Read Online Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams - Free Book Online

and the rest of my friends because of it. It had to be worth at least twenty thousand—there were only a few of them left. Of course, the money might save my immortal soul, which I was also rather fond of. It was a tough call.
    I took a walk along the bay to think it over, and by the time I was finished I was at the Salt Piers where Orban has his gun shop and armory complex. I found him in the big garage, smoking his pipe and watching a bunch of his burly, tattooed henchmen use a chain hoist to lower a massive steel plate into an Escalade, presumably to keep the dumbasses who would eventually ride in the back seat from shooting the driver by accident.
    Orban cocked a shaggy eyebrow at me. “What do you want, Dollar?” he growled in that mouth-full-of-rocks accent he’s never shaken in all these years. “You come to pay me finally for warehousing your piece of shit candy car?” Orban’s not a big guy, but there’s something about him that makes me very glad we get along.
    “Let’s talk,” I said.
    Over a glass of the poisonous red wine Orban favors, I made my pitch about the Matador. That bristling brow climbed up again. He knew how I felt about my car. “Tell you what,” he said. “I give you ten for it—”
    “Ten!” I was so upset I spilled Bull’s Blood in my lap. “It’s worth twice that! More!”
    “Shut up. You don’t hear me out. I give you ten for it, I promise not to sell it for three months. You pay me back the ten, you can have it. You can’t, I sell it and give you ten more.”
    In other words, he was going to loan me the money on the Matador for three months, interest free. Which was a pretty damn decent thing for him to do. I didn’t say that, of course, because it only would have pissed him off. And I haggled too, because if I hadn’t he would have been mortally insulted. Orban wouldn’t front me any more money, but he did up the back end two thousand bucks, which confirmed to me that the Matador must be worth about thirty big ones. He’s not stupid, even when he’s doing somebody a solid. He also threw in a couple of dozen high-velocity silver slugs for my Belgian FN automatic. If I bumped into Smyler again I wanted to be ready.
    I immediately gave him back two thousand of the money for an ugly, unarmored banger, an ancient stock Datsun 510 with so much bondo on the fenders it looked like it had mange. (The Super Sport had a brand new L78 under the hood, so it wound up being a little out of my price range.) Still, the old 510s could be zippy little cars, and Orban said the engine was good. I signed the papers, left the office while he opened his safe, then took the rest of my money in cash. Orban didn’t much believe in banks. Eighty benjamins makes too thick a stack to fit in a wallet, not to mention that wallets can be dropped or lifted, so I put the money in my underwear. Yes, I did. Deal with it.
    The boxy little car handled surprisingly well. People used to customize the 510s for racing, although nobody’d ever bothered with this one. I stopped to grab some takeout at a burger place in the neighborhood, then I parked the new ride around the corner from my building under a streetlight which had just come on for the evening. I was locking it up when something smashed into me from behind, cracking my head against the doorframe so hard that I saw nothing but flashing sparkles for a few seconds. Then I realized I was lying on my back and something was squatting on my chest.
    “Where is feather?” my attacker whispered. “Where? Hided somewhere?” The streetlight was just above us so I couldn’t see the face beneath the shadowing hood, but I could smell its breath, smell the rot. I carefully shifted my weight to get some leverage, but then I felt something press against my lower eyelid, sharp and steady as a doctor’s needle. “It going to find out. Yes, it will.”

six
    broken

    I KEPT VERY still. A door opened somewhere nearby, and the thing raised its head. The small