Free Picking the Ballad's Bones by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page A

sentimental smile—"are where they can actually locate some
of those songs."
    "Do tell?" she asked
mildly.
    "Your problem, Debauchery, is that you
do sloppy work," the Expediency Devil told her. "You don't check up
on things. You don't cover all your bases. You leave things to
chance."
    "Yeah," said the Stupidity and
Ignorance Devil, "and we're in charge of chance."
    DD, in the Torchy Burns guise, gave
the other devils her very best ingratiating smile, the one they
liked with a little hint of a death's-head grin, and said, "Thanks
for the tip, ducks. Now, if you'll 'scuse me, I'll get my people
right on this."
    A few minutes later she kicked Giorgio
in the tight ass of his counterfeit designer jeans. He had been
changing a tire. Now he changed his expression as he caught a
glimpse of her ethereally thundering countenance. She looked like
his wife in a bad mood. But the witch's bad moods were something to
fear.
    "Diabla! How good it is to see
you."
    "What's the matter, Giorgio. Didn't
you like my little present?" she pouted, a mockery of a normal
woman. "You threw her back. And even those mangy beasts of yours
thought they were too good to eat the tidbit I gave
them."
    "Diabla, I swear to you—"
    "Save it for your wife, luv," she
said, still smiling.
    "You won't cut off our
supply?"
    "Oh, no, Giorgio. I wouldn't do that.
But I think I'll start giving away samples to the kids and ease the
old folks' pain along, how would you like that? And maybe get you
to do a lid or two with me but not your wife. Just our little
arrangement. Wouldn't that be nice?"
    He had already been sweating but now
streams of salt water ran down him like the tears of all the grief
he'd ever caused. He had seen what the drugs he acquired from
Diabla and sold to his profit did to others. He knew in the pit of
his black heart that he was of the lowest creatures of creation,
but he was not yet that low. And for the children and the elders of
his tribe to succumb, for he himself to be infected while leaving
his wife in control. No. He would have to kill her. His world would
fall apart. He would have no power any longer and no will to wield
it if he did. "It was not my fault, Diabla. My stupid sow of a wife
became jealous and attacked me and the gadje woman escaped. As for
the lions, I will shoot them myself."
    "Oh, Giorgio, would you really do that
for me?" the witch cried with the glee of a carrion bird finding
flesh, and transformed herself as she twined cold-bone limbs about
his neck, filling his nostrils with the stench of lime and
decomposing bodies, the stench he had smelled as a boy when he and
other boys had been on grave detail in the camps. The gold in his
own tooth was from gold he hoarded from stripping those bodies. He
would have been killed if the Nazis had learned of his treachery,
but he learned treachery well and early. From the time Diabla first
came to him when he was no more than a feral-eyed child, he had
been able to most satisfactorily avenge himself on the world for
the wrongs it had done him. And had he not saved this small band of
his people too? And did he not care for them and provide them a
good living? The terror they felt of him was far less than the
terror of the camps. The thing they did to live they did only to
outsiders to appease their patroness. Even his wife, who was crazy,
was less afraid of him, less afraid of Diabla, than of the outside
world.
    He spit on the outside world, but he
could not bear to look directly at the witch and said to the front
of her decaying dress, "I will get the woman back again and kill
the man with my own two hands."
    "That would be so sweet of you,
Giorgio," she said. "But what I want you to do first involves all
of your people. I want you to bring me something."
    "Anything, Diabla."
    "It's easy, really, for such talented
folk. Just some old books. I'll tell you which ones and where to
find them and how to get them. But you must bring them to me, show
me the titles, and burn them in my