Free The Last Manly Man by Sparkle Hayter

Dewey’s beating had something to do with his work for PACA?”
    â€œI don’t know. I was in South America, like I said. Just got back …”
    â€œAnd the others who presumably work there. They don’t know anything?”
    â€œDewey is secretive,” Jason said.
    â€œWhat kind of work does Dewey do?”
    â€œAnimal liberations mainly.”
    â€œLet me get this straight. You think that man in a hat didn’t stumble into me by accident. You think your friend Dewey, under an assumed name in a hospital, knows me and his beating is connected to the man in the hat and some chimps.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œWhere is he, Dewey?” I asked.
    â€œIn a hospital, under an assumed name. We’re moving him soon to a private clinic.”
    â€œOf course, an assumed name. Could I see your friend Dewey?”
    â€œWhy?” Jason asked, and now he sounded suspicious. “He’s in a coma, he can’t tell you anything.”
    I was a tad suspicious myself. Though Jason appeared to be a Sonny Boy, I was beginning to smell a rat, maybe because I’d once been scammed on an animal rights story. If Dewey had my name, maybe it was from that story. Maybe he was the rotten little shit who set me up. Maybe the lost man in the hat wasn’t lost at all, but one of their co-conspirators.
    â€œI only have your word that this Dewey exists,” I said.
    â€œYou don’t believe me!”
    â€œI don’t have much to go on.”
    â€œWhy do … uh, there’s a cat at your window.”
    Louise Bryant, somehow sensing I was home, had come back from her day at Sally’s to cadge a meal. After carefully moving the poison ivy I grew in planters as a form of delayed justice for anyone who broke into my apartment, I opened the window, and Louise darted in and began weaving around my legs and rubbing up against me affectionately, her way of kissing my ass.
    â€œDid Dewey by any chance have Doublemint gum on him when he was found?” I asked.
    â€œIt wasn’t in his personal effects. Why?”
    â€œI just wondered.”
    Louise Bryant will be ignored for only so long and then she adopts more emphatic tactics, like taking a clawed swipe at my leg.
    â€œExcuse me, I have to feed my cat. Want a beer?”
    â€œSure.”
    Louise Bryant beat me to the kitchen, meowing for her special dinner, Aloof & Fussy cat food sautéed with bok choy, which I had prepared in bulk so I could just micro it. One whiff of steaming animal flesh and Jason the vegetarian was up in arms.
    â€œDo you have to cook meat while I’m here?” he said.
    â€œUnless you want to fight it out with my half-mad cat, and she’s meaner than me,” I called out to him from the kitchen. “It’s for her. But I’m planning to have a big raw steak later.”
    I let the hot cat meal cool for a moment while I poured Jason a small glass of beer, not wanting him to stay for a full bottle.
    â€œSo you’re one of those people who only likes cute, domestic animals,” he said. “And doesn’t give a damn about the …”
    â€œUgly, disease-carrying ones?” I said.
    I went into the living room and handed him the glass before sitting down in the armchair across from him.
    â€œNot just them,” he said. “Do you eat chicken?”
    â€œYeah, sometimes. Why?”
    â€œDon’t you like chickens? Aren’t they cute enough for you?”
    â€œDepends on the chicken,” I said.
    Funny that he picked the chicken, and not, say, the indefensible cockroach. The night Jack Jackson and I had gone out, Jack had asked me about the last time I unexpectedly cried about a story. That’s one of the things you find as a newswriter and a reporter—when you follow a story long enough, you can lose your detachment. There were plenty of stories that had sent me from my typewriter to the ladies’ room to weep in a stall. Most of