Taste of Tenderloin by Gene O'Neill Read Free Book Online

baggie was no longer in his hand, and Richie would have
sworn it had just disappeared into the frigid air. The man leaned
forward, extending his empty, long-fingered, delicate hand for a
formal shake.
    Richie leaned forward, too,
taking the man’s hand in his, unable to restrain another shiver.
Mr. Doom’s hand was colder than if it had been sculpted from a cake
of ice.
    But it was the little man’s
eyes that Richie found truly disturbing: no iris, almost all pupil.
And they weren’t round. No, they appeared to be arched and squared
off at the bottom, a shape vaguely familiar. As the little man sat
back, his face again in shadow, Richie shrugged off the unnerving
feeling, telling himself the weird eye shape was only a trick of
the dim light.
    “ Goodbye, Mis-ter
ah-Brien. I see
you tomorrow night.”
    He was back on the street,
standing by the ex-fighter, Sandman.
    “ See you, tomorrow
morning,” Richie said, hurrying away down Powell.
    “’ Kay, homes,” Sandman
replied in his soft voice.
     
    At the almost-empty
flat he shared with Lisha in the Haight,
Richie dug out his rig from under the mattress on the floor and
cooked up the China White with trembling fingers. He didn’t even
turn on a lamp, instead working by the light glaring through the
bedroom window from a streetlight on Broderick. He almost forgot
about the recent nightmares he’d had while nodding—
    “ Whoa,” he said to himself,
remembering at the last moment. The bad dreams had seemed more
like…an alternate reality. It was getting harder to wake up, to
come back out of them. Before fixing, he got Lisha’s cooking timer
and set it for fifteen minutes. He hoped it would help bring him
off the dope nod, draw him back to the bedroom
from…wherever.
    Oh, yeah!
    Mr. Doom’s shit was
righteous, grabbing his stomach quickly but gently then sending
wave after wave of stone-ass calm tingling through his body and
finally smoothing out the kinks in his arms and legs. His eyelids
grew heavy and sagged. He was drifting away to a rhythmic
beat.
    Tick, tick,
tick.
     
    It is night. Clouds
blot out the moon and stars. But more than
just dark, the city colors have disappeared, replaced by charcoals,
indigos, and blacks—lots of blacks. There is a peculiar lack of
night sound; no sirens, no cars, no shouting, no laughing. Nothing.
Completely still. It is more than the sense of experiencing a
quiet, dark night; the complete black silence is unsettling. You
find yourself standing, squinting, and peering down the mouth of an
alley, the nearby streetlight out. It is like staring into the
abyss. You shiver, even though it isn’t an especially cold night.
No, but you have a compelling need to search this alley, this
black, forbidding spot; it is this compulsion to step into the
unknown that makes you shiver.
    Why?
    You don’t remember. You
have no explanation for this need, no clue of what may lie
ahead.
    You take several tentative
steps into the blackness, your right hand lightly touching the
brick wall on the right side as a guide. You stop, sucking in
several deep breaths, trying to calm your racing pulse. After a
moment or two, your eyes adjust to the blackness, and you are able
to make out things on your side of the alley for a few feet ahead.
You move forward cautiously, keeping your hand in contact with the
wall, which feels grimy, filthy. After a few more steps you come to
the first of the garbage cans lining this side of the alley.
Careful not to touch or rattle the cans, you slip around the
obstacles. A few more steps and you become acutely aware of a
smell, a clinging, sweet smell of decay—the familiar smell of
something dead. It hangs in the air, growing stronger as you move
deeper into the darkness. By now, you can just see across the alley
to the other brick wall. Along that side there are a few cans, but
mostly stacks of cardboard boxes.
    In the dark ahead, just out
of sight, you hear something move.
    Not a footstep, nothing
human like that. No,