The Daily Novel

Twenty
Mrs. Richardson had pivoted me onto the couch and tucked me into a blue quilt. I woke up all cozy and rested, but I felt like a busted spring.
The light was pink against the curtains, and I didn’t know where her bathroom was. I scouted quickly and found it, and when I came out there [...]

Nineteen
Wednesday was an inquisition of gravity and anticlimax. They found the judge and the lawyers and sprang Mike. A courier arrived from the medical examiner’s office in Spokane. The file on Ina Simmons had gotten shuffled onto the wrong end of somebody’s desk, and they had just found it, and they were awful sorry, and [...]

Eighteen
A vivid yellow slash of pain lanced through my eyeballs. I saw it, like lightning. I went down hard, and he kicked me in the hip. I rolled, and he jumped for me and kicked again. He was wearing heavy black workboots. The toe clubbed my thigh. I rolled again. I had to get my [...]

Seventeen
I hit sixty on a couple of the straight stretches. It was a silly thing to do. I came through one corner sideways, and if Larry had been shepherding that Jimmy right there right then, they would have had a hard time even finding pieces to put together. After that I slowed down and thought [...]

Sixteen
It wasn’t quite six when I went through Belmont. The big doors on the elevator were open, and Bob Miller was sweeping out the scale area with a push broom. He gave me his big wave, and I gave him my Bob Miller wave. I was going to help pinch his rotten nephew, and the [...]

Fifteen
I would have been happy to wave at Bob Miller or Larry or the office lady, but everybody in Belmont was lying low as I swept through. I bounced along the rocky part and pased the windmill and nemesised down to the T by Ron Miller’s place. I didn’t expect him to be home, and [...]

Fourteen
It was Tuesday, but gravity was ahead on points. Something clonked, and I started to crawl up out of sleep. Clonk. What the hell?
It clonked again. And rattled. And it was in my room.
Jesus. I rolled out and hit the floor, scrabbling for my gun. Damfool! I thought. Make yourself a target and then sleep [...]

Thirteen
It was the longest Monday since Joshua. I had talked to Bowles and to somebody else. Nothing from Spokane. Ina Simmons had been dead for nearly ninety hours, and we couldn’t even know for sure if they had looked at her up there yet. Maybe she had turned into a vampire and was haunting the [...]

Twelve
Even a highly successful and much admired private eye can’t spend forever lying on a swaybacked bed in a $30-a-month hotel room. I went downstairs and used Mrs Richardson’s phone to talk to Bowles. He said there was no word from the crime lab in Spokane. No medical report on Ina Simmons.
We would have to [...]

Eleven
    It wasn’t seven when I went through Belmont, but Bob Miller had already finished humping open the big tin doors. He gave me a big wave from the truck ramp. Seeing me in an aged white Valiant didn’t seem to shake his faith in a stable universe. The man was more cheerful than my [...]