Hellbound Hearts Read Online Free Page B

tourists. Kept the prime material for the conventions and the auctions.
    â€œOh, right,” he said, when Jack swung by to ask him about Walter. “Fat guy, Hawaiian shirts? Lives with his mother in some piss-poor shack the top of Van Nuys?”
    Jack deadpanned him. “Didn’t you just describe every one of your customers?” he said. Couldn’t help it.
    â€œOh, really?” Carducci said, looking Jack up and down blankly, like the sneer was implicit. “Who died and made you Johnny fucking Depp?”
    Jack grinned, letting it go. “What about his friend Lenny?” he said. “Little guy? Horn-rims?”
    â€œ
He
was there?”
    â€œYeah. Like he had bragging rights. Thought he might have been, you know, the boyfriend or something.”
    â€œStay the fuck away from
that
guy,” Carducci said. “Seriously. Grade-A creep.”
    â€œWhat? Like a prick?”
    â€œNo. Like a fucking
creep
. As in creeps me out. For real. Him and his whole nasty little crowd. Used to hang around with Kenny Anger and LaVey. Seriously. They’re not into this stuff for the same reasons we are. Got their own agenda. Not nice people.”
    Carducci’s reads on people were usually pretty good, so when Jack got the phone call from Lenny a couple of days later, he wanted to be guarded and careful. But he couldn’t be, not when he knew that Lenny—creep or not—could have only one reason for calling, that he was going to offer access to a print of the real thing, to
Prisoners of the Inferno
. He wondered if this was how newly hooked junkies felt when they got the first follow-up call from their dealer. Because that’s what he was, Jack realized. Hooked. Hooked from the momenthe’d stared at the still for the first time and felt that intoxicating rush of being allowed to gaze at the forbidden.
    He had no doubt that it was going to cost him this time. Wasn’t that how it always worked with junkies and their dealers? But he didn’t care. He’d empty his fucking savings account if that’s what they asked. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see, he wanted to know.
For lust of knowing what should not be known
, he thought, remembering Doctor Coppelius’s knee-jerk little mantra.
    But Lenny didn’t mention money at all.
    â€œYou seemed . . .
intrigued
,” he said, as if that were perhaps payment enough.
    â€œWell, yeah,” Jack said. Because he, you know,
was
. The fuck else was he going to say?
    Lenny didn’t reply. Like he was waiting for Jack to ask, and enjoying the wait.
    â€œYou said,
not as good as the real thing
,” Jack said eventually, but still got nothing in return. “The other night.” Just the sound of Lenny breathing. “In the rain.” He didn’t know why the fuck he mentioned the rain.
    â€œI’m going to give you an address, Jack,” Lenny finally said. “It’s a private address, and I don’t want you to write it down. Is that all right?”
    Jack said that, yeah, that was all right and Lenny gave him the address and Jack repeated it and Lenny said he’d see him in half an hour and hung up.
    It took only twenty minutes—no traffic for a change—and Jack circled the block a few times so as not to look too eager. It was a shitty apartment building on Franklin, one of those four boxes on top of four more with railed walkways running past all the front doors like the place had wanted to be a motel but had been too stoned to build a fucking lobby.
    Jack rapped his knuckles on the third door of the upper level because the bell didn’t work—
quelle surprise
—and Lenny opened it and ushered him inside. An old man sat in a La-Z-Boy with a blanketover his legs and smiled at Jack with a vague delight, like he couldn’t ever remember anymore if he’d met someone previously but had learned to err on the side of presuming he had.
Really
old. Like