The Stickmen Read Online Free PDF Page A

crack and the ice
and the black tar Mexican “boy” wrung them out young these days,
added a decade for every year. The kid’s swollen red eyes looked
puffed and teary in whatever addiction it was that he’d sold his
soul too.
    “Nice suit, fuck,” the boy said. “I’ll take
the jacket and the wallet. Now.” Then he raised a sharpened
screwdriver.
    “Think so?”
    “Be cool, man, don’t be stupid. Hand over
the wallet. If there ain’t some good cash in it, you’re fucked.
Don’t make me kill you.”
    “What’s a bag of boy cost over here in the
east?” the driver strangely asked. “Ten bucks, twenty? On the west
coast, they sell the shit by the quarter-gram, but they’re all
loaded shots. Tips you losers over in a day. For God’s sake, what
the hell is wrong with you, kid? Life is a gift. Look what you’re
doing with it.”
    The addict stared, taken aback even in his
twitching withdrawal. “You crazy, pops? I’ll gut you right here.
Gimme the cash…and the jacket. And I’ll take the car keys, too.”
Next, he raised the screwdriver higher.
    “What are you gonna do with that? Hang a
towel rack? Get a life, son.”
    The addict was incredulous.
    “I’m making an important call,” the driver
said. “I got no time to play paddy cakes with junkies, so I’ll tell
you this once : Walk away.”
    The addict grinned. “Fuck it.” Then he
lunged.
    The driver’s left hand shot out, grasped the
addict’s throat while his right hand kept the phone calmly to his
ear. A few futile jabs of the sharpened screwdriver buffeted
against the suit jacket, not even scratching the Threat-Level III
Kevlar vest beneath. The addict’s face ballooned as the driver’s
left hand squeezed harder. In a moment the screwdriver clattered to
the floor, and a moment after that his trachea splintered.
    “Rogers and Sons Dry Cleaning,” came a stiff
male voice over the phone.
    The driver clicked a button on the receiver
with his thumb and then came brittle fizzing sound over the
line, then a long beep.
    “Tango-six-dash-four-nine,” the male voice
said. “Counter-measures confirmed. Feed-decay-refeed loop—positive
for C.E.I.C ancillary band.”
    The driver released his sudden burden; the
addict fell to the floor with a meager thunk, twitching,
gargling blood.
    “Order retrieval request, ID eight,” the
driver said into the phone.
    “Crypt double?”
    “Q-J.”
    “Crypt triple?”
    “W-Y-N.”
    “Roger, QJ/WYN. Listen and out.” A pause
lingered over the scrambled/ descrambled transmission. “Unto
whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”
    The driver, QJ/WYN, replaced the unit’s
receiver into its case and hung up the pay phone.
    At his Gucci wing-tipped feet, the dying
drug addict still twitched, still gargled foamy blood.
    The tracheal wound would more than likely
kill him, but more than likely wasn’t good enough. QJ/WYN removed a
Mont Blanc pen from his jacket pocket, pressed the clip, and out
shot a four-inch-long barbed titanium needle. He inserted it into
one side of the addict’s neck, dragged it back and forth a few
times until the carotid was sufficiently torn.
    Within a minute, QJ/WYN was back in the
rental, back in the rainstorm, driving toward the city which lay
ahead.
     
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
    Silence.
    Blackness. Then—
    The little boy’s name is Danny, and Danny is
walking up a long hill from a distance. Dull red and yellow lights
seem to be throbbing from the other side of the hill. Is that what
Danny is walking toward? The lights?
    Yes.
    The night-time has no sound at first, no
crickets, no peepers, none of the sounds he’s used to on summer
nights. As his pace up the hill breaks into a trot, his footfalls
make no sound. There’s a funny smell drifting around him, like
burning metal, like last summer when they’d had that big storm and
lightning had hit the neighbor’s TV dish.
    Now, the red and yellow blobs of light
appear to be leaking smoke, or steam, and their