“Let us in, Fontaine. We’re in trouble.”
You probably are trouble, by now, Fontaine decided, after whatever it was got you the black eye. He started unlocking the door, noticing how she kept glancing either way, as if expecting unwanted company. The cop-looking one, this Rydell, was doing the same. But the professor, Fontaine noted, was watching him, watching Fontaine, and it made him glad to have the Kit Gun down by his leg.
“Lock it,” Chevette said, as she entered, followed by Rydell and the professor.
“I’m not sure I want to,” Fontaine said. “I might want to show it to you.”
“Show it to me?”
“You in the plural. Show you the door. Follow me? I was sleeping.”
“Fontaine, there are men on the bridge with guns.”
“There are indeed,” said Fontaine, as he rubbed his thumb over the knurls atop the little double-action’s hammer.
The professor closed the door.
“Hey,” Fontaine said, in protest.
“Is there another exit?” the professor asked, studying the locks.
“No,” Fontaine said.
The man glanced back through the shop, to the rear wall, beyond the upturned toes of Fontaine’s guest. “And on the other side of this wall, there is only a sheer drop?” 228 “That’s right,” Fontaine said, somehow resenting the ease with which the man had extracted this information.
“And above? There are people living above?” The man looked up at the shop’s painted plywood ceiling.
“I don’t know,” Fontaine admitted. “If there are, they’re quiet. Never heard ’em.”
This Rydell he seemed to be having trouble walking He made it over to the glass-topped counter and put his duffel down on it.
“You don’t want to break my display there, hear?”
Rydell turned, hand pressed into his side. “Got any adhesive tape? The wide kind?”
Fontaine did have a first-aid kit, but it never had anything anyone ever needed. He had a couple of crumbling wound compresses circa about 1978 in there and an elaborate industnal eye bandage with
instructions in what looked like Finnish. “I got gaffer tape,” Fontaine said.
“What’s that?”
“Duct tape. You know: silver? Stick to skin okay. You want that?” Rydell shrugged painfully out of his black nylon jacket and started
fumbling one-handed with the buttons of his wrinkled blue ~hirt. The girl started helping him, and when she’d gotten the shirt off Fontaine saw the yellow gray mottling of a fresh bruise up his side A bad one
“You in an accident?” He’d tucked the Smith & Wesson into the side pocket of his trousers, not a safe carry ordinarily but a convenient one under the circumstances. The worn checkered walnut of the butt stuck out just enough to get a handy purchase, should he need it. He got a roll of tape out of the top drawer of an old steel filing cabinet. It made that sound when he pulled out a foot or so of it. “You want me to put this on you? I taped fighters in Chicago. In the ring, you know?”
“Please,” said Rydell, wincing as he raised the arm on the bruised side.
Fontaine tore the length of tape off and studied Rydell’s rib cage. “Tape’s mystical, you know that?” He snapped the tape taut between his two hands, the darker, adhesive-coated side toward Rydell.
229 I “How’s that?” Rydell asked.
“Cause it’s got a dark side,” Fontaine said, demonstrating, “a light side,” showing the dull silver backing, “and it holds the universe together.” Rydell started to yell when the strip was applied, but caught it. “Breathe,” Fontaine said. “You ever deliver a baby?”
“No,” Rydell managed.
“Well,” said Fontaine, readying the next strip, this one longer, “you want to breathe the way they tell women to breathe when the contractions come. Here: now breathe out. .
It went pretty fast then, and when Fontaine was done, he saw that Rydell was able to use both hands to button his shirt.
“Good evening,” he heard the professor say and, turning with the roll of tape in his hand, saw that the boy was awake and sitting up, brown eyes wide and empty, staring at the man in the gray-green overcoat. “You look well. Is this your home?”
Something moved, behind the boy’s eyes; saw, retreated again.