The boy had started to cry. Not all-out bawling, not yet, but great big tears that looked pinkish in the reflected glow of the red COUSINTOWN sign as they tracked down his smooth cheeks.
The girl in the information booth flagged down the cop and said something to him. She was pretty, dark-haired, about twenty-five; he was sandy-blonde with a moustache. As the cop leaned on his elbows, smiling at her, Sheridan thought they looked like the cigarette ads you saw on the backs of magazines. Salem Spirit. Light My Lucky. He was dying out here and they were in there making chit-chat — whatcha doin after work, ya wanna go and get a drink at that new place, and blah-blah-blah. Now she was also batting her eyes at him. How cute.
Sheridan abruptly decided to take the chance. The kid’s chest was hitching, and as soon as he started to bawl out loud, someone would notice him. Sheridan didn’t like moving in with a cop less than sixty feet away, but if he didn’t cover his markers at Mr. Reggie’s within the next twenty-four hours, he thought a couple of very large men would pay him a visit and perform impromptu surgery on his arms, adding several elbow-bends to each.
He walked up to the kid, a big man dressed in an ordinary Van Heusen shirt and khaki pants, a man with a broad, ordinary face that looked kind at first glance. He bent over the little boy, hands on his legs just above the knees, and the boy turned his pale, scared face up to Sheridan’s.
His eyes were as green as emeralds, their color accentuated by the light-reflecting tears that washed) them.
‘You get separated from your dad, son?’ Sheridan asked.
‘My Popsy, ‘ the kid said, wiping his eyes. ‘I . . . I can’t find my P-P-Popsy!’
Now the kid did begin to sob, and a woman headed in glanced around with some vague concern.
‘It’s all right,’ Sheridan said to her, and she went on. Sheridan put a comforting arm around the boy’s shoulders and drew him a little to the right . . . in the direction of the van. Then he looked back inside.
The rent-a-cop had his face right down next to the information girl’s now. Looked like maybe more than that little girl’s Lucky was going to get lit tonight. Sheridan relaxed. At this point there could be a stick-up going on at the bank just up the concourse and the cop wouldn’t notice a thing. This was starting to look like a cinch.
‘I want my Popsy!’ the boy wept.
‘Sure you do, of course you do,’ Sheridan said. ‘And we’re going to find him. Don’t you worry.’
He drew him a little more to the right.
The boy looked up at him, suddenly hopeful.
‘Can you? Can you, mister?’
‘Sure!’ Sheridan said, and grinned heartily. ‘Finding lost Popsys . . . well, you might say it’s kind of a specialty of mine.’
‘It is?’ The kid actually smiled a little, although his eyes were still leaking.
‘It sure is,’ Sheridan said, glancing inside again to make sure the cop, whom he could now barely see (and who would barely be able to see Sheridan and the boy, should he happen to look up), was still enthralled. He was. ‘ What was your Popsy wearing, son?’
‘He was wearing his suit,’ the boy said. ‘He almost always wears his suit. I only saw him once in jeans.’ He spoke as if Sheridan should know all these things about his Popsy.
‘I bet it was a black suit,’ Sheridan said.
The boy’s eyes lit up. ‘You saw him! Where?’
He started eagerly back toward the doors, tears forgotten, and Sheridan had to restrain himself from grabbing the pale-faced little brat right then and there. That type of thing was no good.
Couldn’t cause a scene. Couldn’t do anything people would remember later. Had to get him in the van. The van had sun-filter glass everywhere except in the windshield; it was almost impossible to see inside unless you had your face smashed right up against it.
Had to get him in the van first.
He touched the boy on the arm. ‘I didn’t see him inside, son. I saw him right over there.’
He pointed across the huge parking lot with its endless platoons of cars. There was an access road at the far end of it, and beyond that were the double yellow arches of McDonald’s.
‘Why would Popsy go over there?’ the boy asked, as if either Sheridan or Popsy — or maybe both of them — had gone utterly mad.
‘I don’t know,’ Sheridan said. His mind was working fast, clicking along like an express train as it always did when it got right down to the point where you had to stop shitting and either do it up right or fuck it up righteously. Popsy. Not Dad or Daddy but Popsy. The kid had corrected him on it. Maybe Popsy meant Granddad, Sheridan decided. ‘But I’m pretty sure that was him.
Older guy in a black suit. White hair . . . green tie . . . ‘
‘Popsy had his blue tie on,’ the boy said. ‘He knows I like it the best.’
‘Yeah, it could have been blue,’ Sheridan said. ‘Under these lights, who can tell? Come on, hop in the van, I’ll run you over there to him.’
‘Are you sure it was Popsy? Because I don’t know why he’d go to a place where they — ‘
Sheridan shrugged. ‘Look, kid, if you’re sure that wasn’t him, maybe you better look for him on your own. You might even find him.” And he started brusquely away, heading back toward the van.
The kid wasn’t biting. He thought about going back, trying again, but it had already gone on too long — you either kept observable contact to a minimum or you were asking for twenty years in Hammerton Bay. He’d better go on to another mall. Scoterville, maybe. Or —
‘Wait, mister!’ It was the kid, with panic in his voice. There was the light thud of running sneakers. ‘Wait up! I told him I was thirsty, he must have thought he had to go way over there to get me a drink. Wait!’
Sheridan turned around, smiling. ‘I wasn’t really going to leave you anyway, son.’
He led the boy to the van, which was four years old and painted a nondescript blue. He opened the door and smiled at the kid, who looked up at him doubtfully, his green eyes swimming in that pallid little face, as huge as the eyes of a waif in a velvet painting, the kind they advertised in the cheap weekly tabloids like The National Enquirer and Inside View.
‘Step into my parlor, little buddy,’ Sheridan said, and produced a grin which looked almost entirely natural. It was really sort of creepy, how good he’d gotten at this.
The kid did, and although he didn’t know it, his ass belonged to Briggs Sheridan the minute the passenger door swung shut.
There was only one problem in his life. It wasn’t broads, although he liked to hear the swish of a skirt or feel the smooth smoke of silken hose as well as any man, and it wasn’t booze, although he had been known to take a drink or three of an evening. Sheridan’s problem — his fatal flaw, you might even say — was cards. Any kind of cards, as long as it was the kind of game where wagers were allowed. He had lost jobs, credit cards, the home his mother had left him. He had never, at least so far, been in jail, but the first time he got in trouble with Mr. Reggie, he’d thought jail would be a rest-cure by comparison.
He had gone a little crazy that night. It was better, he had found, when you lost right away.
When you lost right away you got discouraged, went home, watched Letterman on the tube, and then went to sleep. When you won a little bit at first, you chased. Sheridan had chased that night and had ended up owing seventeen thousand dollars. He could hardly believe it; he went home dazed, almost elated, by the enormity of it. He kept telling himself in the car on the way home that he owed Mr. Reggie not seven hundred, not seven thousand, but seventeen thousand iron men. Every time he tried to think about it he giggled and turned up the volume on the radio.
But he wasn’t giggling the next night when the two gorillas — the ones who would make sure his arms bent in all sorts of new and interesting ways if he didn’t pay up — brought him into Mr.
Reggie’s office.
‘I’ll pay,’ Sheridan began babbling at once. ‘I’ll pay, listen, it’s no problem, couple of days, a week at the most, two weeks at the outside — ‘