Read Online Down These Strange Streets by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois - Free Book Online Page B

front. There was a couple fellas on the street eyeing my car. One was skinny. One was big. They were dressed up with nice hats and shoes, just like they had jobs. But if they did, they wouldn’t have been standing around in the middle of the day eyeing my Chevy.
    I pulled the .45 out of the glove box and stuck it in my pants, at the small of my back. My coat would cover it just right.
    I got out and gave the hotel the gander. It was nice looking if you were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other.
    There wasn’t any doorman, and the door was hanging on a hinge. Inside I saw a dusty stairway to my left, a scarred door to my right.
    There was a desk in front of me. It had a glass hooked to it that went to the ceiling. There was a little hole in it low down on the counter that had a wooden stop behind it. There were flyspecks on the glass, and there was a man behind the glass, perched on a stool, like a frog on a lily pad. He was fat and colored and his hair had blue blanket wool in it. I didn’t take it for decoration. He was just a nasty son of a bitch.
    I could smell him when he moved the wooden stop. A stink like armpits and nasty underwear and rotting teeth. I could smell old cooking smells floating in from somewhere in back: boiled pigs’ feet and pigs’ tails that might have been good about the time the pig lost them, but now all that was left was a rancid stink. There was also a reek like cat piss.
    I said, “Hey, man, I’m looking for somebody.”
    “You want a woman, you got to bring your own,” the man said. “But I can give you a number or two. Course, I ain’t guaranteeing anything about them being clean.”
    “Naw. I’m looking for somebody was staying here. His name is Tootie Johnson.”
    “I don’t know no Tootie Johnson.”
    That was the same story Alma May had got.
    “Well, all right, you know this fella?” I pulled out the photograph and pressed it against the glass.
    “Well, he might look like someone got a room here. We don’t sign in and we don’t exchange names much.”
    “No? A class place like this.”
    “I said he might look like someone I seen,” he said. “I didn’t say he definitely did.”
    “You fishing for money?”
    “Fishing ain’t very certain,” he said.
    I sighed and put the photograph back inside my coat and got out my wallet and took out a five-dollar bill.
    Frog Man saw himself as some kind of greasy high roller. “That’s it? Five dollars for prime information?”
    I made a slow and careful show of putting my five back in my wallet. “Then you don’t get nothing,” I said.
    He leaned back on his stool and put his stubby fingers together and let them lay on his round belly. “And you don’t get nothing neither, jackass.”
    I went to the door on my right and turned the knob. Locked. I stepped back and kicked it so hard I felt the jar all the way to the top of my head. The door flew back on its hinges, slammed into the wall. It sounded like someone firing a shot.
    I went on through and behind the desk, grabbed Frog Man by the shirt, and slapped him hard enough he fell off the stool. I kicked him in the leg and he yelled. I picked up the stool and hit him with it across the chest, then threw the stool through a doorway that led into a kitchen. I heard something break in there and a cat made a screeching sound.
    “I get mad easy,” I said.
    “Hell, I see that,” he said, and held up a hand for protection. “Take it easy, man. You done hurt me.”
    “That was the plan.”
    The look in his eyes made me feel sorry for him. I also felt like an asshole. But that wouldn’t keep me from hitting him again if he didn’t answer my question. When I get perturbed, I’m not reasonable.
    “Where is he?”
    “Do I still get the five dollars?”
    “No,” I said, “now you get my best wishes. You want to lose that?”
    “No. No, I don’t.”
    “Then don’t play me. Where is he, you toad?”
    “He’s up in room fifty-two, on the fifth