He felt the swaying bulk of the snubnose Colt as he rooted in his pockets for enough change to get a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes from a row of vending machines, then a tepid cup of cardboard-flavored coffee, which he knocked back in one. He checked his watch, but the hands had stopped; it had been more than a day before, and a long way back in Venice, when he’d last wound it.The smell of the restroom flung itself at him as he pushed through the door. The place looked like it had seen some very heavy use, and absolutely no cleaning, for at least the last couple of days. Make that weeks. Cubicle doors hung broken. Several of the toilets and the whole length of the urinal trough had overflowed. The floor was awash with translucent heaps of paper, toilet blocks, cigarette butts, newspapers, and yellow lakes of piss set with heaped islands of turds. Even though this was a mens’ restroom, there were even a few sodden and bloodied scraps of what looked like women’s sanitary pads. Pissing up against a wall outside would probably be more hygienic, but he picked his way across the drier spots toward the one toilet cubicle which gave an impression, misleading as it turned out, that it might be properly functioning.He wondered as he pissed into the near-overflowing bowl about all the people who came through a place like City Hall, and the business of life which got done here.
