A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens(1)

A Christmas Carol
2 of 138
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little
book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which
shall not put my readers out of humour
with themselves, with each other, with the
season, or with me. May it haunt their
houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant, C. D.
December, 1843.
A Christmas Carol
3 of 138
Stave 1: Marley’s Ghost
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed
by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief
mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was
good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand
to.
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own
knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail.
I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffinnail
as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(7)

“He walks forward with the two suitcases, puts them in that
steel box in the trunk, and latches it. If he takes one more step,
up the side of the car toward you, the whole thing goes up. If he
tries to pass you a gun or a tool of some kind, she blows. He’s
been told all that already. So he goes back to his pickup, turns
around, and heads back to the highway. It’ll be hours before he
gets there; that’s been explained to you—the rock slide. He’ll
have to walk most of the way.
“The rest of it’s marked on your map, the turns you make and
the distances. We’ll pick you up and disarm the thing before you
go out of transmitter range. It’ll be dark very shortly after then,
and we’ll be out of the country in a different set of vehicles
before they even find out what direction we went. Okay?”
Man on a Leash — 134
“If you could call it that,” Romstead said.
“So you can take off the blindfolds when I sing out. Then just
wait.” Footsteps receded. Sing out, Romstead thought. Exseaman.
So far, that was the only slip Top Kick had made.
“Okay,” Top Kick called, some distance behind them. At the
same moment a car door slammed, and he heard the other
vehicle accelerate in low gear, going away.

Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(6)

“And I always loved sex,” she said. “Do you suppose I’ll ever
be capable of it again?”
“Sure,” Romstead replied. “Barnyard matings never bothered
you before, did they?”
She lighted another cigarette. “It’s a wonder the great genius
didn’t put a TV camera in here so they could watch us as well as
listen.”
“Oh, we’re being watched.” He gestured toward the front
wall. “The mirror’s a phony.”
She looked at it with interest. “You mean like those they’re
supposed to have in some of the casinos? How does it work?”
“You just have to have more light on the front side than the
back. It’s probably in a closet out there, or there’s a curtain over
it.”
“Oh. What was all that about a burro?”
He explained about finding the skeleton with its broken ribs.
“It was a demonstration, to put the old man in a receptive frame
of mind. They strapped a bundle of dynamite to the poor little
bastard, tied some tin cans to his tail to make him run, and then
blew him up several hundred yards away.”

Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(5)

“Personally,” Brubaker said, “I think they set him up with a
sucker phone call sometime this morning, because he took off
right from his sister’s funeral without even going home to
change clothes. But now we’ll never know. Any more than we’ll
ever know what he found out in San Francisco or what they
were afraid he’d found out. That’s the beauty of amateurs
showing the police how to do it. By God, they don’t waste half
their time sitting around on their dead asses making out reports
like a bunch of dumb cops or even bothering to tell anybody
what they’re doing.” Brubaker removed the cigar from his
mouth as if to throw it against the wall but merely cursed again
and reclamped it between his teeth.
“Well, he did give you the letter,” Romstead said. “When did it
come, and specifically what did it say?”
“It came yesterday morning,” Brubaker said. “But you might
as well read it, since it concerns your old man.” He grabbed it
out of the confusion on his desk and passed it over.
It was written with a ball-point pen on a single sheet of cheap
typing paper. Romstead read it.