Dragon Tears Read Free Page A

oilcloth on the tables, wine bottles for candleholders, good gnocchi, fabulous manicotti.”
    She grimaced. “Nah. Let’s just grab tacos at a drive-through and eat on the fly.”
    They compromised on a burger joint half a block north of Pacific Coast Highway. It had about a dozen customers and a Southwest decor. The tops of the whitewashed wood tables were sealed beneath an inch of acrylic. Pastel flame-pattern upholstery on the chairs. Potted cacti. Gorman and Parkison lithographs. They ought to have been selling black-bean soup and mesquite-grilled beef instead of burgers and fries.
    Harry and Connie were eating at a small table along one wall—a dry, grilled-chicken sandwich for him; shoestring fries and sloppy, aromatic cheeseburger for her—when thetall man entered in a flash of sunlight that flared off the glass door. He stopped at the hostess station and looked around.
    Although the guy was neatly groomed and well dressed in light-gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray Ultrasuede jacket, something about him instantly made Harry uneasy. His vague smile and mildly distracted air gave him a curiously professorial look. His face was round and soft, with a weak chin and pale lips. He looked timid, not threatening. Nevertheless, Harry’s gut tightened. Cop instinct.
2
    Sammy Shamroe had been known as “Sam the Sham” back when he was a Los Angeles advertising agency executive blessed with a singular creative talent—and cursed with a taste for cocaine. That had been three years ago. An eternity.
    Now he crawled out of the packing crate in which he lived, trailing the rags and crumpled newspapers that served as his bedding. He stopped crawling as soon as he moved beyond the drooping boughs of the oleander bush which grew at the edge of the vacant lot and concealed most of the crate. For a while he stayed on his hands and knees, his head hanging down, staring at the alley pavement.
    Long ago he had ceased to be able to afford the high-end drugs that had so thoroughly ruined him. Now he suffered from a cheap-wine headache. He felt as if his skull had fallen open while he slept, allowing the wind to plant a handful of prickly burrs in the surface of his exposed brain.
    He was not in the least disoriented. Because the sunlight fell straight down into the alley, leaving shadows only close along the back walls of the buildings on the north side, Sammy knew it was nearly noon. Althoughhe hadn’t worn a watch, seen a calendar, held a job, or had an appointment to keep in three years, he was always aware of the season, the month, the day. Tuesday. He was acutely cognizant of where he was (Laguna Beach), of how he had gotten there (every mistake, every self-indulgence, every stupid self-destructive act retained in vivid detail), and of what he could expect for the rest of his life (shame, deprivation, struggle, regret).
    The worst aspect of his fall from grace was the stubborn clarity of his mind, which even massive quantities of alcohol could pollute only briefly. The prickly burrs of his hangover headache were a mild inconvenience when compared to the sharp thorns of memory and self-awareness that bristled deeper in his brain.
    He heard someone approaching. Heavy footsteps. A faint limp: one foot scraping lightly against the pavement. He knew that tread. He began to tremble. He kept his head down and closed his eyes, willing the footsteps to grow fainter and recede into silence. But they grew louder, nearer…then stopped directly in front of him.
    “You figured it out yet?”
    It was the deep, gravelly voice that had recently begun to haunt Sammy’s nightmares. But he was not asleep now. This was not the monster of his turbulent dreams. This was the
real
creature that inspired the nightmares.
    Reluctantly Sammy opened his grainy eyes, and looked up.
    The ratman stood over him, grinning.
    “You figured it out yet?”
    Tall, burly, his mane of hair disordered, his tangled beard flecked with unidentifiable bits and chunks