Grimm Awakening Read Free

cellophane hovered around a bus stop bench at the sidewalk. Not normally his type, but he still felt some lingering influence of the recorded phone voice. He considered buying some of her time to purge some of that, but his resolve returned as he reminded himself there were other things that must be done before he could tend to his surging libido. So he tore his gaze away from the prostitute and began to move toward the Sundowner Inn's front office.
    But he sensed a fast-approaching disturbance of some type and stopped in his tracks. He turned around in time to see a long boat of an automotive relic, a fucking ragtop Edsel, come screeching around a street corner. Its rear end fishtailed, but the driver quickly and efficiently course corrected and the metal behemoth shot forward. Two men in suits and fedoras were leaning out of the vehicle's windows and aiming Tommy guns at the empty air behind them. The big car was close enough now that Jack could see the fat driver hunched over the steering wheel, a wisp of smoke curling from the stogie clenched between his gritted teeth.
    The mystery of the daredevil gunmen was solved a moment later when two more cars came speeding around the same corner. These were white police cars, but they were moving too fast for Jack to make out the insignia on the doors. The fleeing gunmen opened fire the moment the cruisers appeared.
    Jack hit the ground and sent out a prayer to whatever ancient deity was in charge of warding off stray bullets. As the cars swerved in the street and blew by the Sundowner Inn, several rounds ripped into the fender of a nearby powder blue Cadillac and blew out the vehicle's windshield. When the sounds of gunfire and squealing tires at last began to recede, Jack breathed a sigh of immense relief and got to his feet. He brushed himself off and went into the motel's front office.
    A fat man with a shiny bald pate sat on a stool behind the desk. His attention was riveted to a pornographic movie playing on a wall-mounted television. The image on the screen showed a bottle-blonde woman with enormous, gravity-defying breasts getting intimate with a vibrator.
    Jack and the front desk clerk were the only people in the small, grimy lobby. Jack stepped over a stain of some unknown, disturbing texture, braced his hands against the edge of the desk, and said, “So! This is hell, eh?”
    The desk clerk still didn't look at him. “Yep.”
    Jack grimaced. “I was hoping you'd say something else, like maybe, 'Why, no, sir, and, say, what kind of drugs are you on today?' You know, something with a quality of reassurance about it, something to indicate that, against all available evidence, something unspeakably horrible hasn't happened to me. By the way, I think I just saw Jimmy Cagney and some of his friends go by. Bit reckless with firearms, those boys.”
    The clerk spun slowly around on the stool, which squeaked like a stool bearing the pressure of a man weighing in excess of four-hundred pounds. Which was precisely the sort of stool it happened to be at that point in time. The clerk's face had a surprisingly pleasing aspect to it. It was cheerful-looking, almost handsome, with fresh, rosy cheeks. Then the man sneered at Jack and hooked a piece of wet, yellow snot out of his left nostril. He squinted and inspected the booger a moment before proceeding to smear the foul thing on the desk's already well-besnotted surface.
    Jack managed not to throw up. Barely. He backed away from the desk.
    The man smirked at Jack's suddenly ill pallor. “I reckon you're new in town.” He laughed. His accent was pure deep south redneck. “Figured you was last night when your sorry ass stumbled through the door. You got the stench of the freshly damned on you right thick.”
    Jack frowned. “So...help me here...I, what, must have...died?”
    The man hocked up something in his throat and spat it at a waste bucket several feet from the stool. The wad of phlegm splashed against the side of the