The Stickmen Read Online Free Page B

heart,” he told
himself. “Today’s been a bad day, that’s true. You lost your job
and you lost your beautiful girlfriend—”
    Sunlight blared in the window. Not a cloud
in the sky.
    “—but things could be a lot worse, couldn’t
they?” Garrett nodded a philosophically positivistic agreement to
himself. He shrugged limply.
    “It could be raining, right?”
     
    ««—»»
     
    Torrential rain poured down on the car’s
windshield, the wipers thunking rapidly back and forth. The sudden
rainstorm had been a bit of a surprise, the turning black in
moments and cracking open like an egg. Thunder rumbled. Lightning
whiplashed blue-white tendrils in the murky darkness overhead.
    But the driver of the rental car was
unperturbed. His entire life had been a storm. He liked storms.
    Through the deluge, the green road-sign with
white letters appeared in the bright halogen headlights:
    WELCOME TO WASHINGTON D.C. under which
someone has crudely spray-painted in scarlet REDSKINS SUCK!
    The driver’s black-gloved hands gripped the
wheel a bit more tightly. The leather creaked. He didn’t know the
Washington Redskins from a redskin peanut, and didn’t care;
football seemed a silly sport of misguided, structured violence.
When legs were irreparably shattered with multiple fractures or
when men broke their necks and were left quadriplegic, the
spectators didn’t care. They just kept watching. They wanted more,
and figured permanently disabling injuries were part of the risk
when these athletes signed their seven-figure contracts.
    But the driver had much better ways of
disabling people, much more expeditious ways. Professional sports
merely seemed to license half-measures. The gladiators of Rome
didn’t, and neither did he. There was no gray area in the
philosophy of violence.
    Idiots…
    The sudden clench of his hands on the
steering wheel was merely a reflex of something that could be
likened to excitement.
    He’d just entered the official limits of
Washington, D.C.…
    He was getting close.
    Good.
    Once Maryland Route 50 turned into the
District’s well-known New York Avenue, a trash-strewn, pot-holed
mainline through the nation’s capital, the driver’s eyes quickly
scanned the coming road for a pay phone. Insular cell-phone devices
or even satellite phones would not suffice for this: too risky.
Instead, he looked for a simple landline.
    The ludicrous lighted sign bloomed: SCOT. A
gas station. Hadn’t that franchise gone under decades ago, right
along with BP and Sinclair? Evidently not. Probably a tag-along
station privately owned, the driver guessed but hardly cared.
He pulled in at once, stopped the rental right in front of the
phone booth. The rain splattered on him, stepping from the car to
the booth, then he clacked the hinged doors closed.
    Outside, the storm continued to rage.
    His gloved hands deftly opened the black
lunch-box-sized case he’d brought with him: an N.P.O 1309 telephone
descrambler. He removed the pay phone’s receiver and snapped it
into the unit’s reception cups, then picked up the unit’s own
receiver. In the reflection of the phone booth’s glass, his face
looked phantom-black.
    He dropped thirty-five cents into the slot
and dialed “O.”
    “Thank you for using Bell-Atlantic,” a
cheery voice answered. “How may I assist you?”
    GO GONZAGA EAGLES, he read a brief
announcement scratched into the phone’s chrome coin-box plate. And:
IF CLINTON DIDN’T INHALE, DID MONICA SWALLOW? “I’d like to place a
station-to-station call, please,” he said. “Area code 202-266-0001,
extension suffix 6.”
    “One moment please.”
    The driver’s eyes flicked up at a sudden
thumping on the phone booth glass. In an instant the door was
loudly pushed wide open.
    Standing in the phone booth’s rainy entrance
was scrawny shaven-headed punk in a sleeveless black-leather jacket
and enough facial piercings to fill a tackle box. Twenty-five,
thirty-five—it was hard to tell these days; the