The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors Read Free Page B

before it went down. The journalist didn’t recall his name but was sure enough of his identity to pass the package on to him. In return, the associate flipped him an old campus-mail envelope folded three times over and snapped tight with a rubber band. The journalist tucked it quickly into the inside pocket of his jacket.
    â€œWho loves you, baby?” the associate said. The associate had not shaved recently; the journalist wondered if that might be a new style open to him now that he was no longer employed as a waiter, or the result of a drop in morale.
    â€œOnly my mother,” he replied, but the associate had already driven away. “And she’s dead.”
    The journalist drifted toward the southern face of the garage, thinking. I ask myself: What is a stable commodity in a time of deep recession? I answer: whatever the consumer can’t stop wanting. This solution was congruent with the gritty, powdery feel of the package through its plastic, and with the sum of money William had offered him for bringing it down. The journalist touched the thickness of the envelope through the leather of his jacket but he didn’t want to look at it yet, in case it should prove to be only dried leaves.
    He stopped at the vertical bars that closed off the garage, wondering if they were meant to stop people going out or coming in. Out, most likely, as there was a two-story drop to the expressway below. He took out the cigarettes and stuck one in the corner of his mouth and tossed the box out through the bars, watching its red and white edges flashing end over end until it had disappeared into the slow current of night traffic.
    No snowflake falls in the wrong place. The journalist lit his last cigarette and flicked the match pack after the box. As he exhaled he seemed to feel a warm breath on the back of his neck but he knew all that was mere illusion, only the idea of the dragon, snuffling at him one more half-interested time before it moved on. He felt that he missed the dragon already, although he knew it would surely return.

Scenarios
    LAWRENCE BLOCK
    T HE ROAD VEERED a few degrees as it reached the outskirts of the city, just enough to move the setting sun into his rearview mirror. It was almost down, its bottom rim already touching the horizon, and would have been somewhere between gold and orange if he’d turned to look at it. In his mirror, some accident of optics turned it the color of blood.
    There will be blood , he thought. He’d seen the film with that for a title, drawn into the theater by the four uncompromising words. He couldn’t remember the town, or if it had been weeks or months ago, but he could summon up the smell of the movie house, popcorn and musty seats and hair spray, could recall the way his seat felt and its distance from the screen. His memory was quirky that way, and what did it matter, really, when or where he’d seen the film? What did it matter if he’d seen it at all?
    Blood? There was greed, he thought, and bitterness, and raw emotion. There was a performance that never let you forget for a moment that you were watching a brilliant actor hard at work. And there was blood, but not all that much of it.
    The sun burned bloodred in his rearview, and he bared his teeth and grinned at it. He could feel the energy in his body, the tingling sensation in his hands and feet, a palpable electrical current surging within him. The sun was setting and the night was coming and there would be a moon, and it would be a hunter’s moon.
    His moon.
    There would be a woman. Oh, yes, there would be a woman. And there would be pleasure—his—and there would be pain—hers. There would be both those things, growing ever more intense, rushing side by side to an ending.
    There would be death, he thought, and felt the blood surging in his veins, felt a throbbing in his loins. Oh, yes, by all means, there would be death.
    There might even be blood. There usually was.
    Yes.