mightily for another shot. Drano would’ve worked fine. The philosophy behind HoB was becoming more appealing by the second. Every necktie made me think of nooses and solid overhead fixtures.
“Lindblad isn’t allowed in the UK,” Michael said, lowering his voice like we were conspiring to knock over the joint. “Larceny rap. I don’t know all the details, except that he got in hot water regarding some rare book that was up for grabs on the black market by way of Finland. Ah, those wily Finns. There was a bidding war going down in some rickety warehouse on the Thames and the Bobbies busted in and clapped the whole lot in irons. I guess twenty different consulates got frantic midnight calls. Lindblad’s chummy with more Arab princes than the Bush family is, so getting the governor to pinch hit wasn’t much of a trick. After much legal finessing, he was sprung on the promise he wouldn’t show his face in England for a while. That, in a nutshell, is that.”
“Must’ve been a hell of a lot of kinky nudity in ye tome,” I said.
“Not really. It was the foreign edition of a US weird almanac or an occult guidebook. Rather innocuous, you ask me.”
“He did a dime in Huntsville back in the late 1970s for gashing somebody with a broken wine bottle,” John said with grave respect. “Lived on the mean streets, close to the bone. After getting his MFA, Lindblad was a derelict for like fifteen years, or something. L befriended him, scraped him out of the gutter and gave him a purpose. Heard that from Lee T. Lee knows everybody in Texas. Got his ear to the ground.”
“That sexy little twerp over there did not do hard time in Huntsville,” I said trying to remain cool. “And he sure as shit didn’t do hard time in Huntsville in the ‘70s. Too pretty and too young. Look at those soft, effeminate hands.”
“Looks sorta hard to me,” John said with an intrigued arch of his brow. Luckily, his powers didn’t work on suave ex cons.
“Older than he appears,” Michael said. “Oil of Olay is a miracle product.”
I rubbed my temples and counted to ten. Thank god right then two things happened: Ellen saw my plight and brought me another triple of whatever was cheap at the bar, and Tom L drifted from a shrouded alcove and stood near his trio of groupies. Stood, mind you, not sat. “Whoa. Okay, that’s a big dude.” I drank up and plunked my empty on the table and gawked, just like everybody else.
“Behold the man,” John said with or without irony; I was too bombed and too awestruck to make that call.
Larger than life was a cliché that fit this apparition all too well. L was conservatively six-feet-eight and broad as the proverbial barn. His bulk was encompassed in a heavy robe of crimson silk that pooled around and hid his presumably huge feet. He wore what I can only describe as an executioner’s hood, also of crimson silk. No flesh was visible, not even the glint of his eyes through the hood slits. He stood motionless, a statue briefly animated, that had shambled unto view, and was now once again frozen in place. Something about his great size and stoicism, the inscrutability of the slits for his eyes and mouth, the blithe obliviousness of his entourage as they chatted amongst themselves, ignoring the giant entirely, scared the living bejeezus out of me, scared me on the level where the coyotes and the lizards and lonely rolling tumbleweeds held sway. A polar bear had beached itself upon an ice shelf with a herd of seals and the seals barked with joy, witless to their mortal danger.
I’d seen a picture of L once, a candid shot of him in a sport coat and a bad haircut, hunched in the act of stubbing a cigarette into an ashtray, grimacing at the camera as a thief with his hand in the till might. A grainy, fuzzy, slightly out of focus picture, but clear enough and contextualized by the presence of other persons in the frame that it was utterly incongruous with the figure in crimson. The author in the photograph was of average size and build. No way no how the same individual as this behemoth holding court. I said as much to my comrades.
“He’s changed over the years,” Michael said. “It’s rather uncanny, I admit.”
“How can you be sure it’s even him?”
“Who else would it be?”
I glanced