Chapters (42)
- DEDICATION
- EPIGRAPH
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- 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
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- ALSO BY RICHARD KADREY
- CREDITS
- ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
“Oh, that’s better. Ironic time passes much faster than regular time.”
In the end, Coop didn’t get the chair (not that he was going to). But the judge was friends with the Bellicose family and sentenced Coop to ten years’ hard time.
Ferthington smiled as the bailiffs led Coop out of the courtroom. It wasn’t fatalism or irony. It was the smile of someone not bright enough to know that he’d been as useful in court as a trout with a speech impediment. Coop started to shout something, but one of the bailiffs helpfully jammed a nightstick into his side, doubling him over and thereby saving him from the extra time the “attack” would have added to his sentence. Maybe I should have gotten the cop for a lawyer, he thought as he lay in the back of the prison bus, nursing a bruised kidney.
At least the other soon-to-be inmates were impressed that Coop had already been in a dustup with a guard, so they left him alone.
And while it wasn’t the finest moment of his career, at least it covered up how entirely freaked out he was to be back in a bus on the way to jail.
The prison didn’t have a name. Just GPS coordinates and a Viking rune that translated roughly as “Seriously, would you take a look at these dumbfucks?”
Inside, the jail was known as Surf City because of how close to the ocean it wasn’t. Surf City was in the high desert and most of it was underground. This kept it out of the public and, more important, the press’s eye. No need to feed the crackpot industry by letting regular saps get wind that, yes, magical thieves, sasquatches, and succubi were all real and on a bad day just as likely to steal your Prius as suck out your soul.
When Coop got the notice that he was going to be released after serving only eighteen months, it was a mystery to him, and he didn’t like mysteries that involved his skin and bones. At first he thought the prison had gotten his file mixed up with some other con’s, but when the warden convinced him that no, it was really Coop who was getting out, he kept his mouth shut and his eyes down, which meant a certain amount of banging into things, but better safe than sorry. Still, the whole thing bothered him. Even with good behavior, he should have been a good three years from a parole hearing.