“No. It’s Christmas. Go away.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. Aim your feet. First right, then left. Try it.”
He knocks again.
“What?”
“Mr. Stark. I understand you do investigations.”
“No. That’s my boss. She’s outside. In the back with a drunk Czech and a hot blonde. You can’t miss them.”
He knocks.
“Please, Mr. Stark. I’d rather deal with you. My case is unique.”
“How unique?”
The guy who pushes the stall door open looks like yesterday’s lunch, eaten and thrown back up again. A gray, patchy beard. Hair a terminal thicket of cowlicks. A trench coat that might have been tan once, but is now the color of cold grease and rhino shit.
“Please, Mr. Stark,” he says. “It has to be you.”
“Why?”
He opens his coat. He isn’t wearing a shirt. His chest is a mass of torn muscle and cracked bones. There’s a gaping hole where his heart should be.
“Mr. Stark, I need your help with an investigation. My name is Death. And I appear to have been murdered.”
I hate this job already.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey has published nine novels, including Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, Aloha from Hell, Devil Said Bang, Kill City Blues, Butcher Bird, and Metrophage, and more than fifty stories. He has been immortalized as an action figure, his short story “Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye” was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award, and his novel Butcher Bird was nominated for the Prix Elbakin in France. The bestselling and acclaimed writer and photographer lives in San Francisco, California.
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ALSO BY RICHARD KADREY
Dead Set
Kill City Blues
Devil Said Bang
Aloha from Hell
Kill the Dead
Sandman Slim