Free The Unlucky Man by H T G Hedges Page B

morning sunlight, robbed of any warmth or colour. The road was empty, an unwelcoming line of desolate shop fronts and tired, shabby buildings.
    An auto-repair shop across the way seemed to be the only other sign of life on the whole street, its barred window lit by a lone dirty yellow bulb that was mirrored in the deep puddles forming on the sidewalk.
    For a while I watched this marooned reflection as the raindrops rippled and disturbed the surface of the water, spreading strange, dull neon patterns in their wake, an ever shifting, circling inkblot of dirty blues and oranges.
    A sharp intake of breath from Corg brought me back to the real word. I looked over at him but found him staring fixedly past me.
    "Damn."
    I turned and followed his eye-line and found the TV screen - and my own face - staring back at me, Corg’s big bald head lined up next to it. The set was behind a cage of thin wire mesh and smeared with grime but I could still make out enough to put together a pretty good guess as to what was being said by the newscaster. Quite clearly, the word "murder" stood out bold and loud through the grease.
    As the picture cut to a shot of the burned out husk of "Last Rights" - the place I’d worked for over half a decade - still smoking damply in clouds of thick grey fog, I remembered the waitress.
    "Wait," I said imploringly, half stood up, trying to disentangle myself from the booth. I don’t know what the end of that sentence was going to be but it turned out not to matter as she bolted away, spiderlike, through the door into the back with a surprising burst of speed. We both clearly heard the unmistakable sound of a bolt being shot.
    "What the hell is this?" Corg hissed.
    "Never mind that, how much do you want to bet she’s got a phone in there with her?" I said. He rolled his eyes.
    "We need to go. Again," was all he said in reply, wrenching open the door with such force that it bounced off the opposite wall, gouging a big chunk of plaster from the already crumbling facade in a cloud of dust. He glanced at the damage, almost guiltily, then shook his great head and stepped out into the rain. With one final glance at the television, which had resumed coverage of our twin photographs, I followed him out.
     
    Back in the car and moving again. Whereas before it had felt like a prison, it now seemed more like a welcome sanctuary, warm and shut-off from the hostile world outside, the soft glow of the dash fading in the grey morning light.
    I thought back to our faces on the TV screen, my own dark eyes and unruly hair, Corg grinning massively, the edges of a Hawaiian shirt just visible in the corners of the frame, the ridiculous, colourful cocktail that I knew him to be holding cropped out of the image.
    "I know that picture," I said aloud, making Corg jump, "The one of you on the news. I recognise it - Heechey’s birthday last year. That god-awful theme bar we ended up in."
    "So?" Corg said, nonplussed. He was squinting through the front window as we coasted along identical narrow streets. The rain had really picked up again, its continuous flow obscuring his view, drumming an insistent, repetitive beat against the glass. Oddly, our new danger seemed to have revitalized him somewhat, reducing his sullenness back to normal atmopsheric levels.
    "So I took it, it’s on my laptop. They’ve been in my flat." It was obvious really. After all, they’d been waiting, watching Corg’s place, it made sense that they would have set up on mine too. Still, it was an upsetting feeling to imagine faceless shadows creeping through a space I considered my own, a private space, gloved hands rifling through my papers, my cupboards, my life.
    With a sudden dislocation, it occurred to me that I couldn’t go back there. At the same time, I recognized that I had nowhere else to go either - no cash, no ID, no phone. On some level I must have known all this already, but full recognition still came with a bump.
    "One of those isn’t a problem,