Demon Jack Read Free Page A

thick with phlegm and sickness. A shadow fell over me, and with it the knowledge that whatever came next was going to hurt. It was going to hurt a lot.
    I fought to pull scraps of coherence together into something tangible. I tried to remember all the kindness Essie had shown me after my release from prison. I thought about the times we had camped under overpasses, in the Commons, anywhere we could find warmth. I thought about sharing food and stealing cigarettes, passing a cheap bottle of hooch back and forth while we panhandled before she'd quit drinking. I thought about staying up with her while she detoxed, helping her get through the worst of her addiction with sheer perseverance. I grabbed those memories and pulled them together, ramming them into a ball of resolve and choking it down in one large bitter pill.
    This thing was going to kill me. It was going to do it while wearing the skin of one of the few people in recent memory that had shown me real kindness. I had literally sold my soul to keep from dying. I’d kill a friend to avoid that fate.
    I sure as hell wasn’t going to die here.
    I rolled onto my stomach and out of the way a split second before its fist crashed into the concrete where my head had been. Chips of splintered stone cut into my still aching cheek, tiny bee stings playing harmony to the much larger pain that had been inflicted upon my poor skull.
    I pushed up to my hands and knees, and rather than stand, I launched with both legs driving my shoulder into her hips. Wrapping my arms around her waist, I let my momentum propel us both back to the floor. The thing holding Essie flailed, slamming her fists into my back and sides. This close they were damn near ineffectual without the leverage to put a good swing behind them. They still hurt, but it was a pain I could ignore.
    She rolled on top of me, straddling my waist. My head snapped forward slamming into her nose. There was a loud crunch, a resounding echo of agony shooting through my skull. Blood splashed into my face, into my eyes. She gave a long, warbling growl of pain. I threw my hips up at the same time I rolled, reversing our positions. I wrenched my fingers into her hair and used her own seizure like thrashing against her. There was a dull thud as I slammed the back of her head into the concrete floor, and the toxic green eyes clouded over. I rammed her head back again, harder this time, and was rewarded with another crunch, her eyes returning to normal, to human.
    “Jack-Jack?” Essie said, her voice thick and drunk sounding.
    I hit her head against the floor one more time.
    That did it.
    I closed my eyes, gently easing her head down. I sat beside her on the floor for a long, silent moment. Her eyes, still open and unblinking, stared back at me.
    I closed them with two fingers.
    “Hands behind your head, asshole!”
    I snapped my head towards the new voice and was instantly rewarded with another wave of dizziness.
    A plain-clothes cop stood maybe twenty feet away. He had his badge hanging around his neck on one of those stainless steel beaded chains.
    His gun was drawn and leveled on my head.
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    I knew the drill. I closed my eyes and lay face down on the cement. I laced my fingers behind my head, and stayed as absolutely still as possible, mental images of a jumpy cop shooting me over a nervous twitch playing out in my head.
    It was pretty safe to say that the deck was stacked against me. I was next to a dead body. I was covered in blood. Granted, some of it was mine. Most of it wasn’t. I was, at one time, a known associate of one of Boston’s more powerful criminal entrepreneurs. I had a record that ran back to my teenage years and carried more than its fair share of violent offenses. I had done federal time. There were no witnesses to attest to it being self-defense, and even if there was, chances were the word of a few homeless folks saying I had fought and killed a homeless bag lady in self-defense, was -to