Several blocks from the apartment building, Dobyns came running out from an alley. He was panting, staggering. He was not used to running this way.
He quickly became aware of a young mother pushing a stroller watching him.
He could imagine how he looked.
The mother shook her head in great distaste and hurried on by.
Bitch, Dobyns thought.
Smug fucking bitch.
Another block down, he found a taxi.
Guy was in there behind the wheel reading a paperback in the dim light of the overhead. Wonder the guy wasn't blind by now.
Dobyns got in the back seat. Slammed the door.
The guy put the paperback away with great reluctance, as if he were doing Dobyns here quite a favour.
"Okay," the guy said, addressing his body to the wheel.
Dobyns gave him the address.
For the first time, the cabbie took a look at Dobyns. A good one, anyway.
In the rear-view, the cabbie's eyes narrowed. Lots of cabbies got murdered these days.
A sweaty, dishevelled, panting man with crazed eyes would seem to fit the profile of Those To Be Avoided.
"You got money?" the cabbie said.
"Yeah."
"Mind if I see it?"
"Why?"
The cabbie sighed. Picked up the microphone of his two-way radio. "You want me to call the fuckin' cops, pal?"
"No," Dobyns said.
"Then let's see your money."
Dobyns dug into his pants pocket and came up with a fistful of bills.
He found a twenty and handed it over to the driver.
"Sorry," the man said. "But these days you got to cover your ass."
Dobyns said nothing, sat back "Could you turn off that light?" He wanted to be in darkness.
"The overhead?"
"Yeah."
"Bothers you, huh?"
"Yeah."
In the rear-view the cabbie offered Dobyns a small white slice of grin. "What're you, pal, some kind of vampire or something?"
The cab pulled away with the overhead light off, the cabbie's laughter trailing out the window. He seemed to find his vampire gag a major source of yuks.
In memory, the street was a perfect image from a song by Elvis early on, or Chuck Berry or Little Richard-a street where chopped and channelled '51 Mercs and '53 Oldsmobiles ferried dazzling ponytailed girls and carefully duck tailed boys up and down the avenue, where corner boys dangled Lucky Strikes from their lips and kept copies of The Amboy Dukes in back pockets of Levi's jeans from which the belt loops had been cut away with razor blades. The sounds: glas-pak mufflers rumbling; jukeboxes thundering Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame (forget the white boy bullshit Pat Boone version); police sirens cutting the night and sounding somehow cool and threatening at the same time (like a sound effect from one of the juvenile delinquent movies that always played on the double bill at the State); Italian babies screaming from tiny apartments; Irish babies screaming; black babies screaming; an argument ending with "Fuck you!" "Well fuck you too!" as one corner boy walks away from another, not really wanting to get into it (unlike movie pain, real pain hurts); and talk talk talk, wives and husbands, lovers, little kids having just gluttoned themselves on Captain Video and imitating the Cap'n now, and old lonely ladies saying prayers for somebody in the parish, heart attack or cancer suddenly striking. And the smells. Evening in Paris on the girls and Wildroot on the boys and cigarette smoke and Doublemint gum and smoke autumn chill and cheeseburgers with lots of thick whorls of onion and night itself, the neon of it, and the vast harrowing potential of it, too (a guy could get laid; a guy could get knifed; a guy could find God; it was great giddy fun, the vast potential of this night, and it was scary as hell too).
What O'Sullivan wanted to know was how did you get from skinny, gangly corner boy looking good in his duck's ass and mandatory black leather jacket to now-to age-forty-three-thirty-pounds-overweight-worrier-TV-news-director?
How exactly did that happen anyway? Didn't you get to stay eighteen forever?
He stood now in the street of his youth, wondering about this. Sometimes he had the feeling that his life-the life he'd really been meant to lead-was like a bus that was always pulling away from the corner before he could quite get aboard. So instead of being a spy or assassin or lonely cowpoke he'd ended up a news director with corns on his feet, anxiety pains in his stomach, and this dim animal notion that given the dull life he'd led, his death would be anticlimactic.
He hadn't been back in this old neighbourhood in years and if Holland hadn't conned him into it, he'd never have come back, either. Too many memories of when he'd been a reasonably cool teenager unwittingly on his way to becoming a decidedly uncool middle-ager.
O'Sullivan crossed the street toward the address he was looking for.
It had all changed.
What had once been bright was now grimy; what had once been sturdy now leaned and sagged.
Long gone were the teenagers of his time. Now there was a new language, Vietnamese, and it coiled through the dark air like a twisting yellow snake, touching the shuffling frightened old man with his shopping bag as he hurried back to his social security hovel; and the wino on his knees in the alley vomiting; and the fat Irish cop beyond rage, beyond fear any longer, sitting lonely in his squad car eating doughnuts and trying not to think about the fact that he didn't have hard ons anymore, he had soft ons.
The janitor O'Sullivan was looking for lived at the opposite end of the street above a Laundromat. As he climbed the enclosed stairs on the side of the building, O'Sullivan could hear the thrum of big industrial sized washers threatening to tear from their mountings; and he smelled the high sour stench of dirty water washing even dirtier clothes. Even this late in the evening-suppertime-you could hear the sad wail of poor little two and three-year-olds running around on the filthy linoleum floor of the Laundromat while their ADC mothers smoked endless cigarettes and gossiped about their boyfriends, especially black boyfriends whom their social workers seemed to disapprove of on general principle ("Sharon, you shouldn't ought to let him wump on you like that, you know?").
The narrow passage upward smelled of fading sunlight and garbage. There was only one door at the top of the stairs and he discovered it was locked. He knocked three times before he heard something tapping on the other side of the door.
The sound was as regular and odd as a woodpecker's rapping. He wondered what it could be and-
— and then an image filled his mind.
Blind man with a cane.
Moving across a wooden floor.
Tapping.
The door opened up and there stood just such a man. Or at least O'Sullivan thought there stood just such a man. In the dusty gloom, he couldn't be sure.
All he could be sure of was the stench.
This apartment hadn't been cleaned since 1946 or something like that. It didn't say much for his janitorial skills.
"Are you Mr. Telfair?"
"Yes."
"My name is O'Sullivan. I'm from Channel 3 news."
"Channel 3 news?"
"Yes."
"Is something wrong?"
"I'd just like to talk to you a few minutes."
"About what?"
"Well, when you were employed at Hastings House."
"Forty years."
"Forty years?"
"That's how long I worked there."
"Oh. I see. That's a long time."
"A hell of a long time." Then, at least as far as O'Sullivan could tell, Telfair turned back toward the interior of the dusty apartment.
The tapping started again.
In the darkness of the apartment, the tip of the cane against the wood tap-tapping had an eerie resonance.
O'Sullivan followed Telfair around the corner of the hallway and there lay the living room. Light from the street below painted it in various neon colours-blue-red-green; green-red-blue flashing alternately.
O'Sullivan got his first good look at the old bastard. He was blind all right, with eyes the colour of Milk of Magnesia. His head was impossibly small, like a head cannibals had shrunk, with wild strands of white hair jutting out spikelike. His slack mouth ran with silver spittle. He smelled unclean, like an animal that has been sick for a long time. The ragged white shirt he wore on his bony frame was stained as if from wounds that excreted not only blood but pus, too. He kept his knobbly hands on top of a knobbly black cane. When he turned to invite O'Sullivan to sit down, his breath almost literally knocked O'Sullivan over. The stink was incredible.
But what was most curious about Telfair was the fat animal crouching on his shoulder. At first, O'Sullivan had mistaken it for an odd-looking cat.
Now, its red eyes flaring, its teeth dripping hungrily, O'Sullivan saw it for what it was-a rat.
Telfair sat down in a ragged armchair set in front of the room's two windows. Backlit this way, Telfair was entirely in silhouette. The only detail O'Sullivan could pick out was Telfair's white useless eyes. And it was the same with the rat that sat on Telfair's shoulder watching O'Sullivan. All he could see was the rat's disturbingly red gaze.
"He bothers you, doesn't he?" Telfair said.
"I guess I just kind of buy into all the myths about rats. You know, how they carry rabies and drag babies off and stuff like that."
"You're a very intense man."
"I suppose I am." O'Sullivan sighed. In the blinking neon, he got his first good look at this room. The furniture all looked as if somebody had worked it over with a club and a knife. It was like the world's worst garage sale, boxes and sacks of junk packed tight along three of the walls, overflowing with all sorts of worthless crap, lamps that didn't glow, pop-up toasters that didn't pop up, even an old white Kelvinator refrigerator like the one the O'Sullivan family had had at home-only this one luid a most peculiar door, one that hung at a comic angle by a single screw. "I shouldn't have said anything about your pet. I'm sorry."
"I never have guests. I didn't even think about Charlie being on my shoulder."
"Charlie, huh?"
"When he's been bad I call him Charles."
For some reason that struck O'Sullivan as funny and he laughed out loud. Laughter sounded real weird in this dusty pauper's grave.
"Well, in seventh grade I had a milk snake named Raymond," O'Sullivan said. "He wasn't real popular around my house, either. So I guess I should understand about Charlie."
And as if to prove his master's point, red eyed Charlie climbed down from Telfair's shoulder and landed in his lap and then wriggled his head into the Oreo bag.
There was something obscene about it, the way the rat burrowed his head into the sack.
O'Sullivan could hear the munching all the way across the room where he had parked his butt on the edge of a lumpy couch with a hideous flowered slipcover over it.
"Good boy, Charlie," Telfair said, knobbly hand stroking the relentless rat. "Just remember to save a few for me."
Then, sated apparently, the rat withdrew, shaking its head as if shaking away Oreo crumbs, and then hopped back up on Telfair's shoulder.
Telfair said, "You've been talking to the Lindstrom woman, haven't you?"
"One of my reporters has."
"And she told you about the old tower."
"Yes. But I have to confess, I don't understand much about it."
Telfair chuckled with a certain satisfaction. "Nobody but me does, Mr. O'Sullivan. Nobody but me does. And an old, insane patient named Gus."
Then he reached into the Oreo bag, seized another brown cookie, and popped it into his mouth.
He also, at the same time, raised his right leg off the seat of the armchair and cut a sharp, quick world record fart. "The Oreos have the darndest effect on me, Mr. O'Sullivan. They make me flatulent."
"Ah," O'Sullivan said. He was definitely planning to kill Holland when he saw her again.
As his teeth ground the Oreos to a fine powdery brown dust, Telfair said, "Have you ever heard of the Cloisters, Mr. O'Sullivan?"
"I guess not."
"They were a splinter religious sect that roamed this state back in the 1800s. They'd been Roman Catholics until the bishop found out that they were practising black magic and then he kicked them out."
"I see." He wondered when Telfair was going to get to the UFO abductions and the out-of-body experiences.
"They also killed children. Usually runaways."
"Runaways?"
"Believe it or not, there was a teenage underground bigger than today's back in the late 1800s. And there weren't nearly as many shelters for them, either."
"Oh."
"Guess where the Cloisters put up for five years?"
"I'm afraid I don't know."
"Right where Hastings House is."
O'Sullivan could see this coming.
"Where the old tower was built was right on the burial ground."
"The authorities know about this?"
Telfair rattled his hand inside the Oreo package and snorted. His rat made a tiny chittering noise. "Authorities? They were suspicious of the Cloisters, of course, the way authorities are suspicious of any strange group, but they never really believed that the Cloisters were killing children in sacrifice."
"They never dug in the earth there?"
"Never."
"How do you know that there was a burial ground there, then?"
"I found the book."
"The book?"
"A sort of diary that one of the cult members kept."
"You found it?"
"Yes. Up in the tower when I was rummaging around up there." He sighed, his windpipe rattling there in the gloom. "You see, they never did use the tower, just the main building and then the other buildings they added on later. The tower was always structurally unsound. It swayed whenever there was a wind and even the smallest rain flooded the place."
"Why didn't they just tear it down?"
Telfair shrugged. "It's a nice piece of architecture. I suppose they felt that as long as nobody was in there, it wasn't hurting anything."
"So what did the diary say?"
"It told about the serpent."
"The serpent."
"Uh-huh. The huge snake that came up out of the ground one night after a certain incantation."
Now it was O'Sullivan's turn to sigh.
"You're starting to squirm, Mr. O'Sullivan."
"I guess I am."
"The Cloisters sacrificed the children. That's why the serpent came. It had waited centuries for a host."
"A host?"
"Yes. The snake works its way into a human body-it shrinks down, of course-and then it takes over the intelligence and the will of that person. It makes the person go out and seek other sacrifices-children or adults, it doesn't really matter."
"I see."
Telfair laughed. "I wish you could hear yourself, Mr. O'Sullivan."
"Oh?"
"You sound as if you'd like to dive out that window."
"You have to admit this is a pretty unlikely story."
" 'Unlikely' is a very polite word, Mr. O'Sullivan. I appreciate it."
And with that O'Sullivan got up.
He walked carefully to the window-carefully because the dusty floor was a mine trap of debris-and then he looked down to the street.
He was still wondering where that teenager had gone to, the one who used to masquerade as himself. He could see the street rods again with the flames painted on the sides and the bikers all doing their self conscious Brando impressions as they wheeled their Harleys and big mother Indians to the kerb. A great sorrow overcame him then as he mourned the loss of the boy he'd been. He wanted it all to be ahead of him and it was all largely behind him and he wore neckties and had to worry about annual health check-ups and loneliness.
Yellow Vietnamese words drifted up from the street and brought him back to the present. The boy he'd been faded like a ghost.
"Over the years since Hastings House was built, Mr. O'Sullivan," Telfair said, "six patients have escaped and killed people. Did you know that?"
"No, I guess I didn't."
"A man named Dobyns escaped just the other night."
"I know."
"The snake is inside him."
"How did it get there?"
"It contacted Dobyns telepathically. Dobyns started sneaking out of his room at night, going over to the tower. One night the snake appeared and got inside him."
O'Sullivan turned away from the window and came back to sit on the arm of the couch again.
"Have you talked with Dobyns?"
"No, but I don't need to. I talked to two of the other patients who escaped back in the fifties."
"And they told you about the snake."
"Yes. I felt the snake. They asked me to. They were afraid they were crazy."
"Did you tell the administration at Hastings House?"
"I tried." Telfair laughed again. "But why would they believe me? I was just some janitor. I was lucky they didn't commit me."
"How did you meet Emily Lindstrom?"
"After her brother killed those women," Telfair said, "I called her and told her everything. I even loaned her the diary."
"Obviously she listened."
Telfair stuffed his hand in the Oreo bag. This time he brought out two cookies. One he popped into his mouth. The other he held up for his pet rat to nibble on. "She listened. She didn't necessarily believe. But finally-well, finally she started looking into all this herself and then she gradually started to see that I wasn't crazy."
"My associate mentioned this apartment where all the escapees go. What's that about?"
Telfair coughed harshly, pounded himself on the chest, and said, "Shit. I quit smoking about five years ago but maybe it was already too late." As he coughed, the rat's red eyes jostled up and down on Telfair's shoulder.
Once he was composed again, Telfair said, "The first man who escaped was named Michaels. He built a small altar to the snake in one of the closets there. He killed a four-year-old girl and stripped her bones clean and put the bones in the closet. So when the snake's inside them, it always guides them there even though when they leave the hospital they usually suffer from amnesia. The third man who escaped came back to the hospital and told me all this-before he hung himself that is, the poor bastard. His name was Allard."
"You wouldn't happen to know where Dobyns is, would you?"
"Hunting."
"Hunting?"
"For a victim. You can bet on that."
"You're sure of that?"
"Absolutely. The longer the snake's in them, the more psychotic they get. Allard told me that."
"You've been to the police?"
"Several times, Mr. O'Sullivan. They've got a file on me, I'm sure." He chuckled. "Filed it under 'C' for Crazy Old Bastard." He sighed. "Oh, yes, they've heard my strange tales many times."
O'Sullivan stood up. "I appreciate all this, Mr. Telfair."
"Appreciate it but don't believe a word of it."
"I guess I'll have to think about it."
"At least you're polite. A lot of people who hear my story get pretty abusive." His hand snapped up another Oreo. "You know, ever since I retired early-about the time I was pronounced legally blind because of this retina disease-I've been telling this story to anybody who'd listen. And about the only audience I could find was this old guy who's a patient at Hastings. A guy named Gus. He actually sneaks up into the tower. He's seen the serpent. But who's going to believe him? Old bastard they keep doped up all the time-he's hardly the best witness. You see what I mean?"
Telfair got to his feet and walked over to O'Sullivan. "You want to see something cute?"
"What's that?"
"Watch." Telfair reached out and touched his pet rat on the head. "Say goodbye to the nice gentleman, Charlie."
And with that, the rat got right up on his haunches, right there on Telfair's shoulder, and started chittering crazily.
"And people say you can't train rats," Telfair said. "But what the hell do people know anyway?"
O'Sullivan took one more look at the old man's Milk of Magnesia eyes and got out of there.
While two customers were in the back in the science fiction section, Richie told Marie his secret.
Two years ago Richie and his family had lived in the state capital, where his father was a bank president. As the son of a wealthy and prominent community leader, Richie's life had been enviably simple and full. Then came the sudden bank audit and his father's even more sudden pleading of guilty to an embezzlement charge. For the previous five years, it was revealed, Richie's father had been a secret addictive gambler, first going through the family's entire small fortune, then beginning to use bank funds. Richie's entire life changed. He went from being one of his school's most popular boys to somebody people whispered about, and pointed to and smirked at. His father was sentenced to ten years in prison and the family had been forced to move here to an apartment on a side of town that was barely respectable. His mother worked as a secretary in her brother's law office. How Richie and his two sisters would ever get through college was unknown at this point.
As Richie told Marie all this, she saw him suffer through embarrassment and pain. By the time he finished his story, his voice rasped with a very real agony. He was afraid for his father in prison-afraid that one of the inmates would stab him-and he was equally afraid for his mother. She was not in the best of health. The scandal had made her even weaker. And her stressful forty-hour-a-week job couldn't be doing her any good, either. Richie had taken a job at a local department store. Three nights a week and Saturdays he sold sports gear even though his interest in sports was minimal at best.
So there it was.
The secret hurt that was in his eyes but that he'd never talked about. The secret hurt that forced him to sit at the same table with the 'geeks.' She almost called him a geek-affectionately, of course-but she thought he might take it the wrong way. At least until he knew her better.
When he finished, he took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and said, "You mind?" He sounded as if he'd just finished making a long confession to a priest. He looked relieved, too.
She pointed to a sign above the door: NO SMOKING. "Brewster'd be awful mad."
"Maybe I'll step outside."
"Maybe you shouldn't smoke."
He grinned. "I figured you were the den mother type."
She grinned back. "Is that what I am?"
"No," he said, looking at her slyly, self-confidence coming back to his tone and face again. "What you are is cute. Very cute."
She felt exultant. Cute. Very cute. Maybe this first date was going to turn out just like her fantasy after all.
They were sitting on stools behind the counter with the cash register.
"Tell you what," he said.
"What?"
"Why don't I go out and have a cigarette and then go get us some Blizzards?"
"Only if you'll let me pay for my own."
"I really wish you'd let me pay for both of them." He smiled again and made a muscle with his bicep. He wasn't particularly muscular so that made his self-deprecating gesture all the sweeter to her. "That way I'd feel more macho."
"Well, if you'd feel more macho, maybe I'd better let you pay."
"Then next time you can pay."
"And will I get to be macho then?"
"You know," he said, crossing his eyes like an old vaudevillian comic, "That's a very good question."
Before she could respond, the pair from the back were at the counter. One young man-portly with long greasy hair-set down two science fiction paperbacks. The other young man- skinny and already balding even though he couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three-set down a copy of Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle.
As she checked them out-Richie still waiting around-she felt them staring at her. Occupational hazard, Brewster always told her. "You're so pretty, half the guys who come in here are going to have crushes on you. You wait and see." And so they did. While she was flattered by this kind of attention-heady stuff for a girl who usually thought of herself as some drab and crippled drudge-it also unnerved her. She didn't know how to respond.
When the two young men left, one of them pointing to a copy of an art magazine with a beautiful nude on the cover, Richie said, "Boy, you've got fans everywhere."
"They're nice guys. They come in here a lot."
"And I know why, too. To see you."
"They really like science fiction."
"They like you better."
"Strawberry."
"Huh?"
Tired of the subject of other boys-wanting to talk about
Richie if the subject had to be about boys at all-she said, "Strawberry. My Blizzard."
"Oh."
"You sound disappointed."
"Somehow I thought you'd be more adventurous. You know, a Blizzard with everything in it."
"Everything?"
"Sure-M amp;Ms and strawberries and 7-Up and-everything." He laughed. "It's the only way to live."
"Well, if you're going to go macho on me again I don't suppose I have any choice. Everything."
He was already on the way out the door. "You won't regret it. Believe me."
Then he was gone, the bell above the door tinkling, the air the sadder for his absence.
She couldn't believe how much closer she'd felt to him during the past fifteen minutes of conversation.
That was one thing her first date fantasy hadn't allowed for-real friendship to accompany the passion.
"Then do you know of a Marie Fane?"
"I think she's Kathleen's daughter. I'm not related to Kathleen but I know of her through a relative. She's like a shirt-tail cousin or something."
"How old would Marie be?"
The woman on the other end of the phone paused. "High school age or thereabouts, I'd guess."
"And her mother's name is Kathleen?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'll give it a try then. And thank you very much."
"Oh, you're most welcome. Like I said, we watch you on TV all the time. We like you a lot."
Chris Holland smiled. Sometimes a compliment could make you feel better than getting a new car. "Thanks again."
The woman hung up.
Chris put the phone down and said to Emily Lindstrom, "According to her there's a Kathleen Fane."
"Wonder why it isn't in the book?"
"Don't know. I'll try information."
They were still in the apartment Dobyns was using. The dead meat smell was as bad as ever.
When the wispy voiced male operator said "Information." Chris gave him the city and name she was looking for.
After half a minute, the live operator vanished and a recording took over.
"We're sorry but at the customer's request, the number is unpublished."
"Shit," Chris said, slamming the phone down. Then, "Excuse my French."
"What happened?"
"Unlisted number."
"Oh. Great. We've got to find this Marie Fane and warn her. Dobyns is on the way right now."
Chris snapped her fingers. "Cameron."
"Who?"
"Frank Cameron. He's a cop I know. He'll get the number for me."
She quickly dialled the Sixth Precinct. She wasn't used to rotary phones so the dialling was somewhat awkward.
"Detective Cameron, please."
She waited.
"Hello."
"Frank."
"Oh, God."
"You know who this is?"
"If I didn't, would I have said 'Oh, God'?"
"Good point."
He laughed. "It's something illegal, isn't it?"
"What is?"
"What you want me to do."
Cameron loved to tease her and she loved to be teased by him. He was like an older brother. A divorced man with three kids, Cameron had asked her out a few times. Great fun but no sparks alas. Fortunately both of them felt that way. Now they were just friends, just two more overworked, overstressed lonely middle class people anonymously going about the business of living and dying.
"Well, I'm not sure, actually."
"So what is it? The shift commander's called a meeting in five minutes."
"Unlisted number."
"Is that all? You mean I don't have to plant any evidence or run any drugs?"
"Not tonight."
"What's the name?"
She told him.
"Hold on a sec," he said.
"He's getting it for you?" Emily Lindstrom asked.
Chris nodded.
He came back moments later and gave her the number.
"You owe me a lunch," he said.
"McDonald's all right?"
"Sure."
"Good. That I can afford. I'll call you next week."
"Really?"
"Sure really. You helped me, didn't you?"
"Actually, it'll be nice to sit down with a woman who isn't a cop and talk. I'm not doing too well in the old dating department."
Chris laughed. "Well, I'm not doing too well in that department either, Frank, so we can commiserate."
"There you go again with those big words. Talk to you later."
After hanging up, Chris waved the number at Emily Lindstrom. "Well, here it is. Let's just hope somebody is home."
Emily crossed her fingers and held them high.
Chris dialled Kathleen Fane's number.
And waited for somebody to pick up on the other end.
Dobyns reached the street. In the pale glow of the mercury vapour lights, he stood taking polluted air deep into his lungs and getting himself ready to walk inside the bookstore.
A pimp and a hooker passed by. The pimp was obviously upset with the heavily made up black woman. He had gripped her tight by the elbow and was shaking her as they moved toward a Caddy convertible.
What am I waiting for? Dobyns wondered. I should just walk right in there and-
Until now, he had not confronted the unspoken reason he was going into the bookstore.
The reason the knife was lashed to his leg.
The bookstore.
Inside.
Marie Fane.
Now.
He went inside.
Even from the threshold, he could see how neatly- lovingly-the store was laid out. Tidily categorised, all the books fitted perfectly into their pockets.
"May I help you?"
She was no great beauty but she was very pretty. One of those attractive, earnest looking girls boys actually seem to prefer to great beauties.
"Just looking for some old John Steinbeck novels, I guess," Dobyns said casually.
She had a nice body, the right combination of roundness and leanness.
"You'll find that to your right behind you in American literature."
He watched her carefully. He could see that his gaze upset her slightly, that she didn't know how to interpret it.
"Do you sell a lot of him?"
"Not a lot," Marie Fane said. "Mostly The Red Pony, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men."
"That's my favourite."
"Of Mice and Men?"
"Right. You ever read it?"
"Yes. I loved it. Especially the ending. It was so sad."
He saw her earnestness again. The simple but almost moving way she talked about the novel. The fact that she found it so sad told him a lot about her. She was a sensitive and intelligent girl.
Now, she seemed even prettier to him.
"When he puts the mouse in his pocket," Dobyns said. "That's the part I always remember."
The girl nodded. "He was a great writer."
"I guess one of the novels I'm looking for is In Dubious Battle. You think you have that?"
"It'd be in the Steinbeck section if we did."
He'd been trying to lure her out from behind the cash register. He didn't want to grab her up front. Too near the door. Too close to somebody walking in on them. Or seeing them struggle through the glass front door.
"Thanks," he said, and walked back to the American literature section.
Richie ended up walking around the block to smoke his cigarette. Even in a run down neighbourhood such as this one, spring was meant to be enjoyed.
At first he was a little nervous-drunks and homeless people had the most baleful eyes on the planet-but soon enough he relaxed and appreciated the soft sweet breeze and the aromatic sprays of apple blossoms and dogwood that bloomed on a nearby hill.
He felt pure exhilaration. He'd never before trusted anyone enough to tell them the story about his father. For months now he'd had this secret crush on Marie but he hadn't ever expected it to lead to the kind of relationship where you talk, really talk, to somebody.
His problems hadn't gone away. There still wasn't enough money at home. His mother still looked worse and worse each day. Attending college still seemed a dimmer and dimmer hope for him. But even given all this, the fact that he'd unburdened himself with Marie made him feel as if he now had an ally. Somebody on whom he could rely.
He had a friend.
He had walked four blocks from the bookstore without even realising it. On one corner was an adult bookstore where two winos with paper bags covering their wine bottles sat hassling customers as they came out the door, apparently trying to panhandle some cash. On another corner was a Hardee's, a brilliant glowing white against the darkness and gloom of this neighbourhood. And on the third corner sat a small stone Catholic Church. He wasn't sure why, but he felt like going over there, mounting the stairs and going inside to sit in the quiet shadows and watch the votive candles flicker green and yellow and red in the darkness. Even though he wasn't sure he even believed in a personal God anymore, the prospect of sitting in church always cheered him. He'd spent many such hours following the revelations about his father.
He decided it was time to start back, pick up the Blizzards, and head for the bookstore.
He took out another cigarette and got it going. He probably wouldn't have another one for an hour or two.
When the light turned green, he crossed the street.