The laughter began like dry autumn leaves scraping across a cracked gravestone.
High on the thirty-foot mahogany bench, Chief Magistrate Horace Glass threw his head back against the ceiling bulkheads. The sound tore out of his desiccated throat in rhythmic, mechanical spasms: click-hiss-HEH-HEH-HEH. Red legal ribbon fluttered across his hollow eye sockets, weeping greasy crimson droplets that sizzled as they hit his inverted brass desk blotter.
Julian did not look away. He kept his boots planted on the iron grating of the Prisoner’s Dock, his right hand resting on the chain that bound the Contradiction Ledger to his wrist.
In eight hundred graveyard shifts behind the counter at Store #04, Julian had heard every variety of customer laugh. There was the nervous laugh of a teenager trying to buy cigarettes with an expired driver’s license. There was the bitter snicker of a graveyard shift mechanic who found out the coffee pot was empty at three in the morning.
Glass’s laugh was different. It was the hysterical rattle of a middle manager who thought his corporate title made him immortal.
“Listen to him,” Mac muttered, wiping hydraulic oil from his metal forearm with a rough denim cuff. “Sounds like a starter motor grinding on a dead battery.”
