Free The Crime Studio by Steve Aylett Page A

Bleach was appalled and we began arguing without restraint. We got onto communism as usual, and Bleach repeated her view that Russia was never a communist country seeing as communism is the abolition of class and all they ever did in Russia was abolish the middle one. Finally she said she was ashamed to be seen with me and stormed off down the boardwalk, her white tanktop an easy sight-target as she took casual pot-shots left and right with the 9mm. She scudded away in the car so I had to walk back.
    In town the firing had become more sparse and emphatic. Chief of the Cops Henry Blince declaimed from a balcony but the combined effort of his mouth, nose, arms and legs could not produce the level of authority required to quell the masses. Brute Parker fired at him boisterously with the same Corbray he’d used in the Delayed Reaction.
    But within twenty-four hours the only work for the cops was in cutting down the hanged and wading through blood so thick it pulled their boots off. The temperature dropped dramatically - at 92 degrees there are murders galore but at minus 92 they’re unnecessary. Even the mosquitoes were frozen. Parker tried to make soup in a cauldron of water, boiling his Corbray and spent shells. Everyone was ashamed at having shot people without arranging an alibi. As Bleach and I argued in the Reaction we were shivering so much our features were a blur. I compromised by agreeing to use BBs, which take people’s eyes out no matter where you point them. But the whole mess had lowered my bridge in regard to Beerlight, its alleys and apartments full of brooding garbage, stoved-in TVs and shipwrecked cars, the air polluted by flying ammunition. Even the squalor was nuclear-powered. What was it doing to me? Pretty soon I’d be regarding the world through an infra-red grid.
    And for the first time I found myself dreaming of a land far away, where I would be awoken by the clang of opening flowers and walk through apple-green fields full of small, inexpensive cows.

FAIT ACCOMPLI
    Ben Stalkeye had a fierce effect upon chance - he had only to walk into a room and the probability figures would go haywire. The unlikeliest things would happen, but on the sole condition that he didn’t want them to. This was detrimental to his work - every heist he performed failed through the most bizarre chance events. He could never make anyone understand or believe how there’d be another robbery in progress when he arrived, or the teller would be struck acutely blind at the moment he passed over the note, or the gun he held would simply and impossibly turn into a sweetcorn. It happened. By tradition those who make pacts with the devil have some success in life, so Stalkeye assumed he’d made a pact with god.
    A benign illustration of his effect on chance was his ability to throw a dice a couple of hundred times and always have it come up the same number, so long as he didn’t want it to. If he tried to demonstrate this to someone it wouldn’t happen, because he wanted it to. Stalkeye was fascinated and appalled by the immaculate simplicity of his private hell.
    But despite absolutely everything Stalkeye was not one to kick back and let the blistering inferno of circumstance reduce him to bleached bone. The logical thing was to find someone else who had the same problem, but who didn’t want to accomplish any form of crime. If brought along on the robbery this party would influence the probability ratings in favour of a successful heist and thus neutralise the effects of Stalkeye’s bad luck. Stalkeye would have at least a fighting chance of performing a hold-up with the standard odds.
    After eight farcical years he ran slambang into a woman who was running away from Deal Street in a flurry of smackers and sobbing like a struck deacon. Stalkeye took her aside and she explained her plight in finely-crafted detail. She had been all fired up to make a small deposit at a Deal Street bank when she saw a gun sat in one of the