The Book of Counted Sorrows by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

Crispin.
                       Upon his death, Heff's considerable fortune - enhanced by wise investments in Human Stupidity Bonds, the value of which soar with the rise of stupi ditv in the species, but fall with any indication of increasing human wisdom - was inherited by his only child, Hisser Heffalope, ward of the state. At the age of eighteen, having survived into more enlightened times, Hisser was released into society. It became a wildly successful criminal defense attorney, specializing in clients who were wealthy serial killers; Hisser won not-guilty-by-reason-of-entertaining-legal-defense verdicts for the most savage, unremorseful, bloody-minded, and ill-dressed murderers of its time, winning kudos, plaudits, accolades, and prize Cadi1lacs from the wards committee of the hoity-toity American Bar Association. Hisser also pioneered the profitable practice of suing the grieving families of a killer's Victims for damages, sucking them drier than an empty coconut husk. A secondary career as a cat rancher was far less successful, because Hisser routinely ate the profits.
                       Fortunately for the fate of mankind, The Book of Counted Sorrows did not fall into Hisser's several hands upon Addison Heffalope's choir-traumatizing death, but was reacquired by Ed Thomas, the Orange County rare-book dealer. By this time, Thomas was no longer operating out of a converted burlesque theater. He had moved his business into a former whorehouse that for decades had specialized in providing midget prostitutes for sailors of equally diminutive stature.
                       (A parenthetical aside: The term "midget prostitute," much in use in the 1930s, is not one we would use these days. Now we would say "height-challenged hooker." or perhaps "pocket Venus, if we were of a poetic bent, or possibly even "very small, not to say unusually small, not to say remarkably small, lady of the night.")
                       This whorehouse, by now a shop called Book Orgy, in a commercial district overlooking Newport Harbor, was a wonderfully atmospheric structure of many rooms, all filled with treasures upon treasures of magnificent books, and conducive to leisurely browsing, especially because the omnipresent odor, though as odd as that in the burlesque house, was frequently more appealing. Thomas, always present and assisted by his charming wife Pitty, was more of a host and friend to his customers than he was a retailer. By all accounts, he was an affable man and happy in his work, though he might have been dour if he had known that three years hence, in 1942, he would be run down by that 30,000-pound Acme steamroller and squashed flatter than a page of onionskin paper. Customers spent hours in this charming former bordello for midget prostitutes and height-challenged sailors, roaming room to room, and not one ever complained that the five-foot-high ceilings required them to browse on their hands and knees. If from time to time a small but highly aroused and extremely agitated sailor burst into the shop, looking for action and exhibiting little or no appreciation for literature... Well, this was no more awkward for Ed and Pitty than when they had been obliged to deal with the elderly strippers who had shown up at the former burlesque house, down on their luck and offering to take off their clothes for two dollars.
                       In 1941, Ed Thomas sold The Book of Counted Sorrows to Clete Reet, a breathtakingly stylish and hugely successful big-band leader who was as famous in his time as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, but who is now, sadly, as forgotten as Cream-'o-Chaff, once the most popular breakfast cereal in America. On stage and off, Reet dressed the same, in top hat and tuxedo and white silk scarf, as if he had stepped off the cover of Vanity Fair. An Art Deco icon, he went everywhere with two elegant borzoi hounds on