A Fear of Clowns (The Greasepaint Chronicals) Read Online Free

get them from Jason, for a while, until he'd gone into court and
told the judge the whole story, with proof. The woman had agreed that Carl
should be the one making the payments, and dropped that part of things. The man
had never been made to pay up. Naturally.
    After that things had gotten hard
for him. Yes, Carl sent his goons out to harass him, but that wasn't the worst
of it. That was, in fact, more of a nuisance than anything else. The single
sign that Jay had which showed that, somewhere in all that had gone on, he'd
managed to score a hit against the man. Somehow. What that really was, he had
no clue.
    That was what he was thinking
when the siren blared, and lights filled the window behind him. Jason used to
feel a trickle of terror when it happened, like he'd broken a rule or law, but
it came about so often now that he just couldn't be bothered to. Instead he
simply got his license, proof of insurance and registration out. He had copies
of them all too, in case it was Deputy Richmond. He liked to take things back
to his car and then claim to have "lost" them. Thankfully he normally
just dumped them by the road side, so Jason could get them back. He'd had to
get a replacement license once, which had taken weeks. That meant walking and
not working for a while, since doing otherwise would have led to trouble. It would
have been an excuse to punish him for not having his license on him, and then
starting a cycle of pain. It had, he knew, been the point. A trap that he'd
been clever enough to get around.
    It wasn't Richmond at all, but
the new guy on the force, Deputy Mills. He'd been around for about six months,
Jason thought. The man was actually, except for being about twenty years
younger than Jay, pretty similar in looks. Jay was a bit slimmer, but the other
man wasn't too far off that way. They both had a full head of brown hair, and
wore it short. They even both had brown eyes. If Jason had known his mother
back in college, he would have had to ask if the man was his. Or Carl's. He
looked a lot like Alexis too. That probably had more to do with the fact that
white people with dark hair often looked sort of similar.
    The guy was also fairly
decent, as far as law enforcement went. Not happy and cheerful all the time,
but polite enough. He followed orders, and the law. It was just that the
entire force had all been told to try and find something to stop him for every
time he went outside. If they could. If they couldn't, why then they'd just
stop to chat.
    Rolling the window down he
smiled, which got the Deputy to make a face that was a lot funnier than he
normally went for. Real, and a bit annoyed, or even scared. Some people were
like that with clowns. They found them disconcerting. Legitimately creepy, even
if they knew on some level that they were just ordinary people in makeup.
    "What the hell is this, Hadley?
I saw you driving by and was about to let you go on past, until I realized that
you'd gone all psycho on us." He waved toward the face paint, which got
Jason to actually smile a bit. It wouldn't show very much, not with the dark
red he had around his mouth, in an angularly downturned frown.
    He made a circle around his face.
    "The modern 'scary clown'. I
had a job earlier, the mother didn't seem to understand that a boy might not
really want a clown for his sixteenth birthday. Winthrop? Nice kid. The mother
was really friendly, too. She managed to get the kid a car as a
consolation prize, after letting me embarrass him for forty minutes. I was
impressed."
    The man looked at him for a long
time, then took the papers back to his vehicle. After far too long, he was back,
but actually handed everything over. That was refreshing. No games meant to
harass more than the rules stated.
    "All in order. Like always.
Just so you know, I would have pulled your butt over anyway, orders or not. You
look insane . Then, clowns always do. That's not right, going around like
that." There were two taps on the top of the car, but