Penny Dreadful by Will Christopher Baer Read Free Book Online Page A

for a while and sometimes they come back but when they do they’re not right. They’re different.
    Different how?
    Like pod people. And then one day they don’t come back at all. These are guys from Narcotics and Vice, mostly. Fuck them, right. But then two guys from Homicide. You remember Jimmy Sky?
    Yeah. I never liked him.
    Come on. The fucking Skywalker. You never met a cop so cool as him and he slides in dry as ice after a month undercover with a basket full of oatmeal raisin cookies he baked himself. Then he’s gone for good. And nobody wants to talk about it.
    Who’s your chief?
    Moon spat violently. Captain Honey, he said.
    I laughed.
    Moon muttered, the poor bastard is ninety days from retirement and doped up on painkillers. His teeth are no good. He tells me not to worry. Don’t worry, he says. Meanwhile he’s busy cutting shit out of the newspapers all day: comic strips and “Dear Abby” and coupons for cat food and his horoscope. You walk into his office and Captain Honey says hey, private. What’s your sign? He reads you your horoscope and smiles at you like some kind of drunk priest. Then he slips you a coupon for forty-nine cents off Fancy Feast. He says you got a fucking cat, don’t you? And the watch commander says there’s nothing he can do about it. These guys aren’t officially missing. Nobody knows shit. And nobody wants to go undercover, nobody.
    A minute or two rattled past. I waited but Moon said nothing else. His voice had disappeared into the powdery air of sleep.
    The motherfucker is asleep and maybe I’m jealous. Not sleeping so well lately. Not since I got off the junk. It’s like the dark doesn’t really find me.
    I wait for it. I wait for the velvet, for the warm bottomless silence to come and wrap itself around me but the silence is indifferent and passes me by and I remember the velvet doesn’t know me anymore, it doesn’t want me.
    And I think about other ways to get there. Bleeding to death might work. As long as I didn’t cut through a major artery the long slide down to unconsciousness would likely be slow and sweet, something I could savor.
    It’s a funny thing to dream but sometimes I dream of going flatline. Not sure I would want to go all the way under but for a minute or two it would be pretty nice to take a look around and then swim back to the surface.
    Thursday’s child has far to go.
    Mingus:
    Red bricks on all sides. The smell of earth and clay and men sweating. The smoke of a thousand cigarettes. Sunshine and tar. The noise of a bulldozer, loud as fury.
    Mingus chomped at his tongue. He was too easily hypnotized by his own sense of smell. The pain in his tongue cleared his head. His legs were asleep and dangling from the iron fire escape. He put away the yo-yo and leaned forward to watch Chrome lazily finish off the Fred. Mingus chewed at his thumbnail, his head still spinning from the scent of Chinese take-out and the strange Citizen they had encountered at Goo’s.
    That one would bear watching, he thought.
    At the end of the alley, Chrome still whispered into the Fred’s ear. Mingus stopped himself from summoning the smell of the Fred’s damp, fishy hair. He was plagued enough by the real.
    The Fred lay curled like a baby in ash and black gravel. He was almost asleep, his hands limp and white. Chrome stroked the back of the Fred’s neck, his lips moving softly. He was singing a French nursery rhyme, Mingus was sure of it. Frère Jacques. Chrome was terribly disappointed that he had not been born French. He spoke often of jumping a ship to Paris, of starting their own subterrain there. But it would not be so easy. One did not just withdraw from the game and Chrome’s French was hopeless.
    He was the cruelest of the Mariners, without question. Chrome garroted the Freds, pulling them down like sick deer. But he didn’t kill them straightaway. He calmed and comforted them. He promised not to hurt them and he lulled them to sleep. He made them feel safe in