The Stickmen Read Online Free

brazenly dropping the towel, then
pulling her clothes back on. “I can’t hack it anymore, Harlan.
Every time
    you get something good in your life, you
blow it. Christ, I’m surprised you still have the freelance job
with The Psi-Com Journal.
    Garrett felt like a toddler caught with full
pants. But he couldn’t lie to her. “I just got fired…”
    “What! When?”
    “Just now,” he admitted. “When I got the
mail.”
    Jessica momentarily froze in disbelief, one
stocking dangling from her hand. “You’re serious, aren’t
you? My God, Harlan! It just gets worse and worse!”
    Garrett tossed a nonchalant hand. “What, Psi-Com fires me? So what? I can do better than that tabloid
roll of toilet paper any day.”
    Jessica, still half naked, looked fit to
explode. “Harlan, you just lost your job and you act like it’s
nothing! Jeeze, you’ve been fired from MUFON, The SETI Sentinel,
The Watchman—”
    “Rags, all rags—”
    “You’ve been arrested seven times—”
    “Six times, thank you, and they were all bum
raps, just like last night. All I was doing was what investigative
journalists are supposed to do. I was investigating.”
    “You call it investigating, but the police
call it something else—breaking and entering!” Jessica railed. Now
she’d at least gotten her stockings and skirt back on. “I mean, for
God’s sake, Harlan, I’ve tried my best to support you through all
this but I can’t take anymore! You’ve got to join the real world,
get a real job, and get off all this UFO paranormal psychic
phenomena trance-channeling spontaneous combustion past-life
regressive hypnosis Uri Geller spoon-bending bullshit! ”
    “Hey, Uri Geller really can bend spoons,”
Garrett defended. “I saw him do it at the Seattle Convention Center
in ‘93. He also blanked some floppy disks just by looking at them;
I positively verified the erasures with my laptop. He says the
Russians hired him to do it to D-O-D couriers on commercial air
flights. I believe him.”
    Jessica stormed about the unkempt apartment,
fully dressed now, but looking for her shoes. “Everything’s a joke
to you, isn’t it? It almost seems like you go out of your way to
make things worse for yourself! You get a scholarship to MIT grad
school and quit! You get job offers from IBM, Compaq,
Packard Bell, and Microsoft—and you turn them down! Then you
get a chance at a solid career in the Air Force, and you get kicked out! ”
    Garrett finally found a Bic and lit his
cigarette. He shrugged at Jessica’s rather loud observations. It
was all true, but what did that matter. “Can I help it they can’t
take a joke?”
    “A joke? Reading classified security
files is a joke? You’re lucky they didn’t throw you in a
military prison for twenty years!”
    “Hey, no prison on earth can hold me, baby,”
he tried to make light of it.
    Jessica wasn’t hearing it. “I work my tail
off at the hospital, swing-shifts, double-shifts, thinking it’s all for something, for us, for our life together—and all you do is drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and make
jokes!”
    “All right,” Garrett agreed. “I’ll cut down
on the jokes—”
    Jessica, now dressed and her shoes on,
snatched up her purse in an escalating rage. “No wonder your wife
divorced you! She ought to get a medal for putting up with you for
that long! Well, I’m sure as hell not going to make the same
mistake she did—”
    Next, Jessica stared Garrett down, glaring.
Then she—
    “No!” Garrett yelled.
    —took her engagement ring off her finger and
threw it at him.
    “Jessica! Come on!” Garrett exclaimed.
“Let’s not get carried away here. Look, I’m really sorry about you
having to bail me out of jail. But don’t you understand? I got set
up. Some government entity is bugging me again!”
    The ring bounced across the dingy carpet and
wound up under the couch. “Oh, give me a break. Every time you
screw up you blame it on some ridiculous