Supersize SOB's 2 The Barrabas Sting by Jack Hild

Author:Jack Hild
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LIAM O'TOOLE CLUTCHED the handhold on the dash for all he was worth, wedging his stout, powerful legs against the fire wall. Pushing down as hard as he could, he still couldn't keep his behind planted on the seat. All the way back from the Loreto airport, Beck had kept the pedal right against the floorboard. He hadn't slowed when he hit the dirt road. He was rampaging down it as though it was the last twenty miles of the Baja 1000. The Land Cruiser's redlined engine was howling so loud that conversation below a bellow was impossible.

Twice since he landed, O'Toole had asked Beck why he had been summoned. Once, right off the bat, when he stepped off the plane, and again as they were loading his gear into the jeep. Beck's answer both times had been, "Just be patient, Liam, you'll see."

From the telegram Nate had sent, O'Toole had been prepared to face a horde of PCP-crazed, Uzi-toting bandits at the very least. "Situation desperate," the note had said. "Come at once."

Yeah, sure, the red-haired Irishman thought, hurry up so you can get your kidneys rattled loose. Ouch! There wasn't even any interesting scenery. Or if there was, it might as well have not been there. Road dust the color of malted-milk powder coated the windshield and the side windows. Beck had to use the wiper spray to clear a dim arc of visibility.

Not that O'Toole had been doing anything important. Except drinking Bushmill's—something he could do almost anywhere, but here. And writing poetry that he couldn't stand. He had broken through the barrier of writer's block that had paralyzed him for so long, only to realize that he had reached a plateau in his work. He could see that what he had done in the past was pure derivative crap. A combination of Charles Bukowski and Rod McKuen. Obscene greeting-card verse. Sentimental smut. But he had no idea how or where to go from there. The harder he tried to figure it out, the farther away the solution seemed to slip. He had begun to wonder if he would ever enjoy his calling again.

And then there was the matter of Fung-Qua, the originator and sole master of the drunken parrot style of t'ai chi ch'uan—a besotted genius who had introduced Liam to his chi machine, for the nominal cost of two hundred dollars an hour. It was, in Liam's terminology, a "psychic tanning booth." After a single treatment O'Toole fulfilled the master's promise: he flew.

Slipped like a well-buttered oyster between the warp and weave of time and space.

The trouble was, between the time Liam had been first psychically energized and had gone on a mercenary mission with Barrabas and the time he returned, the old man had disappeared, chi machine and all. The treatment that had worked such wonders gradually wore off, leaving Liam worse off, because he had glimpsed the astounding possibilities. How to reach them again by himself? The alternative, according to Fung-Qua, would be to spend decades practicing the soft martial arts, working with the breath, the root to earth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.