Dying Is My Business Read Online Free

and added another name to it.
9. Maddock
    All the lives I’d stolen, reduced to the equivalent of a shopping list. Writing down their names was a compulsion. It helped me remember them, and that seemed like the right thing to do. I could recite the list forward and backward by now, knew their names by heart, all except one. Number eight, “the boy.” The only one who didn’t belong. The others were killers, racketeers, and thieves, but not him. He hadn’t done anything to anyone. He hadn’t tried to kill me first the way the others had. The boy had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    I thought of the crack house on Fourth Avenue again, and had to forcefully push it from my mind. The memory of the boy had been lurking in the back of my head like a ghost ever since. I didn’t want to think about it. One night off, that was all I wanted. A way to forget, even if only for a few hours.
    There was an old TV set in the corner of the room, rescued from the same garbage dump as my bed. It barely worked, and when it did its rabbit ears only picked up a single station, a local-access channel that showed old movies. I watched whenever I could. It was more than a pastime—it was my teacher. Everything I learned about the world that didn’t come from Underwood came from watching Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff.
    I turned it on and watched for a couple of hours, taking in all of Werewolf of London and part of The Maltese Falcon before I realized I was too distracted to pay attention. I kept thinking about the boy, and God-knows-what happening to Bennett behind the black door. I needed something stronger than the TV. I turned it off and pulled out the other item I’d hidden inside the mattress. It was a paperback book I’d found one rainy day on the stoop of a brownstone in Park Slope after running a collection for Underwood. Something about the sight of the book lying there, discarded, unwanted, and alone, pelted mercilessly by the rain, had filled me with an unexpected sadness. I pitied it, felt almost a kinship with it, so I stuffed it inside my coat to keep it safe from the storm, and brought it back with me.
    It seemed so small in my hands now, a fragile thing. Its rain-battered pages had dried, but they’d also become swollen and brittle from the moisture they’d absorbed. The cover art was a painting of a flat blue sea with a big white castle on the far shore. A ship with tall sails floated upon the waves. Standing on its deck was a woman in a white dress with long, flowing auburn hair. She held a sword in her hands. Above her, a winged horse and a flying lizard faced off. The title was printed along the top in a curled script: The Ragana’s Revenge by Elena De Voe. I opened the book carefully so the damaged pages wouldn’t tear.
    At the front was a detailed map of a land called Kallamathus, charting regions with names like the Cliffs of Treachery, the Forest of Dark Secrets, and the Sea of Miseries. I thought it was ridiculous and chuckled at the idea of New York City’s geography named in a similar, absurdly specific manner. The Street of Forgotten Trash Bags. The Avenue of Impossibly Expensive Restaurants. I turned the page to a foreword by the author explaining how the magical kingdom of Kallamathus was based on an alternate version of Eastern Europe, and in fact the word ragana was Lithuanian for witch. Then, finally, the story began, describing the adventures of a dirt-poor peasant girl named Armelle who lived in a realm of magic and strange creatures, and discovered her world was far more dangerous, yet far more richly rewarding, than she ever knew. At the back of the book was a lengthy glossary of invented words that I found myself consulting regularly as I read, just to figure out what the hell the characters were talking about, and who was who. It didn’t help that most of the characters had unpronounceable names comprised of strings of consonants broken by random