the man said. “Could you describe that for me?”It’s coffee, she thought. From Sumatra. What more do you need to know?“Well, it’s a sort of medium roast,” she said. “And it has a good deal of body. I would say that it’s assertive without being overbearing.”He nodded encouragement. He had a high fo...
That was in a bar in Riverdale, within walking distance of the last stop on the Bronx-bound Number One train, and she knew that much because she knew she’d walked there. She was drinking a Cosmopolitan when their eyes met. He bought her the next Cosmo, and the next thing she’d been able to rememb...
Four men, each of whom could see her walking down the street, nudge a friend, and say, “You see that one? Nice, huh? Well, I had her once.”There’d been others, of course, who could have made that claim. You couldn’t say there’d been too many to count, but it was true that she could no longer coun...
Like that, no warmup, no transition, no ascent into consciousness out of a dream. She was just all at once awake, brain in gear, all of her senses operating but sight. Her eyes were closed, and she let them remain that way for a moment while she picked up what information her other senses could p...
Wade left about a half hour ago, sir. Or maybe a little more than that. Let me see, I came on at midnight, and then I had a cup of coffee at two-thirty, and then your wife left the hotel just as I was finishing my coffee. It must have been a quarter to three, I would guess.” It was just three-thi...
A Rust Belt city in east-central Ohio, immune to economic cycles because it had been in its own permanent recession ever since the end of the Second World War. A dingy SRO hotel, her drab room so small that the initials might as easily have stood for Standing Room Only as Single Room Occupancy.An...
Did you see Elvis yet?”“I was in a restaurant,” she said. “Just a diner, really. And there was an Elvis at one end of the counter and another one in a booth. Those were the only two I’ve seen and I saw them both at once.”“Elvis impersonators.”“Well, duh, yeah. I mean, if it was just one, I suppos...
The bus stopped at a convenience store with a pair of gas pumps out front. She got off, and the bus driver climbed down after her and retrieved her suitcase from the luggage compartment.“Bet you’re glad to be gettin’ home,” he said.He was a pleasant fellow, heartier than his passengers, and she s...
Slowly, carefully, Johnny opened his eyes. It was something he didn’t want to do too quickly. You didn’t rush a thing like that. A man could get hurt, opening his eyes too quickly. He got them open at last, blinked, saw Lieutenant Sam Haig, and did the only thing possible under such conditions. H...
the soldier said. He looked at his cards, shook his head. “What do you figure I had in mind? I pass.” The policeman, sitting to the dealer’s left---East to his South---nodded, closed his eyes, opened them, and announced: “One club.” “Pass,” said the doctor. The priest said...
Ours was the third listing, following a plea for information from the parents of a fourteen-year-old runaway. I read our ad three or four times and decided that it did its job efficiently enough. It hadn’t brought any response yet, but it was still early; Carolyn had awakened at dawn and gone for...
What did she know about Toledo? Like, Holy Toledo. The original city, in Spain, was famous for fine swords, and the newspaper here in Ohio called itself The Toledo Blade. That was a better name than the Mud Hens, which was what they called the baseball team.And here she was in Toledo.There was a ...
His shirt was white with a button-down collar. His glasses had oval lenses in brown tortoiseshell frames. His hair was a dark brown, short but not severely so, neatly combed, parted on the right. I saw him come in and watched him ask a question at the bar. Billie was working afternoons that week....
The following night I finished work at midnight. I had Sunday off, so Doug picked me up after work and we drove to Denver. He gave the Corvair back to the Hertz people. We caught a jet to Chicago, changed planes and flew on to Toronto. We spent Sunday renting apartments. He took a two-room place ...
she said, “but she was there with her husband, and he was kind of cute.”“You’ve got to tell me everything.”Well, not exactly everything. She gave Rita the Reader’s Digest version, abbreviated and toned down. Even so, with Rita’s questions and exclamations, she used up a chunk of the new cell phon...
I looked up when it announced her arrival, and then I took a second look, because she was worth it. She was stunning, in fact. She wore sky blue designer jeans and a clingy green silk blouse, and a writer of country songs would have told you her hair was the color of tupelo honey, but he might no...
She wanted to turn and see who was eyeing her, but remained as she was, trying to analyze just what it was she felt. She couldn’t pin it down physically, couldn’t detect a specific prickling of the nerves in the back of her neck. She simple knew she was being watched, and that the watcher was a m...
Polk was helpful, especially once he came to the conclusion that he was not going to know anything about what was going on until Leo Haig was ready to tell him.“He’s a genius,” I explained. “He was telling me just a few hours ago that there’s a very thin line between genius and insanity. You can ...
He was some sort of corporate executive, and she seemed to remember a wedding ring, so he’d be more likely to live in a suburb than within the city limits.A branch library had all the suburban phone books. No Graham Weider there, either. But there were two G Weiders, one in Lake Forest, the other...