Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) Read Free Page A

felt it flick the back of his left arm. It wasn’t a hand this time. The touch was cool and almost unnoticeable, but Peter Simms felt a sudden flow of moisture. He reached with his other hand and touched the spot. It came away dark and damp and he realized he was bleeding.
    “Oh my God,” he whispered. He jerked his head left and right, looking for the blade wielder, looking for a place to run or hide. Surely this was only a nightmare. At any moment he must wake up in his bed to the beep of his alarm. Something bit him on the other arm and he saw that his sleeve had been slashed and his shirt was acquiring a dark wet stripe that lengthened and widened as he watched.
    “Oh Jesus!” he screamed. “Don’t hurt me!” It was as fervent as any prayer he’d ever uttered.
    ***
     
    A deputy sat behind a desk in the old county courthouse about a hundred yards away, reading a commentary from the preceding day’s Wichita
Eagle-Beacon
that argued the Dow could never sustain its inflated value at seven thousand and listening to the static that occasionally crackled from his departmental radio. He was undisturbed by the Reverend’s plea.
    Boris, in his yard at the east edge of town, heard. He barked a couple of times, and, when the sound changed, tried to match the agony of that distant howl. A few canines responded, but no humans. They soon ceased, as had the voice they echoed. Boris silently patrolled his territory, troubled by the presence of a danger he sensed but was unable to challenge.
    ***
     
    He looked more like Jason, or Freddy Krueger—or some other not-quite-human murderer in one of those dead-teenager movies—than a man. Since his hair had been way too short to braid in the foreseeable future, he’d shaved it off. He wore a thin strip of leather as a head band, one he’d dyed black with shoe polish, and, in the band at the back of his skull, a single raven feather—well, actually crow, but it would take an ornithologist to know. His body was clad only in a pair of black Speedo swim trunks, since he hadn’t been able to come up with satisfactory makings for a breech cloth, and he’d covered himself from head to toe with black, licorice-flavored body paint he’d bought in a sex paraphernalia shop in Wichita. There were ragged white strokes of vanilla lightning artfully arcing down each arm and leg and across each of his cheeks. He’d managed to incorporate the Speedo logo into the stroke on his right leg. He was just setting out the leather bags of painted sand and the cow skull that would have to make do in place of a buffalo skull when a pickup came down the street on the south side of Veteran’s Memorial Park and pulled up where the curb would have been if one of those bond elections had passed.
    “What the hell are you doing, Mad Dog?” a familiar voice asked over the strains of a John Stewart CD turned up high enough to test the truck’s sound system.
    Mad Dog was disappointed. He hadn’t thought anyone would recognize him in his elaborate costume, not even his half-brother, the sheriff.
    “That your new truck?” He walked up to the window, careful not to touch anything in case his body paint might stain the Chevy. “See you got a good stereo with it. Nice.”
    Without the body paint, Mad Dog looked a lot more Anglo than his brother, even though they shared their equal but slim claim to Cheyenneness through their common mother. His hair wasn’t a very dark brown and it tended to sun streak and curl as it lengthened, two of the reasons he hadn’t managed to let it grow long enough for braids before getting disgusted and chopping it off.
    Mad Dog was his real name. He’d been born Harvey Edward Maddox. His father ran off shortly after his conception, and, fueled by his long held disgust at distantly related Lester Maddox’s unheroic rise to racist infamy, Harvey Edward had legally adopted the nickname he’d earned as a high school football star in Buffalo Springs. It had more to do with