Dead Mann Walking Read Online Free

enough, you can have it; just act as if ; that sort of horseshit. Had some books published. Somehow I don’t think he was found guilty because he didn’t want his freedom bad enough. Ha. When it turned out a year later that the kid was living with his aunt in another state, they brought him back. Oops. So sorry, Mr. Jones. Now he’s a small-time dealer, and he knows not to call me Mr. Mann.
    The dead make okay street dealers. They can’t get hooked, and in a pinch they can take a bullet or three. Sure, eventually the damage gets too severe to patch with thread and Krazy Glue, but who cares? So what if pieces dangle, rot sets in, things fall off? Eventually they go feral, but by then there’s not enough left to do much damage. It’s a win-win.
    A couple of cars trolled the field of potholes that passed for a street—most likely liveblood druggies hoping to score. If you’re not an addict, alive, and here at night, then you’re a whole new breed of pervert, into chakking up : a quick one with an animated corpse in the alley, or a drive back home, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase dry humping . And they know what they want. Back when Misty tried passing as a chak, it earned her a beating or two from disappointed johns. She showed me the bruises.
    My dad once said to me, “There ain’t a single thing in all creation someone hasn’t tried to fuck.” I was five or six at the time. Had no idea what he meant. Now I wish I didn’t.
    Then again, I’ve never heard of a chak, male or female, going feral from what pervs do to them. I guess there are some things we really just don’t care about anymore.
    Jonesey usually hung at the third lamppost down Cruger Avenue. Just my luck, tonight he wasn’t there. That was a little weird. He was a regular guy, for a chak.
    In his place, a real Romero type was leaning against a building like he was holding it up. The left side of his skull looked like it’d been caved in by an anvil.
    Hoping his remaining ear still worked, I sauntered up. “Jonesey around?”
    I got some grunts. He twisted his shoulder to the right, the arm dangling, useless. At the end of his hand, bones poked through blackened skin. I knew what it was, but a whiff of something putrid told me how bad.
    â€œHey, pal, watch the rot. Soak that in some bleach before you lose the muscle.”
    He gave me another grunt. I hoped I wasn’t talking to myself.
    â€œBleach? You know? Kill the rot? Keep the fingers?”
    Nothing. At least I tried. There’s not much you can do for the low-level types.
    I hoped Jonesey was all right, but I was starting to worry. The feral thing’s hard to predict. I knew a chest, arm, and head that had its act together for years. Others go with a finger snap. The fastest was under thirty seconds, Tanya Felding. Funny story. She was a cover girl who died in a car accident. It was the early days of the process, so her agent figured he’d have his cash cow ripped. A little makeup, some plastic surgery, and he’d have the first living-dead model. The look was in . But the stupid docs, typically arrogant, thought they’d done such a great job, that right after she woke up, they shoved a mirror in her hands. It wound up embedded in one of their skulls. After tearing off another doc’s face and swallowing it, sweet little Tanya was subdued and humanely D-capped. Her agent sued. Dunno if he won or not.
    Jonesey was always a bit on edge, but I never took him for someone who’d go wild. That’d be bad news. If he’d picked tonight to fall off, I’d never find Boyle. Aside from which, I kind of liked Jonesey, insofar as I liked anyone. When I first moved to the Bones, he taught me some of his memory tricks, using weird images to remember people, like that baby-Eggman thing for what’s-his-face.
    Oh, yeah, Turgeon. See? Works sometimes.
    If anyone could find Frank Boyle, it was him. The