Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
It turned out that Edward Walker’s nice house in the Palo Alto district, where G-Man and Posie had been squatting for the last few months, was going on the market. As part of that process, the real estate agent had informed Posie that the place would have to be tented for termite fumigation. I suppose I should have been grateful that G-Man had the brains at least to figure out that a massive dose of pesticide might be bad for my body, but he handled it in typical idiotic fashion. I was too heavy for him to carry, he said, so he’d recruited Clarence—who, you may remember, I had intentionally not told about any of this—to wrap me up in the tarp, carry me out, and drive me in G-Man’s car over to the place in Brittan Heights where Clarence rented a room. I’d spent the last few days in a toolshed that Clarence’s landlords never used. The Littlest Angel at least had the wit to look embarrassed about this.
“A toolshed? Really? What, just propped up with the spiders and earwigs and whatevers crawling all over me?” I knew I was being unpleasant about it, but I wasn’t ready to care yet. Maybe having just spent a massive amount of time undergoing torture in Hell had something to do with that.
“No!” said Clarence. “No, Bobby, I put you on an old pool table. I kind of made a space and then stacked some other stuff on you. You weren’t just propped up or anything. And I didn’t see any spiders.”
“Thanks for that. It’s nice to know I was so well cared-for.”
Clarence frowned. “You don’t have to be so bitchy, Bobby. You already punched me in the testicles.”
“True.” I nodded, downed the rest of the bottle of pisswater that Garcia kept in the late Edward Walker’s refrigerator, some weak-ass hipster beer that used to be drunk by blue-collar guys because it was the only weak-ass crap they could afford, and was now supported almost entirely by nostalgics with tattoos and semi-expensive bicycles. Still, that stuff was better than no beer, although the contest was closer than you might think. “Sorry about that again, Clarence. Really truly. Self-defense, disoriented and confused, probably even PTSD. Put that together and make an excuse out of it you can live with, okay?”
He gave me one of his looks, somewhere between “hurt puppy” and “irritated older brother.” I might not have wanted to trust him, although I was going to have to now, at least to an extent, but how could I dislike anyone who was so easy to annoy and so profitable to tease?
“So . . . what were you doing, Bobby?” he asked.