RavenShadow Read Online Free

Blue Crow is fired, effective immediately. Escort him out of the building. Get his keys. Clean out his desk and send him whatever’s in it. Tell him to forget his severance pay.”
    Did he think I would surrender to her guns? I held his eye. I walked over to the cassette player, popped out a cassette, put it in my pocket. Then I walked straight at Long John, staring at him like a worm. I reached out and grabbed his shirt front. I shook him. Fabric tore.
    Amy tracked to my direction and started to move. I turned and shoved Long John into her. They dominoed onto the floor, John between her legs but facing me.
    “Now hear the rest. I have a list of all the double selling you did on my show the last two and half years. That’s fraud. I know who all your sweeties have been. Patty will see that as cause for divorce. And every employee you got knows where you stash your coke in that ZipLock bag—the sheriff will love that.”
    He got up, but I pushed him back into the wall. “The best of all is what you just gave me. You called me racial epithets on the air. Live. I’ve got a tape. The station has tapes. If need be, the FCC and the Civil Rights Commission will have tapes.” I thumped him against the plasterboard. “They can take your license away! They will take you license away!” I was bellowing so loud it hurt my throat.
    “So here’s a tip. If my severance pay comes through real smooth, and there’s no trouble about my unemployment, I’ll keep my mouth shut. If not, I’ll scalp your scrotum! I’m on the goddamn warpath!”
    I slammed him against the wall and dropped him. I reached to the counter, seized the ZipLock bag of coke, unZipped the Lock, and dumped a thousand bucks worth of the white ladyright on Long John, from the part in his hair to his eyebrows and nose to his necktie to his lap.
    He sputtered, mewled, and howled all at once.
    I strode down the hall and straight out of the building.
    It scared me, how violent I felt, how angry I was. I was shaking.
    I sat in the Lincoln for a few minutes to calm down. I breathed deep in, deep out, deep in, deep out.
    The sun was glaring off the hood of the Lincoln, and it shone in my eyes. I felt something odd, like I was sleepy, but I was too agitated to be sleepy. The sun slashed at my eyes and made them want to close. It shone on the hood of the car until it became a mirage light, hallucinatory.
    And I saw … broken pictures. Magpies. Flowers. American flags upside down. Half-moons. Flowers. Pictures like that, all in fragments, and they were all moving, swaying, swooping up and down, like flotsam swelling upward and dropping downward on pitching seas. They were all in a swirl that made no sense ….
    Behind the pictures quavered a song in the old style and in the Lakota language. It was different from the songs I heard as a youngster, not a single male voice, nor a group of men around a drum, but the voices of hundreds of people, men, women, and children together. No drum. Or if there was a drum, it was the sound of moccasined feet on the Earth. The people sang. From the style, I half recognized one phrase, a kind of chorus, but I could not catch the words .
    There in the car, but not in the car, I strained my ears to hear the words of the song that came from …
    A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!
    This was Raven, perched on the hood ornament, black and menacing, huge and apocalyptic in the blinding glare .
    A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!
    I jerked with fear, and moved somehow toward ordinary consciousness. Raven still perched on the hood.
    Some people know the sound of their own death. Mine is, A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!
    Raven always comes to me, or at me, black, shiny, and mocking. If he was a character in a carnival, maybe a fortune-teller, he would laugh at you and put his hand on your shoulder and lick your inmost ear with his tongue and whisper, “Death, death, death.” His tongue would be the coldest thing that ever touched you. Not being human, though, he gleams the message at you