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We kicked in the door of the crypt with an aluminum battering ram and did the sweep-and-spread you usually do when trying to cover unknown space. No bloodthirsty monsters attacked. Our own blood was up from the first bag of the day; maybe I should tell you about that first.
GARAGE SALE, read the sign. I saw the chromium-yellow tagboard, with its big black cartoony arrow, on my way back from the bus stop, stapled to a much-stapled phone pole. The address on the sign was dead between my building and the phone pole. Ever since de-zoning, re-zoning, or whatever other catastrophe acceptable to the City Council’s bribed lackeys had befallen this former “neighborhood,” the residential blocks had been carved, sliced and diced to please the developers until some bloated fat cat with a cigar in his mush, incipient cancer and a string of embezzlement acquittals had pronounced it “good,” like Frankenstein’s Monster sucking watery soup.
Abel Swift bandaged up his hand as best he could, given that there were no dressings or hydrogen peroxide in the apartment. To buy that kind of stuff from a bodega he would have to hump down six floors of stairs, and Abel hated exerting himself to waste money. He mummied up his hand with one of his wife’s halter tops tied in a knot, which gifted him with a bonus twinge of revenge. It served her right.
