denominations were included; they were all hundreds. She chose two
packets at random and counted them. Each contained one hundred bills.
Ten thousand in each.
By the time Bobby returned with mugs, spoons, cream, sugar, a pot of hot
coffee, all on a tray, Julie had concluded that it was the largest of
Frank’s three hauls to date.
“Three hundred K,” she said, as Bobby put the tray on the desk.
He whistled softly.
“What’s that bring the total to?”
“With this, we’ll be holding six hundred thousand for him
“Soon have to get a bigger office safe.”
HAL YAMATAKA put Frank’s other set of clothes on the coffee table.
“Something’s wrong with the zipper in the pants. I don’t mean just that
it doesn’t work, which it doesn’t. I mean, something’s very wrong with
it.”
Hal, Frank, and Julie pulled up chairs around the low glass topped
table, and drank strong black coffee while Bobby sat on the couch and
carefully inspected the garments. In addition to the oddities he had
noticed at the hospital, he discovered that most of the teeth in the
pants zipper were metal, as it should have been, while about forty
others, interspersed at random, appeared to be hard black rubber; in
fact, the slide jammed on a couple of the rubber ones.
Bobby stared in puzzlement at the anomalous zipper, slowly moving a
finger up and down one of the notched tracks,he was suddenly struck by
inspiration. He picked up one of the shoes Frank had been wearing and
examined the heel.
It looked perfectly normal, but in the heel of the second shoe thirty or
forty tiny, brass-bright bits of metal were embedded in the rubber,
flush with the surface of it.
“Anybody have a pen knife?” Bobby asked.
Hal withdrew one from his pocket.
Bobby used it to pry loose a couple of the shiny rectangles, which
appeared to have been set in the rubber when it was still molten. Zipper
teeth. They fell onto the glass table: tink… tink. At a glance he
estimated that the amount of rubber displaced by those teeth was equal
to what he had found in the zipper.
Sitting around IN the Dakotas’ Disney-embellished office, Frank Pollard
was overwhelmed by a weariness that was cartoonish in its extremity, the
degree of utter exhaustion sufficient to render Donald Duck so limp that
he might slip off a chair and pour onto the floor in a puddle of mallard
flesh and feathers. It had been seeping into him day by day, hour by
hour, since he had awakened in that alleyway last week; but now it
suddenly poured through him as if a dike had broken. This surging flood
of weariness had a density not of water but of liquid lead, and he felt
enormously heavy; he could lift a foot or move a limb only with effort,
and even keeping his head up was a strain on his neck. Virtually every
joint in his body ached dully, even his elbow and wrist and finger
joints, but especially his knees, hips, and shoulders. He felt
feverish, not acutely ill, but as if his strength had been steadily
sapped by a low-grade viral infection from which he had been suffering
his entire life. Weariness had not dulled his senses; on the contrary,
it abraded his nerve endings as surely as a fine-grade sandpaper might
have done. Loud sounds made him cringe, bright light made him squint in
pain, and he was exquisitely sensitive to heat and cold and the textures
of everything he touched.
His exhaustion seemed only in part a result of his inability to sleep
more than a couple of hours a night. If Hal Yamataka and the Dakotas
could be believed-and Frank saw no reason for them to lie to him-he
performed an incredible vanishing act several times during the night,
though upon returning to his bed and staying put there, he could recall
nothing of what he had done. Whatever the cause of those
disappearances, no matter where he had gone or how or why, the very act
of vanishing seemed likely to require an expenditure of energy surely as
walking or running or lifting heavy weights or any other physical act;