Read Online Serpent's Kiss by Ed Gorman - Free Book Online Page B

TERRACE.
        He reached up and grasped the cord that would signal the driver to stop.
        And then he saw the police car. It wasn't marked, of course-the police were not stupid-but it was one of those bulky dark Ford sedans whose very plainness announced it as an 'official' car and 'official' in this case meant police.
         They're waiting for me.
        The driver pulled over to the kerb.
        He sat down again and said, self conscious because he had to speak so loudly in order to be heard, "I made a mistake. Just drive on, all right?"
         Mistake? What a stupid story. I reached all the way up there and yanked on the cord. And it was a mistake?
        He saw 3567 then.
        It was a particularly nice ranch style, one made of both lumber and natural stone. He put his face to the bus window like a small lonely boy peering into a house.
        Why was 3567 so special to him? Who lived there?
        But of course he knew the answer to that one.
        He lived there.
        He rode the bus for the next hour and a hall. During this time he fell asleep and when he woke, he was disoriented. Not only was his name vague now; so was his purpose.
         I'm on a bus. Why? Where am I going?
        And then he felt the shift in his stomach.
        He touched his hand to the slight swell of his belly, felt something thick and round curving across the arc beneath his sternum.
        He recalled something that had happened to him once as a boy.
        On the back porch, autumn winds blowing dead colourful leaves scratching across the screened in windows, he saw something move in a gunny sack his father kept on the back porch for storing walnuts. He had never forgotten what happened next. He knelt down and touched the palm of his hand to the top of the gunny sack He was sure he'd seen the sack move -and then he knew why. Beneath his hand, just under the fabric of the sack, uncoiled a fat writhing snake. He jerked back in panic. He had never been able to forget that odd sensation-the unseen reptile slithering beneath the rough material of the sack
        Just as something slithered inside his belly just now. He could feel it coil and uncoil, coil and uncoil.
        The image of something inside him made him sick suddenly and he wanted to vomit. But he knew he would have to hold it as long as he was on the bus. Which was why he got off.
        Fortunately, the stop at which he left the bus was a forlorn section of taverns and Laundromats and large empty fields filled with rusting deserted cars and hundreds of jagged busted pop bottles and heel-crunched beer cans.
        There was an alley between two rotting taverns that seemed to be having a war of country and western jukeboxes.
        He ran into the alley just as a Hank Williams, Jr., song came on and he vomited so long he was half afraid he would start seeing blood.
        As he stood up, he saw that a skinny, bald guy in a dirty white apron and holding a broom in one hand was watching him.
        "Only three o'clock," the bald, skinny guy said. He was obviously the owner of the tavern.
        "What?" he said, pulling the back of his hand across his mouth.
        "Only three o'clock. Too goddamned early to start puking."
        And with that, the guy hefted his broom and went back inside.
        
***
        
        Twenty minutes later he came to a phone booth. This was on a corner loud with semis and thick with diesel fumes. Faces were mostly black; clothes mostly bright and cheap. The people moved as if they were dragging chains behind them. Somebody had recently pissed in the phone booth. It reeked. And somebody had also smashed his head against the glass of the booth. In a circle of shattered safety glass, you could see splotches of blood and hair. A starved dog, all ribs and crazed brown eyes, stood at his feet smelling the rancid piss.
        He called a phone number.
        He had no idea what number it