Sandman Slim with Bonus Content by Richard Kadrey Read Free Book Online Page A

rusty lock mechanism spinning through the air like a metal Frisbee. I have the .45 up and in front of me, ready for anything.
    “Well,” says the two-hundred-year-old Frenchman from his easy chair. “It fucking took you long enough.”
    HE STANDS UP from a battered, green recliner. He’s a little taller than I remember and a little heavier, but he still has the same salt-and-pepper beard and close-cropped hair, the same impressive Roman nose and dark eyes that, at different times, might belong to your favorite uncle on Christmas morning or to the pissed-off ex-thug who’s about shove a power drill through your forehead.
    I just look at him. Normally, I like hearing Vidocq shout “fuck” because he pronounces it “fock.” On the other hand, of the top ten people I didn’t expect to find here, he’s the entire top five. I stay put, not moving to the right or left, orienting my body so that, if I have to, I can make it out the door without looking.
    “Vidocq? What are you doing here?”
    “That’s how you greet a friend after all these years?” he asks, setting the battered book he’d been reading on the floor. “I’ve been waiting for you, keeping your home safe. You think I wanted to squat in this concrete shithole?”
    I raise the .45 and aim it at his head. “How did we meet, old man?”
    “Ah, you don’t think it’s me, no? You think this is some trap. I might, too, if I were you.” He picks up a tumbler filled to the top with wine so red it looks black.
    “You and I met at a saloon. It’s closed now. Blood Meridian. This was before you met lovely Alice. We were both at the bar, each chatting up the same pretty girl, who stood between us. Neither of us had more than a few dollars then, so we’d employed a small memory charm on the bartender so that we could pay for drinks with the same money over and over again. When we realized what the other was doing, we forgot the pretty girl and talked about what and who we were, what and who we knew, paying the poor bartender with the same few dollars all night.”
    “No great loss, from what I remember. The girl was pretty, but kind of wasted.”
    “So were we, as I recall. Our sudden loss of interest offended her.”
    “Next lifetime, I’ll buy her drinks and listen to her all night long.”
    “Next lifetime.”
    The gun suddenly feels heavy in my hand. I lower it. Vidocq, a head taller than me and half again as wide, comes over and crushes me in a long bear hug.
    “It’s good to see you, boy,” he says.
    Like the building, Vidocq hasn’t changed a bit. He looks about forty-five, but is old enough that he can tell you what guillotines sounded like offing the aristocracy during the French Revolution.
    I look around the room. It doesn’t look right. Where’s all my stuff? Where’s Alice’s?
    “How long have you been living here? Where is everything?” I ask.
    “Alice moved out a few months after you disappeared. I saved your things and the things she left in the bedroom.”
    “Where did she go?”
    “She moved in with a friend in Echo Park. That’s where she was when the terrible things happened.”
    “Mason murdered her. You can say it.” I feel stupid, but I have to ask him. “The friend she moved in with, was it a girl or a guy?”
    “No, a girlfriend,” he says. “Alice had lovers after you were gone, but none of them were very serious. You broke her heart. She wasn’t the same girl.”
    I go over to the counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. The teakettle on the stove looks familiar, but not much else. And I’m not sure about the kettle.
    “You checked up on her?”
    “As much as I could. She didn’t really want to see anybody from your old days together. Certainly, no one associated with magic.”
    That sounds like her. She didn’t like Mason or anyone else in the Circle. After I was gone, she’d want to get as far away from magic as she could. But she didn’t run far enough. I should have told her to