she'd seen. The bald midaet had wanted her to see. Had wanted both of them to see. The real question was how much significance she had attached to it.
How much do you really know, Lois? How many connections have you made? I have to wonder, because they're not really that hard to see.
I wonder... but I'm afraid to ask.
There was a low brick building about a quarter of a mile farther down the feeder road-WomanCare. A number of spotlights (new additions, he was quite sure) threw fans of illumination across its lawn, and Ralph could see two men walking back and forth at the end of grotesquely elongated shadows... rent-a-cops, he supposed.
Another new wrinkle; another straw flying in an evil wind.
He turned left (this time remembering the blinker, at least) and eased the Olds carefully up the chute which led into the multi-level hospital parking garage. At the top, an orange barrier-arm blocked the way. PLEASE STOP amp; TAKE TICKET, read the sign next to it. Ralph could recall a time when there used to be actual people in places like this, rendering them a little less eerie. Those were the dais, my friend, we thought they'd never end, he thought as he unrolled his window and took a ticket from the automated dispenser.
"Ralph?"
"Hmmm?" He was concentrating on avoiding the back bumpers of the cars slant-parked on both sides of the ascending aisles. He knew that the aisles were much too wide for the bumpers of those other cars to be an actual impediment to his progress-intellectually he knew it-but what his guts knew was something else. How Carolyn would bitch and moan about the way I'm driving, he thought with a certain distracted fondness.
"Do you know what we're doing here, or are we just winging it?"
"Just another minute-let me get this damned thing parked."
He passed several slots big enough for the Olds on the first level, but none with enough buffer-zone to make him feel comfortable.
On the third level he found three spaces side by side (together they were big enough to hold a Sherman tank comfortably) and babied the Olds into the one in the middle. He killed the motor and turned to face Lois. Other engines idled above and below them, their locations impossible to pinpoint because of the echo. Orange lightthat persistent, penetrating tone-glow now common to all such facilities as this, it seemed-lay upon their skins like thin toxic paint.
Lois looked back at him steadily. He could see traces of the tears she had cried for Rosalie in her puffy, swollen lids, but the eyes themselves were calm and sure. He was struck by how much she had changed just since that morning, when he had found her sitting slump-shouldered on a park bench and weeping. Lois, he thought, if your son and daughter-in-law could see you tonight, I think they might run away screaming at the top of their lungs. Not because you look scary, but because the woman they came to bulldoze into moving to Rivervie
Estates is gone.
"Well?" she asked with just a hint of a smile. "Are you going to talk to me or just look at me?"
Ralph, ordinarily a cautious sort of man, recklessly said the first thing to come into his head. "What I'd like to do, I think, is eat you like ice cream."
Her smile deepened enough to make dimples at the corners of her mouth. "Maybe later we'll see how much of an appetite for ice cream you really have, Ralph. For now, just tell me why you brought me here.
And don't tell me you don't know, because I think you do." Ralph closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again. "I guess we're here to find the other two bald guys. The ones I saw coming out of May Locher's. If anyone can explain what's going on, it'll be them."
"What makes you think you'll find them here?"
"I think they've got work to do... two men, jimmy V. and Bill's friend, dying side by side. I should have known what the bald doctors are-what they do-from the minute I saw the ambulance guys bring Mrs. Locher out strapped to a stretcher and with a sheet over her face.
I would have known, if I hadn't been so damned tired. The scissors should have been enough. Instead, it took me until this afternoon, and I only got it then because of something Mr. Polhurst's niece said."
"What was it?"
"That death was stupid. That if an obstetrician took