The Unlucky Man Read Online Free PDF

Bedecked in a faded Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants under an overlong black leather jacket, he cut an unlikely figure. Whimsy looked so much like a play-actor investigator - was so incongruous in any setting - that he became at times almost invisible. Like a strange aroma, he lingered in the background until he was a part of it. In his profession such a skill could be invaluable. It had certainly saved his life.
    As he made his way onto the escalator he lit up a dog eared rollie, pluming thick acrid smoke in his wake. He sucked in an appreciative lungful and wished, not for the first time, that he’d chosen a less exposed rendezvous destination.
    Shit, Whimsy thought as the escalator reached the pinnacle of its rise and spewed him out into the grubby ticket barriers. He hated being this visible, too many people, too many unknown faces.
    Relax, he told himself, if it was a trap, you’d already be dead, and there was something to be said for safety in the anonymity of numbers. Still, Whimsy knew the only reason he had lived so long was a mixture of paranoia and his uncanny ability to effectively disappear, to melt away and stay away.
    His ticket popped out of the machine and he pocketed it once more, noticing as he did so the story on the scrolling news screen. Some funeral parlour downtown was burning down.
    And then he was out into the station proper, into the newly breaking commotion.
    "My God," he breathed, the words escaping out in a breath full of dirty smoke.
    Like a scene out of a movie, there were a lot of panicking people on the move, crushing back into one another, screaming, forming an open half moon, at the centre of which a figure lay in a spreading pool of blood. He was still clearly fighting to hold on to life but Whimsy didn’t need a doctor to tell him that it was a battle he was losing. The guy on the floor thrashed and, for the briefest moment his eyes met Whimsy’s own.
    He felt a flash of ice in his blood, not least because no one ever looked straight at Whimsy. He knew then that he had come too late.
    With a supreme effort, Carver Whimsy forced himself to remain calm. Running will get you dead, he told himself, stay with the crowd, don’t draw any attention to yourself, stay calm, walk away. Still, some sense of something akin to responsibility made his feet heavy, his exit slower than it should have been.
    I’m sorry, he thought, gaze riveted to the prone figure, unable to look away. Head thick with guilt, Whimsy beat his retreat, feeling sick with himself, with what he’d seen and the need to be free of it that was tearing at his gut. Without seemingly moving, Whimsy melted back onto the throng. Where he had been seconds before, a guy in a corduroy blazer was screaming into his phone whilst someone else gripped his shoulder. And, in this manner, Whimsy insinuated himself into the mass of shifting humanity until he was lost in the crowd.
     
    I watched him go, not angry, not anything really. I was way past that. It didn’t matter now, nothing did. Worlds swam.
    A sudden, incongruous, memory leaped unbidden to mind. When I was a kid, perhaps six or seven, I remember I used to ask questions constantly, the way a lot of kids do: why is the sky blue? Why do we have feet? What’s grass made of? That kind of thing.
    I remember that it used to really get on my old man’s nerves, I could keep it up for hours. One day we were in the city -we didn’t live in the city but in a small community an hour or so away from it – and it was a hot, sunny idyllic summer’s day, least ways that’s how it looks in my memory. On this day, I remember seeing an old guy, a bum, rifling through some garbage cans. He looked, to my child’s eyes, a bit like a grubby Santa with a huge, tangle of beard covering half his crinkled face.
    "Why is that man so dirty?" I asked my father, just loud enough that I guess it must have been awkward.
    "Jesus Johnny," my father shot at me, scowling, "You keep asking so many questions,