“I don’t like them.”
“Why not?”
“Because of that ugly pink packet they come in. And they make me drowsy. Flat. Boring.”
“And what are you like when you don’t take them, Bob?”
“Moody. Angry. Aggressive. Suicidal. And a lot more fun.”
“Take them, please.”
Bob tried to swallow the lump in his throat. That damn concern in her voice. It always hit him in a place where he had no defense against it.
“Bob?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Aren’t you going to ask me for my signature on the house?”
“No,” she said. “Not today.”
“Maybe you know I still visit there, the house I mean?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But maybe you don’t know the reason. I didn’t know myself. I thought I did it to spy on you and Stan the Man. But it’s because that’s where Frankie died. What I mean is…it was where she lived.”
Bob listened. Heard the tremor in her deep breathing.
“Just wanted to say that so you know,” he said and hung up.
—
I was headed toward Town Taxidermy when, turning the corner, I caught sight of him. He was sitting on the step outside the store, talking on the phone. I stopped at once and ducked back around the corner. Peered out. Doubted that he had seen me, he was concentrating so much on the call. Even if he had seen me, he wouldn’t have recognized me from such a distance. But my gaze was sharp, and he was easy to recognize in that special coat. A guy walking past the store gave him a second look, maybe someone else who’d seen that video on YouTube and thought he must be that cop in the orange coat, the guy who had made such a fool of himself on live TV.
He sat there talking into the phone, but that wasn’t just any old random place he happened to be, he was sitting there waiting for me, I told myself.
So what did I do then?
Phone booth.
I went back the way I had come. There were still a few of the old phone booths left in the smaller towns scattered around, but this one here had to be the last in all Minneapolis. It stood on the outer edge of the sidewalk and had scratched-up concertina doors that clapped together when you opened them, and a phone book for the sister cities. I fed in a few coins and dialed a cell number. The call I was making was to the taxidermist, Mike Lunde.
—
Bob continued to sit there studying her face on the screen after he had ended the connection. He missed the picture of her that used to come up when she called. How beautiful she was. And how beautiful he had been in the brightness of her aura. As he was on the point of calling Mike’s number the phone rang. And this time it really was Mike.
“Hello, Mike, some telepathy going on here.”
“Sorry?”
“I was just about to call you. Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Not well?”
“Tired, that’s all. I finished the Labrador this morning, finally got the eyes right. So I closed up and drove home to get some sleep. What’s this about?”
“I think I know where Tomás Gomez is hiding out.”
