Father O’Brian back in Aubreyville about that and Father had told him that pets had no souls—when they died they just winked out like Fourth of July sparklers. It was true that the Shep had probably lost his balls not even six months after he was born, but ...
“But in a way that’s a blessing, too, ” Daniels murmured. He patted Ramon’s crotch, where the penis was now deflating even as the testicles began to swell. “Right, big boy?”
Ramon muttered deep in his throat. It was the sound of a man having a terrible dream.
Still, Daniels thought, what you got was what you got, and so you might as well be content with it. He might be lucky enough to be a German Shepherd in his next life, with nothing to do but chase Frisbees in the park and stick his head out the back window of the car on his way home to a nice big supper of Purina Dog Chow, but in this one he was a man, with a man’s problem.
At least he was a man, unlike his little buddy.
Continental Express. Ramon had seen her at the Continental Express ticket-window at ten-thirty or quarter to eleven, and she wouldn’t have waited long-she was too scared of him to wait for long, he’d bet his life on that. So he was looking for a bus that had left Portside between, say, eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon. Probably headed for a large city where she felt she could lose herself.
“But you can’t do that, ” Daniels said. He watched the Shep jump and snatch the Frisbee out of the air with its long white teeth. No, she couldn’t do that. She might think she could, but she was wrong. He would work it on weekends to start with, mostly using the phone. He would have to do it that way; there was a lot going on at the company store, a big bust coming down (his bust, if he was lucky.) But that was all right. He’d be ready to turn his full attention to Rose soon enough, and before long she was going to regret what she had done. Yes. She was going to regret it for the rest of her life, a period of time which might be short but which would be extremely ... well ...
“Extremely intense,” he said out loud, and yes—that was the right word. Exactly the right word.
He got up and walked briskly back toward the street and the police station on the other side, not wasting a second glance on the semiconscious young man sitting on the bench with his head down and his hands laced limply together in his crotch. In Detective Inspector 2/Gr Norman Daniels’s mind, Ramon had ceased to exist. Daniels was thinking about his wife, and all the things she had to learn. About all the things they had to talk about. And they would talk about them, just as soon as he tracked her down. All sorts of things—ships and sails and sealing wax, not to mention what should happen to wives who promised to love, honor, and obey, and then took a powder with their husbands’ bank cards in their purses. All those things.
They would talk about them up close.
9
She was making another bed, 9 but this time it was all right. It was a different bed, in a different room, in a different city. Best of all, this was a bed she had never slept in and never would.
A month had passed since she had left the house eight hundred miles east of here, and things were a lot better. Currently her worst problem was her back, and even that was getting better; she was sure of it. Right now the ache around her kidneys was strong and unpleasant, true enough, but this was her eighteenth room of the day, and when she’d begun at the Whitestone she had been close to fainting after a dozen rooms and unable to go on after fourteen-she’d had to ask Pam for help. Four weeks could make a hell of a difference in a person’s outlook, Rosie was discovering, especially if it was four weeks without any hard shots to the kidneys or the pit of the stomach.
Still, for now it was enough.
She went to the hall door, poked her head out, and looked in both directions. She saw nothing but a few room-service trays left over from breakfast, Pam’s trolley down by the