Eden, lush and filled with flowers. A winged angel stood before its closed gate, the sword in its hand glowing with terrible light.
“Don’t you dare think of it that way!” she cried suddenly, and the man sitting in the doorway recoiled so strongly that he almost dropped his sign. “Don’t you dare!”
“Jesus, I’m sorry!” the man with the sign said, and rolled his eyes. “Go on, if that’s the way you feel!”
“No, I ... it wasn’t you ... I was thinking about my—”
The absurdity of what she was doing—trying to explain herself to a beggar sitting in the doorway of the bus terminal—came home to her then. She was still holding two dollars in her hand, her change from the cabbie. She flung them into the cigar-box beside the young man with the sign and fled into the Portside terminal.
8
Another young man—this one with a tiny Errol Flynn moustache and a handsome, unreliable face—had set up a game she recognized from TV shows as three-card monte on top of his suitcase near the back of the terminal.
“Find the ace of spades?” he invited. “Find the ace of spades, lady?”
In her mind she saw a fist floating toward her. Saw a ring on the third finger, a ring with the words Service, Loyalty, and Community engraved on it.
“No thank you,” she said. “I never had a problem with that.”
His expression as she passed suggested he thought she had a few bats flying around loose in her belfry, but that was all right. He was not her problem. Neither was the man at the entrance who might or might not have AIDS, or the man with the bag of flesh hanging from his neck and the Mickey Mouse doll poking out of his duffel. Her problem was Rose Daniels—check that, Rosie McClendon-and that was her only problem.
She started down the center aisle, then stopped as she saw a trash barrel. A curt imperative—DON’T LITTER!—was stencilled across its round green belly. She opened her purse, took out the ATM card, gazed down at it for a moment, then pushed it through the flap on top of the barrel. She hated to let it go, but at the same time she was relieved to see the last of it. If she kept it, using it again might become a temptation she couldn’t resist ... and Norman wasn’t stupid. Brutal, yes. Stupid, no. If she gave him a way to trace her, he would. She would do well to keep that in mind.
She took in a deep breath, held it for a second or two, then let it out and headed for the ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES monitors clustered at the center of the building. She didn’t look back. If she had, she would have seen the young man with the Errol Flynn moustache already rummaging in the barrel, looking for whatever it was the ditzy lady in the sunglasses and bright red kerchief had eighty-sixed. To the young man it had looked like a credit card. Probably not, but you never knew stuff like that for sure unless you checked. And sometimes a person got lucky. Sometimes? Hell, often. They didn’t call it the Land of Opportunity for nothing.
9
The next large city to the west was only two hundred and fifty miles away, and that felt too close. She decided on an even bigger one, five hundred and fifty miles farther on. It was a lakeshore city, like this one, but in the next timezone. There was a Continental Express headed there in half an hour. She went to the bank of ticket windows and got into line. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest and her mouth was dry. Just before the person in front of her finished his transaction and moved away from the window, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and stifled a burp that burned coming up and tasted of her morning coffee.
You don’t dare use either version of your name here, she cautioned herself. If they want a name, you have to give another one.
“Help you, ma’am?” the clerk asked, looking at her over a pair of half-glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.
“Angela Flyte,” she said. It was the name of her best chum in junior high, and the last friend she had ever really made. At Aubreyville High School, Rosie had gone steady with the boy who had married her a week after her graduation, and they had formed a country of two