Mad Lizard Mambo Read Online Free Page B

stomach when he eased himself into a folding metal chair next to me as I scrubbed the living shit out of the egg and Dempsey sighed.
    “Listen close, son.”
    Dempsey never called me son.
    I was never his kid. Hell, I’d never been a kid. Sure, I’d been a bit smaller and shorter when he’d won me in that poker game, but I’d never ever been a child. My sick and twisted father’s magic took care of that shortly after I was born. I’d come to him a malfunctioning idiot, and he’d made me into a man.
    But I’d never been his son.
    “Doctors found some black spots in my guts, son.” His thick sausage fingers scrubbed over the tired in his grizzled, soulful face. “They said it’s going to kill me. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon. Real fucking soon.”
    I’d taken knives to my stomach that hurt less than what Dempsey was telling me. I wasn’t sure what scared me more: him calling me son or the news of those dark blotches in his gut.
    The water hose dropped from my hand, and I steadied myself on the egg, its curved bottom fitted into the ring of a bucket cabriolet I’d rigged to hold it while I washed it down. My knees gave, and I fumbled back for the other chair I’d brought out, my ass finding its hard edge with a heavy thump.
    The warehouse’s single remaining bay-turned-garage echoed with my panicked, hissing breaths. Dempsey sat quiet and still while I fought to take control of my thoughts, swallowed up by the sudden reality of my whatever-the-fuck-he-was dying on me before I was ready for it.
    It was funny how someone’s world changes in a second. Silly, stupid things turn life inside out, but everything else continues on as if nothing happened. Behind me, my Pendle-run-battered Mustang continued to sit on blocks, its partially restored body waiting for me to attach the new quarter panels I’d gotten in the day before. A bird sang out a trilling shriek from the jacaranda tree planted in the green space between my place and Dalia’s front door.
    Water continued to bathe the slightly sloping driveway at my feet, curling around the tires of Dempsey’s truck, not quite reaching its battered rims, coated in a thin layer of milky brown dust he’d brought with him from Lakeside. The city continued to buzz, cars zipping along its streets, and the nearby ironworks churned and clanged its way through another bright, sunny San Diego morning.
    But my own world had gone suddenly and irrevocably dark.
    Dempsey seemed to grow smaller as he spoke, grumbling about Medical and the long lines of uncaring faces he’d been trotted past. It was more about complaining than actually telling me what was wrong, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the why and what I needed to shout at him. Those words remained lodged in the back of my throat, trapped in an amber drop of fear and unknown I couldn’t shake loose. I only found my tongue when he pulled out one of his ratty hand-rolled stogies, bit off its end, then pressed a lit lucifer to its rough tip while he sucked it to a deep red glow.
    Staring at the first puff of smoke curling up from his lumpy cigar, an unreasonable rage crept over my brain, and I did something I never in my right mind would have done before that moment.
    “Don’t fucking put that in your mouth, asshole.” I slapped the cigar out of his hand, sending it flying into the growing pool of water forming under the egg. “Don’t you gods-be-damned….”
    The insanity of what I’d just done took a little bit to creep into my consciousness, but I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit if he beat me into the ground. I was angry . So damned angry at what he’d done to himself. What he was doing to me.
    He remained so still in his chair, I began to wonder if he’d somehow died in the space between my smacking the lit skunkweed out of his hand and my brain freaking out. I don’t know what I expected. Probably his fist in my face or maybe in my stomach. Either way I was going to get my face rearranged, and I