The Night Mayor Read Online Free PDF

Shamus.’
    Damn, so I was a bit part after all. A first-reel casualty. I prayed to God and Jack L. Warner that Richie Quick had a partner. A Bogart or an Alan Ladd. Hell, I’d even put up with Warner Oland as Charlie Chan or Edna May Oliver as Miss Withers. Richie Quick might be on a slab in the morgue, and his partner might have hated his worthless guts, but murdering detectives is bad for business. Richie’s partner would have the case cleared up by morning. Daine and his goons would be brought to book, or picturesquely killed in such a way that the Hays Code couldn’t accuse the partner of having committed a revenge murder. The old stories always come out best. Of course, none of that would matter to me: dead on the sidewalk in the City, a vegetable in my tank back in the world.
    The lights went out. A lot of glass got broken. A familiar staccato assaulted my ears, and a burst of flashes strobe-lit the night.
    Duryea got pitched off the balcony and fell like a twitching dummy. A small crowd gathered around his broken doll of a corpse. Another cheap hood dead in the gutter. Nothing new around here. They fall out of the skies all the time, like safes in the cartoons.
    The penthouse lights came up again. I turned and staggered back into the room. The place was wrecked. The walls were delicately embroidered with bullet scars. Priceless art objects were smashed. Mazurki lay under the fishtank, which solemnly pissed on him out of a tracery of holes. A cat curled around his huge feet, meowing lazily, waiting for the fish.
    Daine was on the couch. Thick black stuff seeped from his mouth. He had been going for his roscoe but hadn’t made it. He was as dead as Benedict Arnold and twice as guilty.
    In the theory, it was over. I massaged the back of my neck, and waited to be woken up.
    Nothing changed. The record finished and the needle clicked in a groove. The cat left for some business elsewhere. The tank emptied to the level of the lowest hole. The remaining three inches of water were thick with expensive specimens, dragging filament fins in the gravel.
    The City should be decaying around me. I looked out of the window. It was all there. Buildings, slums, ships in the harbour, moving cars, everything. Joseph Cotten looked up at me, hands on hips, coat draped cloak-fashion on his shoulders. He was standing over Duryea, the last of the crowd. He walked across the street to a pay phone and made a call. Even from five storeys up, I could read the PRESS card in his hat. Another late-breaking story for the
Inquirer.
    Hold the front page. The City was still alive.
    I checked Daine. He was still dead. The Princetown psychs had been wrong.
    Bastards! Lousy, lying, know-nothing bastards!
    I kicked Daine off the couch. He didn’t come back to life. I kicked him some more, for my own personal pleasure. That doesn’t sound very pleasant, I know, but sometimes these small things help. If the governor of Princetown had been there, I would have kicked him too. And Lissa. Let’s not forget Lissa.
    I kicked Daine around the room. All he did was get deader. I kicked him into a dark corner and tried to bounce a bust of Napoleon off his dead forehead. It exploded, whiting his face like a clown and spreading fragments around him. A black pearl blinked in the plaster mess.
    I scooped up my hat, straightened it on my head and kicked Daine again.
    That’s when I heard the sirens.

4
    T he andrew marshal on the doorstop was a pleasant-faced young woman with JULIET stencilled on her uniform breast. Susan angled the viewer down the official’s body and tagged the sidearm web-holstered to her thigh. From her
Vanessa Vail
research, she recognised a directional taser. That was enough to confirm the importance of her Public Service.
    Susan ran a check to verify the image. The Household reported that its doorstop view was a first-generation transmission, not a simulation. Thanks to the latest home-defence technologies, ransacking was out of fashion, but