Free Bad Dreams by Kim Newman Page B

out.
    Nina? N?
    Anne looked around too. The barman had ignored the green-haired girl, so she was out. Which of the others could Nina be?
    Anne turned back to the barman, and found that he was, for the first time, looking carefully at her. She knew he was realizing that he had never seen her before. She glanced at the doors. The executioner was standing by them.
    ‘You’re curious,’ the barman told her. ‘Open your handbag, love. Let’s see your membership card.’
    The executioner was coming over now. Nancy Drew had failed. She would have to start being Clint Eastwood instead, and she did not think she was really up to it.
    ‘Eric,’ the barman called the executioner, ‘we have a trespasser who needs prosecuting.’
    These people, she knew, were good at pain. That was how they made their living.
    She dashed her Perrier into the barman’s eyes, and snatched his ice tongs. Eric did not move too fast. She hoped he could not see a thing in his Batman cowl. At school, she had not been a quarterback, but she had not been a cheerleader either. She slammed painfully into the executioner, but he did not fall over.
    She grabbed for his mask and pushed it. The eyeholes were now over his forehead. She backed off, but he still managed to hit her hand away before falling over his whip and sprawling on the floor.
    She threw the tongs at the barman, and picked up a heavy metal and leather chair. The barman dodged the tongs, but did not try to come out and get her. The weight of the chair felt good.
    Some of the businessmen were applauding, and calling for more. The blond was diverted from his ladylove’s boot, and looking up at Anne, imploring with his watering eyes.
    Everyone was staying out of the reach of Anne’s chair. She jabbed it in the air a couple of times, like a lion-tamer. People cringed.
    Anne felt the need to hit Eric with the chair. She brought it down on him with a log-chopping swing. He grunted and held his head, still trying to struggle out of the hood.
    She threw the chair aside, and pushed through the doors. She did not know if Eric was after her or not.
    She raced down the corridor.
    She nearly lost a shoe on the staircase, but made it easily to the street. For the first time in years, she had a stitch.
    Slowing down and trying to get her breath, she walked briskly through the shop and into the street. The cold wrapped around her. After the Inferno Lounge, which she now realized had been overheated, the outside chill was almost welcome.
    As she tried to walk away, there was a tug at her smarting shoulder. Someone was pulling her handbag.
    ‘Excuse me, miss…’

12
    ‘ L ook,’ said Tail Gunner Joe, ‘isn’t that Bogart?’
    It was somebody else, but the observation helped the Monster understand the Junior Senator. Sitting in Romanoff ’s, an ill-fitting suit and a sweaty grin among so many tailcoats and panstick-smooth faces, the man was star-gazing, like any other gawk-eyed Mid-Westerner visiting Sin City – Hollywood, California. It almost made him endearing. Tail Gunner Joe was made for this town. Like the glove salesmen tycoons, the grease-monkey ape-men, the waitress demigoddesses and the bogus Russian royalty restaurateurs, the war hero witchfinder was a Great American Fraud. Even politics was not a big enough backdrop for his imagined autobiography. Tail Gunner Joe had to get into Showbiz, and rate more mentions in
Variety
than in
The New York Times.
His was an addictive personality, and the need for fame was as desperate in him as the need for his favoured stimulant, morphine. The Monster knew that the Junior Senator was on his crusade so someone would one day cast Spencer Tracy as him in a film of his heroic life from the dogfights of the war to the pit-bull tussles of the Senate. Like every crooked politician in the United States, he had seen
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
several times, and always identified more fiercely with Jimmy Stewart than Claude Rains. When he had got up in the Senate