Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,47

if I let it hang on now that it had served its purpose.

I struggled to push all the rage and spite away. Shadow shrank back down more reluctantly than Red had. But he did let go, and left me feeling ashamed that he was any part of me.

But before I could even promise myself I’d become a better person, Georgie chimp-walked out of the patch of shadow underneath a stand of oaks. The little bastard really was good at hiding. I’d looked right at the trees without spotting him.

He stood on his stumps and brought up a pistol in both sets of claws. My Smith and Wesson, probably. Backing away from him, I visualized the Thunderbird, tried to make another invisible wall, and felt a shiver of magic jump out of me when the ward popped into existence.

Georgie fired. The bullet cracked against the side of the garden mausoleum behind me.

Apparently the kind of wall I knew how to make would stop a brownwing but not a bullet. It would have been nice if Timon had included that particular fact in my lessons.

I turned and ran. The automatic banged again. Another miss, but I couldn’t see myself just running and running while Georgie emptied the gun at my back. There was too good a chance that he’d get lucky.

I dodged behind the mausoleum. Then I scrambled up onto the roof of it. It wasn’t too hard. There were carved letters and grooves in the marble that gave me finger- and toeholds.

Georgie was smart enough to slow down as he came around the side of the crypt. He was looking for an ambush, but he didn’t think to look up.

I jumped. My feet hammered down on his shoulders and smashed him sprawling on the ground. I almost fell down, too, but staggered a couple steps and caught my balance.

He was lifting himself up when I kicked out some of the rest of his teeth. Then I stamped on the pincer-fingers that held the automatic. Something cracked. I stooped, yanked the gun out of his grip, and leaped away.

He swung himself right after me, just not quite quickly enough. I pointed the automatic, squeezed the trigger, and blasted a new hole in his forehead. Dark gray sludge blew out the back of his skull. It spattered the grass and the foot of the mausoleum wall. He collapsed.

And believe it or not, as I stood there panting, my pulse pounding in the arteries in my neck, I felt bad about it. At least until he groaned and twitched.

“Stay down!” I said. “Or I’ll blow out the rest of your brains, and see if I can twist your head loose from your neck while you’re out.”

He stayed put as I backed away. But he did say, “Billy.”

“What?” I answered.

“We were only doing what we had to.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that I’d almost reached the waist-high wall at the edge of the cemetery. Hoping Georgie wouldn’t chase me any farther, I stuffed the automatic back into my jeans, hopped the barrier, and trotted south on North Boulevard.

After a couple blocks, I came to a convenience store. Everybody gave me the skunk eye when I came in, including the chunky Hispanic woman behind the counter. I understood their point of view. I was filthy from head to toe, I had blood on my hands, and I smelled like Georgie.

But on the plus side, I had lots of cash. I pulled the wad out of my pocket, tossed bills on the counter, and headed for the men’s room.

On the way, I noticed this was one of your full-service convenience stores. Along with the beer, cigarettes, beef jerky, Lotto tickets, and DVD’s of thirty-year-old movies nobody ever heard of in the first place, they were selling cheap underwear, socks, jeans, and T-shirts with Harley Davidson and Iron Maiden logos on them. Figuring that I’d thrown the clerk enough money to cover a change of clothes as well as the use of the john, I found my sizes.

Once inside the restroom, I stripped and cleaned myself up as best it could with liquid soap and paper towels at the sink. When I finished, I checked myself out in the mirror and decided that while I didn’t look—or feel—really clean, what I saw was a big improvement. And then I started shaking.

I’d gone through too much weirdness, and too much of the weirdness had been trying to kill me. I had a high