to kill the cancer while it's half-killing you. I'm surprised you didn't know, Ralph."
I suppose you are, but I'm not. The insomnia keeps swallowing stuff, you see. One day it's the last Cup-A-Soup envelope you lose track of,next day it's your sense of time,-the day after that it's your old
???? friends.
???? Faye shook his head. "Fucking cancer. It's spooky, how it waits."
???? Ralph nodded, now thinking of Carolyn. "What room's Jimmy in, do you
???? know? Maybe I'll go visit him."
????
"Just so happens I do. 315. Think you can remember it?" Ralph grinned. "For awhile, anyway."
"Go see him if you can, sure-they got him pretty doped up, but he still knows who comes in, and I bet he'd love to see you. Him and you had a lot of high old times together, he told me once."
"Well, you know," Ralph said. "Couple of guys on the road, that's all. If we flipped for the check in some diner, jimmy V. always called tails." Suddenly he felt like crying.
"Lousy, isn't it?" Faye said quietly. "Yes."
"Well, you go see him. He'll be glad, and you'll feel better. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. And don't you go and forget the damn chess tournament!" Faye finished, straightening up and making a heroic effort to look and sound cheerful. "If you step out now, you'll fuck up the seedings."
"I'll do my best."
lucky. Except anyone did, in the end.
"Yeah, I know you will." He made a fist and punched Ralph's upper arm lightly. "And thanks again for stopping me before I could do something I'd, you know, feel bad about later."
"Sure. Peacemaker Number One, that's me." Ralph started down the path which led to the Extension, then turned back. "You see that service road over there? The one that goes from General Aviation out to the street?" He pointed. A catering truck was currently driving away from the private terminal, its windshield reflecting bright darts of sunlight into their eyes. The truck stopped just short of the gate, breaking the electric-eye beam. The gate began to trundle open.
"Sure I do," Faye said.
"Last summer I saw Ed Deepneau using that road, which means he had a key-card to the gate. Any idea how he would have come by a thing like that?"
"You mean The Friends of Life guy? Lab scientist who did a little research in wife-beating last summer?"
Ralph nodded. "But it's the summer of '92 I'm talking about. He was driving an old brown Datsun."
Faye laughed. "I wouldn't know a Datsun from a Toyota from a Honda, Ralph-I stopped being able to tell cars apart around the time Chevrolet gave up the gullwing tailfins. But I can tell you who mostly uses that road: caterers, mechanics, pilots, crew, and flightcontrollers. Some passengers have key-cards, I think, if they fly private a lot. The only scientists over there are the ones who work at the air-testing station. Is that the kind of scientist he is?"
"Nope, a chemist. He worked at Hawking Labs until just a little while ago."
"Played with the white rats, did he? Well there aren't any rats over at the airport-that I know of, anyway-but now that I think of it, there is one other bunch of people who use that gate."
"Oh? Who?"
Faye pointed at a prefab building with a corrugated-tin roof standing about seventy yards from the General Aviation terminal. "See that building? That's SoloTech."
"What's SoloTech?"
"A school," Faye said. "They teach people to fly."
Ralph walked back down Harris Avenue With his big hands stuffed into his pockets and his head lowered so he did not see much more than the cracks in the sidewalk passing beneath his sneakers. His mind was fixed on Ed Deepneau again... and on SoloTech. He had no way of knowing if SoloTech was the reason Ed had been out at the airport on the day he had run into Mr. West Side Gardeners, but all of a sudden that was a question to which Ralph very much wanted an answer. He was also curious as to just where Ed was living these days. He wondered if John Leydecker might share his curiosity on these two points, and decided to find out.
He was passing the unpretentious double storefront which housed George Lyford, C.P.A on one side and Maritime jewelry (WE BUY YOUR OLD GOLD AT TOP PRICES on the other, when he was pulled out of his thoughts by a short, strangled bark. He looked up and saw Rosalie sitting on the sidewalk just outside the upper entrance to