Endgame Read Online Free Page A

than necessary.
    The rear window rolled down. Clouds of cigarette smoke emerged. A Japanese woman with ragged purple hair and too much eyeliner squinted at him. She looks like an Asian vampire , he thought. Neurotic bitch. And still as big a pain as ever.
    â€œCheck it again, Pete. I don’t want to die in this cock-sucking hellhole. Where the fuck are we, anyway?”
    Pete made a show of kicking the tire. “It’s fine, Sami Lee.” Now that he’d started, he would have to go round to all four tires, kicking them one at a time. Always complete, the Voice reminded him.
    â€œWe’re almost there,” Pete said, trying not to glare at the woman sitting in the back seat next to Max Hardcore.
    Max was the one Pete really worried about. Max with his thinning hair and his middle-aged paunch. He was still bad news, like the number thirteen or a black cat on Halloween. Max was the guy Pete didn’t want to offend. If they were going to pull off this reunion gig, he’d have to stay on Max’s good side. Hell, they’d all have to stay on Max’s good side. Not that Max had a good side. This was one hellbent bad boy. A vicious, drug-addled twat. It was a wonder Kent died of an overdose rather than Max.
    Crap , Pete thought. An entire week on an island with Max and Spike and Sami Lee . Was there a worse hell he could think of? Not likely, but this was probably the last chance any of them would have to revive their careers. And if anybody needed it, it was Pete Doghouse, né Peter Harrison, from Spokane, Washington. Of all the losers from the Lilac City’s gutters, Pete was the least likely to have made it. If he hadn’t clung to the ragged coattails of Max and Spike as they battled their way up the punk-rock ladder, he might never have got out. For all the good it did him, though, it almost seemed he’d never left. He’d spent the last decade working in a factory warehouse just to make ends meet.
    At work, no one cared that he used to be Pete Doghouse, bassist for the legendary Ladykillers. No one would be impressed if he told them he’d met Joe Strummer or traded dirty jokes with Johnny Rotten. So he didn’t tell them. They didn’t need to know who he was. Every once in a while, someone with a keen eye and a good memory asked if he was Pete Doghouse or if he might be related to Pete Doghouse, or even if he knew that he looked a little like Pete Doghouse, but he always denied it. To his fellow workers, he was just another down-and-out Joe who lifted boxes for a living and drank bad beer in dirty pubs after-hours.
    He also didn’t tell them about the Voice that told him to touch each box twice or crack his knuckles and pat that one three times on the top and another one on the bottom before piling them up in a corner and continuing with his work. They would only have laughed. And Pete Doghouse hated being laughed at. Worse, he could never have explained why he felt he had to do everything the Voice told him. So Pete kept to himself as best he could. He didn’t have much of an urge to talk anyway. No sense in reliving past glories.
    It was hard now for Pete to believe some of the things he’d seen and done in his time, but the heyday had ended. After the band broke up, he’d faded into the woodwork, like so many other out-of-work musicians from back then. He couldn’t even get studio work. Not surprising, since he wasn’t much of a musician. No one noticed for years that they could barely play a note, because most of their gigs had been such noisy bash-ups. There’d always been musicians to fix the mess they made of their early records. Max used to joke that he knew only three chords on his guitar. That was close to the truth, but it didn’t seem like a joke now.
    Pete peered into the car. Sami Lee had crawled onto Max’s lap and was giving him little pecks on the cheek. If she didn’t keep her mouth shut, Pete thought, he