Weird Detectives by Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlin R.Kiernan Simon R. Green Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online

then my throat, there wasn’t any pulse. And I wasn’t breathing hard because I wasn’t breathing at all. I couldn’t remember taking a single breath since I woke up. I touched my face with my fingertips, and they both felt cold.
    I was dead.
    Someone had killed me. I knew that, though I didn’t know how. The maggots suggested I’d been dead for some time. So, who killed me, and why hadn’t I noticed it till now?
    My name’s Larry Oblivion, and with a name like that I pretty much had to be a private investigator. Mostly I do corporate work: industrial espionage, checking out backgrounds, helping significant people defect from one organization to another. Big business has always been where the real money is. I don’t do divorce cases, or solve mysteries, and I’ve never even owned a trench coat. I wear Gucci, I make more money than most people ever dream of, and I pack a wand. Don’t snigger. I took the wand in payment for a case involving the Unseelie Court, and I’ve never regretted it. Two feet long, and carved from the spine of a species that never existed in the waking world, the wand could stop time, for everyone except me. More than enough to give me an edge, or a running start. You take all the advantages you can get when you operate in the Nightside. No one else knew I had the wand.
    Unless . . . someone had found out and killed me to try and get their hands on it.
    I found the coffee maker and fixed myself my usual pick-me-up. Black coffee, steaming hot, and strong enough to jump-start a mummy from its sleep. But when it was ready, I didn’t want it. Apparently the walking dead don’t drink coffee. Damn. I was going to miss that.
    Larry! Larry!
    I spun round, the words loud in my ear, but still there was no one else in the room. Just a voice, calling my name. For a moment I almost remembered something horrid, then it was gone before I could hold on to it. I scowled, pacing up and down the room to help me think. I was dead, I’d been murdered. So, start with the usual suspects. Who had reason to want me dead? Serious reasons. I had my share of enemies, but that was just the price of doing business. No one murders anyone over business.
    No; start with my ex-wife, Donna Tramen. She had reasons to hate me. I fell in love with a client, Margaret Boniface, and left my wife for her. The affair didn’t work out, but Maggie and I remained friends. In fact, we worked so well together I made her a partner in my business. My wife hadn’t talked to me since I moved out, except through her lawyer, but if she was going to kill me, she would have done it long ago. And the amount of money the divorce judge awarded her gave her a lot of good reasons for wanting me alive. As long as the cheques kept coming.
    Next up: angry or disappointed clients, where the case hadn’t worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. There were any number of organizations in and out of the Nightside that I’d stolen secrets or personnel from. But none of them would take such things personally. Today’s target might be tomorrow’s client, so everyone stayed polite. I never got involved in the kinds of cases where passions were likely to be raised. No one’s ever made movies about the kind of work I do.
    I kept feeling I already knew the answer, but it remained stubbornly out of reach. Perhaps because . . . I didn’t want to remember. I shuddered suddenly, and it wasn’t from the cold. I picked up the phone beside the bed, and called my partner. Maggie picked up on the second ring, as though she’d been waiting for a call.
    “Maggie, this is Larry. Listen, you’re not going to believe what’s happened . . . ”
    “Larry, you’ve been missing for three days! Where are you?”
    Three days . . . A trail could get real cold in three days.
    “I’m at the old safe house on Blaiston Street. I think you’d better come and get me.”
    “What the hell are you doing there? I didn’t know we still had that place on the