said the girl in bewilderment. “I swear to God they were both sober when they came in here, and all they’ve ordered is hot chocolate.”
    “Maybe they just really like hot chocolate?” said the busboy.
    “So, anyway,” Joseph said,