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Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

“You still owe me an answer,” I told the Broken Boy.

“Really? After I just got the shit kicked out of me for messing in your business?” He looked like a plucked chicken in a pair of Garanimals jeans and a sweatshirt, but I was out of options. I had to be hard.

“You owe me an answer, kid. I can’t afford to pay you two thousand bucks just to admire your decor.”

He laughed. A little bubble of spit remained on his lower lip. “You’re a nasty man, Bobby.” He craned his head to see me better. I moved to make it easier. “What do you want to know?”

I looked around at the bright eyes and dirty faces of the Boy’s followers. It was like having an audience of raccoons. “Send your friends away. This one’s not for public consumption.”

The Boy must have made some gesture, because Tico got up and led the others out. BB had them well trained, I had to admit it. Pretty good for a sixty-pound bundle of rags that couldn’t stand by itself. When they were gone, I stepped closer. Even under all this concrete I didn’t want to say anything too loudly. I don’t know why—I had talked about it in the park with Sam without worrying. But suddenly I felt something heavy on me, the weight of superstition or just the realization of what I was actually intending.

“I need to know how to get into Hell.”

ten

a mild, gray man

IT WAS taking the Boy longer than it usually did. Maybe I’d tired him out with the first attempt, maybe it was just a hard thing to discover, but he was laboring like a truck going uphill, and I could tell he still wasn’t anywhere near where he needed to be. At first he had simply slipped out of normal conversation like a patient going under anesthetic, flowing seamlessly into what sounded like free-verse nonsense, but that had been the last comfortable thing I’d seen. He very quickly began hitching and writhing within his bonds and now seemed to be deep in some kind of seizure, his wasted limbs rigid, his teeth locked in a skull-like grin, grunts of pain puffing out his cheeks in regular rhythm.

I actually heard the first bone snap, a terrible muffled crack as his contortions put too much stress on his fragile structure. What was worse was that he didn’t even scream, as though such a brutal rupture of tissue and bone barely climbed to his attention, but only shut his eyes, slowly, like someone pulling down the shutters in front of a downtown store.