How to Be Bad by David Bowker Page A

on it.
    So he drove me all the way to East Sheen, saving me a tedious bus journey. On the way, I asked him to tell me a few firefighter’s jokes. He didn’t know any. “There is one thing we say. Some of the houses we go to are so filthy that we have to remember to wipe our feet on the way out.”
    I forced a laugh. Lenny asked me what I did for a living. I told him. He nodded. “And business is bad, is it?”
    â€œHow did you know?”
    â€œBecause you worry a lot. I can see it. You got frown lines on your forehead.” Lenny cackled, having thought of a joke. “You’re s’posed to be following the way of the warrior. Not the way of the worrier.”
    Lenny took a look at my book collection while I went upstairs to get his money. Without much hope, I suggested that if he found a nice book he wanted, we might be able to arrange a trade. Lenny found this hilarious. “A book that’s worth forty quid? There’s no such thing.”
    While I was taking a piss, I heard a knock at the door. I assumed it was Caro, or someone complaining about the way Lenny had parked the van on the pavement. The lavatory window was open, and I peered down into the street. I heard Lenny answer the door; then came the sound of shouting and scuffling. A moment later I leaned forward to peer through the window and saw three shapes spinning about in the darkness.
    I cut my piss short and ran down to see what was happening. Lenny was standing on the pavement, looking down. A large man was lying on his back in the gutter, illegally parked on the double yellow lines. The big man was gripping a baseball bat that had obviously not done him much good. His face looked like a strawberry flan that someone had trampled on.
    â€œWhat happened?” I said.
    â€œI opened the door and this idiot took a swing at me,” said Lenny incredulously. “There were two of ’em. The other one legged it.”
    The guy on the ground, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, coughed and blew out a huge bubble of blood.
    â€œFuck,” I said. “What did you do to him?”
    â€œSimple block, then elbow strike to the face,” said Lenny. “The elbow’s one of the deadliest parts of the body.”
    â€œWhat about that speech you give us about how it’s always safer to run away?”
    â€œI didn’t have time to run.” He eyed me warily. “I got the impression they thought I was you. Is that possible?”
    I looked at Lenny. I hated to admit it, but we were the same height, with similar haircuts and similar sticky-out ears. I’d swear I was far more handsome, but maybe not.
    â€œAll right,” he said. “Do you mind telling me what you’ve been doing to bring fellas with baseball bats down on you?”
    I chose to ignore the question. “We better call an ambulance.”
    â€œYou call the ambulance. I need to run some cold water over this elbow.”
    Lenny went up to the bathroom. Before dialing 999, I went out to see what Lenny’s victim was doing. He wasn’t doing anything. He’d gone, leaving a trail of blood that stretched all the way to High Street.

CHAPTER 7
    AND WHEN DID YOU LAST KILL YOUR FATHER?
    T HE NEXT day started promisingly enough. I opened the shop just before nine. There was the usual crowd of people standing outside, none of them wanting to come in. But then I logged on to my Web site to learn that someone had ordered my most valuable book, a very good first edition of Casino Royale without a dust jacket, price three thousand pounds. I was elated and went to the case to remove the book, only to find it wasn’t there.
    I wasn’t unduly concerned. I tended to mislay books all the time. I had a habit of taking the finest copies off display, subjecting them to lingering adoration, then putting them down somewhere stupid. When a book was lost in this way, I found that a frantic search never helped. It was always