Read In the Blood for Free Online Page B

Nicholls."
    The severed connection droned in his ear like an angry hornet. Palmer's hands were shaking, his shirt glued to his back. It was the same woman. The one from his

    Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer ( http://www.novapdf.com ) dream. He'd recognized the voice. He blinked and massaged his brow with the flat of his palm. Christ, what was going on? Was it the acid he'd done back in the seventies? If so, it had picked one hell of a time to treat him to a flashback.
    Still, so many things had changed since he'd awakened from the coma. Sometimes it felt as if he'd spent the past thirty-eight years stumbling around in a sleepwalker's daze and was only now fully awake. Other times it seemed as if he was on the verge of complete and utter mental collapse.
    He'd never considered himself an ordinary schmuck, but before his "accident" he'd never experienced much in the way of nightmares. Not since he was a kid, anyway.
    He'd had some doozies back then.
    His parents had disapproved of his discussing the dreams, so he'd stopped. His father insisted that talking about "things that ain't real and never will be" was pointless and only lead to confusion and, in some strange logic that only his parents seemed to grasp, insanity.
    Whenever Palmer pressed the point, his father would threaten him with Uncle Willy.
    "You keep fretting about stuff that ain't real, you 're gonna end up just like Uncle
    Willy! He was always worrying about the things he saw in his dreams. Where'd it get
    him ? In the State Hospital, that's where! You 're gonna end up sharing a cell with
    him if you don't lay off this shit!"
    Palmer smiled wryly as he reached for the bourbon. Better shove over, Uncle Willy.
    Look's like you 're going to have company.

    Palmer let the crowd push him along Bourbon Street. It was slow going and intensely claustrophobic, but in spite of the overcrowding, the noise and the reek of curbside garbage, he was enjoying himself.
    It was Mardi Gras, and he'd spent the day wandering the narrow streets of the French Quarter, marveling at the costumes and sampling the various local alcoholic beverages. Carnival revelers on the balconies overhead tossed beads and other trinkets at the crowd below. Occasionally a drunken tourist would bare a tit or a backside, causing a shower of hurled plastic beads and a firestorm of camera flashes.
    The whole thing was silly, trivial, bawdy and dumb. Palmer thought it was great.
    He broke free of the press of bodies at the next intersection and headed toward Jackson Square to watch the costumers promenade past the Saint Louis Basilica. He was amused by a band of masquers dressed as frogs heckling the extremist fundamentalists, who were protesting the merrymaking by handing out their own bogus religious tracts. Palmer was so impressed he offered to pay for some of their literature.
    "Don't bother." The young man grinned from inside the gaping cloth mouth of a frog's head. "We just do it to piss these jerks off. In fact, more people offer us money than them, and that really gets their goat! They've been out here for the last few years, being a major pain in the butt. There's not nearly as many of them this time, though. I guess their funding got the triple whammy, what with the PTL
    scandal, old Jimmy gettin' caught out on Airline Highway, and that weird Catherine Wheele cult-massacre last year. Thanks anyway, mister! Happy Mardi

    Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer ( http://www.novapdf.com ) Gras! Remember: Frog Croaked For Your Sins!" The frog priest laughed, hopping after his departing flock.
    "You weren't offering that man money, were you, sir?" Palmer looked down at the florid-faced woman in the Christ Is the Answer Crusade T-shirt. Her eyes were so magnified by her coke-bottle glasses they seemed to hover in front of her face. "They do the Devil's work, mocking the Lord's word and deed! They shall burn in hell on Judgment Day! Jesus loves