Cowboy offered the last ball to him. “Oh, that’s okay,” Jeremy said. “You go on.”
“Don’t be a woos,” Lizzie yelled.
With a sigh, he gave the waffle cones to Cowboy and took the ball.
The beginning of the end, he thought. I’m going to miss by a mile and they’ll know I’m a dip.
He wound up and fired the ball.
Right on target!
It struck the bull’s-eye and bounced off.
Lizzie’s perch didn’t collapse.
She cackled and clapped. “Tough luck, Duchess.”
Shit!
“You’ve gotta throw it a little harder than that,” Cowboy said, smiling and shaking his head. “Give it another try.” He took out his money.
“No, no. That’s okay. Some other time. I’m really wasted today. Been moving furniture, unpacking.”
“Cowboy!” Lizzie shouted through the bars.
“Yo!”
“Give Tanya a message for me?”
“You bet.”
“Tell her about Janet. I want to bring her along tonight. See if it’s okay, huh? Give me a call later and let me know.”
“You got it. Adios. Don’t get your tits wrinkled.”
She suddenly looked as if she burned to punch out his lights.
Half a dozen people nearby started laughing. Jeremy was too stunned to laugh.
“Let’s move out, Duke.”
They hurried away. Jeremy gave a cone back to Cowboy and followed him across the boardwalk. They passed through an open space in the railing and trotted down concrete stairs to the beach.
Four
“Somebody sure knows how to pick a banjo,” Dave said. The quick, cheery music was barely audible behind the carnival tunes of the rides, the voices and laughter all around him, the screams of people on the high-swinging Viking Ship, the poomphs of the Bazooka guns.
It seemed to come from somewhere ahead. Dave saw a circle of spectators in the distance, near the north end of the boardwalk.
“Let’s check it out,” he said.
“Beats interviewing trolls,” Joan said.
Since lunch, they had approached a total of seven indigents. None could be coaxed into admitting knowledge of a man named Enoch. Asked if anything strange had happened last night, one told of being beamed up into a hovering spacecraft from the planet Mogo, where a creature like a man-size lizard stuck a tube down his throat and sucked out the contents of his stomach—which the creature drank as it sucked. One said he’d been grabbed by a pair of albinos who tried to drag him under the boardwalk and feed him to their pet spider. A woman had been visited by the Blessed Virgin, who gave her a rough gray stone and said there was a diamond inside. While the woman told her story, she gnawed the rock as if it were a walnut she figured she could crack open with her teeth. One man ranted incoherently. Another simply glared at them and muttered about assassins. Only one seemed fairly rational, and he claimed to have spent a peaceful night sleeping in the dunes.
Joan had spent a lot of time sighing and rolling her eyes upward. She’d told Dave that it would be a waste of time, questioning the boardwalk’s panhandlers.
But it hadn’t been a total waste.
After speaking to a few of them, he was half-convinced that Enoch “biting the weenie” had no more basis in reality than the diamond in the rock, the albino attack, or the peculiar feast of the lizard alien.
He heard applause from the banjo-picker’s audience. Only a couple of people wandered away from the edges of the circle. Most stayed. Several passersby joined the crowd. A few people moved inward, apparently to contribute money in appreciation of the performance.
As Dave and Joan approached the group, the next number began. “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The melody twanged out, strong and lively, with such complex chords and runs in the background that Dave decided there must be at least two banjos. He was listening to a duet, or even a trio of street musicians, banging out a version of “Saints” so fine that those in the audience who’d been clapping along at the start went silent to listen.
Joan stayed at Dave’s side while he roamed the perimeter of the group, searching for a gap so he could watch the performance.
A couple of grubby bikers, seeing that they were cops, broke away from the circle and wandered off. Dave and Joan stepped into the opening.
Not a trio. Not a duet.
All that music was coming from the banjo of a lone girl who looked no older than eighteen.
She stood straight-backed as if at attention, her weight on one leg, her other leg forward, heel on the boardwalk, toe tapping as she