Marines enough times. “And you don’t need a goddam permit to buy a cleaning kit, either.
Ain’t freedom wonderful?”
“Yes,” the gunslinger said seriously, and pretended to look closely at the cleaning kit, although a single glance was enough to show him that it was a shoddy thing in a shoddy
box. While he looked, he carefully pushed Mort’s wallet under the counter with his foot.
After a moment he pushed it back with a passable show of regret. “I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”
“All right,” the clerk said, losing interest abruptly. Since the guy wasn’t crazy and was obviously a looker, not a buyer, their relationship was at an end. Bullshit walks. “Anything else?” His mouth asked while his eyes told blue-suit to get out.
“No, thank you.” The gunslinger walked out without a look back. Mort’s wallet was deep
under the counter. Roland had set out his own honeypot.
7
Officers Carl Delevan and George O’Mearah had finished their coffee and were about to
move on when the man in the blue suit came out of Clements’—which both cops believed
to be a powderhorn (police slang for a legal gunshop which sometimes sells guns to
independent stick-up men with proven credentials and which does business, sometimes in
bulk, to the Mafia), and approached their squad car.
He leaned down and looked in the passenger side window at O’Mearah. O’Mearah
expected the guy to sound like a fruit—probably as fruity as his routine about the lavender
handcuffths had suggested, but a pouf all the same. Guns aside, Clements’ did a lively trade
in handcuffs. These were legal in Manhattan, and most of the people buying them weren’t
amateur Houdinis (the cops didn’t like it, but when had what the cops thought on any given
subject ever changed things?). The buyers were homos with a little taste for s & m. But the man didn’t sound like a fag at all. His voice was flat and expressionless, polite but
somehow dead.
“The tradesman in there took my wallet,” he said.
“Who?”O’Mearah straightened up fast. They had been itching to bust Justin Clements for a year and a half. If it could be done, maybe the two of them could finally swap these
bluesuits for detective’s badges. Probably just a pipe-dream— this was too good to be
true—but just the same . . .
“The tradesman. The—” A brief pause. “The clerk.”
O’Mearah and Carl Delevan exchanged a glance.
“Black hair?” Delevan asked. “On the stocky side?”
Again there was the briefest pause. “Yes. His eyes were brown. Small scar under one of
them.”
There was something about the guy . . . O’Mearah couldn’t put his finger on it then, but
remembered later on, when there weren’t so many other things to think about. The chief of
which, of course, was the simple fact that the gold detective’s badge didn’t matter; it turned
out that just holding onto the jobs they had would be a pure brassy-ass miracle.
But years later there was a brief moment of epiphany when O’Mearah took his two sons to
the Museum of Science in Boston. They had a machine there—a computer—that played
tic-tac-toe, and unless you put your X in the middle square on your first move, the machine
fucked you over every time. But there was always a pause as it checked its memory for all
possible gambits. He and his boys had been fascinated. But there was something spooky
about it… and then he remem- bered Blue-Suit. He remembered because Blue-Suit had had
that some fucking habit. Talking to him had been like talking to a robot.
Delevan had no such feeling, but nine years later, when he took his own son (then eighteen
and about to start college) to the movies one night, Delevan would rise unexpectedly to his
feet about thirty minutes into the feature and scream, “It’s him! That’s HIM! That’s the guy in the fucking blue suit! The guy who was at Cle—”
Somebody would shout Down in front! but needn’t have bothered; Delevan, seventy
pounds overweight and a heavy smoker, would be struck by a fatal heart attack before the
complainer even got to the second word. The man in the blue suit who approached their
cruiser that day and told them about his stolen wallet didn’t look like the star of the movie,
but the dead delivery of words had been the same; so had been the somehow relentless yet
graceful way he moved.
The movie, of course, had been The Terminator.
8
The cops exchanged a glance. The man Blue-Suit was talking about wasn’t Clements, but
almost as good: “Fat Johnny” Holden, Clements’ brother-in-law. But to have done
something as totally dumb-ass as simply stealing a guy’s wallet would be—
— would be right up that gink’s alley, O’Mearah’s mind finished, and he had to put a hand to his mouth to cover a momentary little grin.
“Maybe you better tell us exactly what happened,” Dele-van said. “You can start with your name.”
Again, the man’s response struck O’Mearah as a little wrong, a little off-beat. In this city,
where it sometimes seemed that seventy per cent of the population believed Go fuck yourself was American for Have a nice day, he would have expected the guy to say
something like, Hey, that S.O.B. took my wallet! Are you going to get it back for me or are
we going to stand out here playing Twenty Questions?
But there was the nicely cut suit, the manicured finger- nails. A guy maybe used to dealing
with bureaucratic bullshit. In truth, George O’Mearah didn’t care much. The thought of
busting Fat Johnny Holden and using him as a lever on Arnold Clements made O’Mearah’s
mouth water. For one dizzy moment he even allowed himself to imagine using Holden to
get Clements and Clements to get one of the really big guys—that wop Balazar, for
instance, or maybe Ginelli. That wouldn’t be too tacky. Not too tacky at all.
“My name is Jack Mort,” the man said.
Delevan had taken a butt-warped pad from his back pocket. “Address?”
That slight pause. Like the machine, O’Mearah thought again. A moment of silence, then an almost audible click.
“409 Park Avenue South.”
Delevan jotted it down.
“Social Security number?”
After another slight pause, Mort recited it.
“Want you to understand I gotta ask you these questions for identification purposes. If the
guy did take your wallet, it’s nice if I can say you told me certain stuff before I take it into my possession. You understand.”
“Yes.” Now there was the slightest hint of impatience in the man’s voice. It made
O’Mearah feel a little better about him somehow. “Just don’t drag it out any more than you
have to. Time passes, and—”
“Things have a way of happening, yeah, I dig.”
“Things have a way of happening,” the man in the blue suit agreed. “Yes.”
“Do you have a photo in your wallet that’s distinctive?”
A pause. Then: “A picture of my mother taken in front of the Empire State Building. On
the back is written: ‘It was a wonderful day and a wonderful view. Love, Mom.’ ”
Delevan jotted furiously, then snapped his notebook closed. “Okay. That should do it.
Only other thing’ll be to have you write your signature if we get the wallet back and
compare it with the sigs on your driver’s license, credit cards, stuff like that. Okay?”
Roland nodded, although part of him understood that, although he could draw on Jack
Mort’s memories and knowl- edge of this world as much as he needed, he hadn’t a chance in
hell of duplicating Mort’s signature with Mort’s consciousness absent, as it was now.
“Tell us what happened.”
“I went in to buy shells for my brother. He has a .45 Winchester revolver. The man asked
me if I had a Permit to Carry. I said of course. He asked to see it.”
Pause.
“I took out my wallet. I showed him. Only when I turned my wallet around to do that
showing, he must have seen there were quite a few—” slight pause “—twenties in there. I am a tax accountant. I have a client named Dorfman who just won a small tax refund after
an extended—” pause “—litigation. The sum was only eight hundred dollars, but this man, Dorf- man, is—” pause “—the biggest prick we handle.” Pause. “Pardon my pun.”
O’Mearah ran the man’s last few words back through his head and suddenly got it. The
biggest prick we handle. Not bad. He laughed. Thoughts of robots and machines that
played tic-tac-toe went out of his mind. The guy was real enough, just upset and trying to
hide it by being cool.
“Anyway, Dorfman wanted cash. He insisted on cash.”
“You think Fat Johnny got a look at your client’s dough,”
Delevan said. He and O’Mearah got out of the blue-and-white.
“Is that what you call the man in the that shop?”