Free Easter City by iancrooks Page A

loomed like a gold monolith, and
cars lined up out front, waiting for the valet to scramble to their
aid. Flyers depicting a shadowy woman plastered the gutter grates
and filled waste bins and were stuck up on restaurant windows.
JULIA’S SWORD. 11 FRIDAY ONE NIGHT ONLY.
    Next door was a sprawling hotel with a sign
studded in flashing lights: La Rouge. There was the same amount of
congestion and people guffawing and wolf whistling and dashing into
the warm, lavish interior for a long awaited mug of coffee or glass
of pinot from the wine fountain. Next to La Rouge was another
hotel, Le Vert, with more people, and next to Le Vert, a packed
steakhouse and another casino and, further up the road, Avaris
Airstrip. Nearly every establishment played “Luck be a Lady”.
    “Hey! What’s he doing there?
    I spun round to see a red-faced man wearing
red-tint shades in a tux accompanied by a burly fellow with
splotchy skin and three slim women in violent-red dresses and long
hoop earrings, pointing a gloved finger at me. Beneath the man’s
boot was a kid who looked my age. He had a black eye and a busted
lip. Snot and blood congealed and froze down his nose. His eyes
were brown and frozen like his tangled blonde roots. He didn’t look
up.
    In an instant the devil crew lusted for
me—another body, ripe for ravaging.
    “Two in one day!” screeched one woman.
    “Oh… this is too good.” Sighed the pointing
man. “Julia will have to wait!”
    The burly man cupped his hands and shouted
down the street to another group that was approaching the
scene.
    “Cochon! Hurry u—!”
    I backed up, rounded the corner and pelted
down the street, trying to ignore the crowing and heavy footfalls
as the group tailed me.
    I squinted through falling snow, and after
few minutes of slide-running, found my hideout, a space beneath a
short flight of wood stairs, and my food source—a packed steakhouse
to which the stairs led. The sign out front read Bones.
    I ducked behind a waste bin near the side of
a hotel and waited for the flow of stuffed rich people to ebb
before crawling in the thick snow, and, when all was clear and the
street was void of cars and the sidewalk of people, dove under the
staircase.
    The door banged open at that instant and
warmth and the smell of steak and the sound of a murmuring violin
and chatter wafted out.
    “Come again!”
    “We sure will!” came a cartoonish voice. I
couldn’t tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman but it
tickled my ears in an annoying way.
    The patio creaked, then the stairs. I peered
through the space between the stairs. A man. And he wasn’t alone.
Only…on each arm, instead of women in lurid dresses, he held
giggling men with hoop earrings and black suits and black
shoes.
    “—Cranston’s mistress, they say.”
    “I’d swallow a sword for a piece of that
chiseled beauty.”
    I blinked, shook my head and scanned their
hands; no bags. A car pulled up to the curb. Doors shut and the men
were gone.
    The next party to descend the stairs was
rowdier—if less colorful—than the last, though all they had to
offer were a few dirty toothpicks, which they dropped through the
space between the stairs.
    My stomach grumbled and I shivered violently
and wrapped my arms around my prominent rib cage. I never got used
to the cold—not even after freezing for as long as I can remember.
The gutter was freezing and you got wet but at least the wind
couldn’t rattle your bones and blow away dreams of warmer days.
    I brushed ice crystals from my lashes and
looked up at the sound of the door moaning wide. Chatter. Violins.
“Take care now! Come again!”
    Someone creaked out onto the patio. A pair of
feet and a dull clunk; a man, alone. A man with a cane, alone. And
better still, the silver bottom of a paper bag glinted as he made
his steady way down the stairs.
    I tensed, ready to spring out but froze at
the crunch of road-ice. I squinted through the stairs. A small
limousine had pulled up