Read Online NO Quarter by Robert Asprin - Free Book Online Page A

overdosed, and one who is serving a ten-year manslaughter stretch for putting a 9-millimeter to her sleeping boyfriend’s forehead and pulling the trigger. That the boyfriend used to pound her like a gong hadn’t seemed to impress the cops much, but the jury took it carefully into account.
    When I stepped outside, the steamy air was almost welcome after the club’s deep freeze. I picked a patch of wall, leaned, and waited. Sunshine had been waiting tables at Big Daddy’s, not peeling, I reminded myself needlessly. But ... hadn’t she already been on a self-destructive trajectory? And, if I was going to be brutally honest, she had been since we’d moved here. For that matter, even before we got together. Bad relationship choices—so bad and so consistent, in fact, they had to be deliberate on some level. Her high-strung personality had been volatile, but not panicky. Actually she was a good one to have around in a crisis. Still, she had that penchant for strong emotions, and her flirtation with drugs had been more serious than I’d let myself think. And what of our relationship? Was I the only decent man she’d ever been with, or was I just fooling myself? That scene at Molly’s between us, when she’d showed up wrecked and we’d ended up screaming at each other ... Christ . It still made me wince.
    I want to know who killed Sunshine.
    It had startled me when I caught myself saying that. It was suggestive, telling. I hadn’t yet stopped to think about what I was doing—stepping out of the Calf, coming here to Sunshine’s old workplace to make inquiries, to find out. She’d been killed. Stabbed. Possibly as part of some sick, twisted ritual thing. I would handle the grief of that on my own. But I needed my question answered. Who did it?
    Why, though, did I want to know? It seemed if I was asking, then I meant to do something about it. Was that what was happening? I didn’t know.
    Was I thinking of revenge?
    I absentmindedly lit up a smoke, and immediately a rancid gutter punk sprang up out of the dark and grime, looking to mooch. Beer-stained T-shirt, facial blemishes, gross ingratiating grin. It was tough to give a shit, and I didn’t try, waving him off.
    Bourbon, which closes nightly to auto traffic, was supporting just a few handfuls of revelers, those walking around with “specialty” drinks (puked up, they make distinctively colored puddles on the sidewalks) and oversized beers in plastic go-cups. Somebody shouted out, “Newwwor-LEEENZ!” at football rally volume, just in case anybody sleeping in a one block radius had forgotten where they were, and mispronounced our city’s name to boot.
    I love the Quarter. I truly do. But it can be a test.
    When Chanel came down the front steps, I’d been waiting more like twenty minutes. The tight outfit had been replaced by dowdy civilian clothes, her spiked bottle-red hair hidden under a cap. Frankly, I thought she looked prettier this way, less mannequin-like. She fished a pack of cigarettes out of her shapeless, baggy jeans, and I lit her smoke for her.
    “Okay, Bone.” Her makeup too was gone. She looked tired. “Ask me.”
    “You want to go someplace?”
    “No. I don’t. I want to go home. Ask me here.”
    It felt, oddly, for that second there like I was at some line of demarcation, that to cross it I need only ask my first question about Sunshine—that I was at the start of something I could stop now, simply by not going forward.
    I stepped off into the void. “Do you know if Sunshine was dating anybody lately?”
    “Dating?” Chanel blew smoke through grimly smirking lips. “What, like going to the malt shop, wearing some guy’s school pin?”
    I wasn’t doing banter tonight. “Like seeing somebody steady.”
    “Couldn’t say. I had the feeling she was screwing someone on a regular basis, but who ... ” She shrugged. “We weren’t tight, y’know, her and me. Girls go through here, and it’s usually a while ‘fore I get to know ...