he supposed he had really hurt the little spick, Ramon Sanders. The idea that it mattered if a queerboy like Ramon got hurt a little was ridiculous, of course—Saint Anthony he was not—but you had to abide by the rules of the game ... or at least not be caught breaking them. It was like not saying out loud that niggers didn’t understand the concept of work, although everybody (everybody white, at least) knew it.
But he was not being canned. He was moving, that was all. Moving from this shitty little cubicle which had been home since the first year of the Bush Presidency. Moving into a real office, where the walls went all the way up to the ceiling and came all the way down to the floor. Not canned; promoted. It made him think of a Chuck Berry song, one that went C’est la vie, it goes to show you never can tell.
The bust had happened, the big one, and things couldn’t have gone better for him if he’d written the script himself. An almost unbelievable transmutation had taken place: his ass had turned to gold, at least around here.
It had been a city-wide crack ring, the sort of combine you never get whole and complete ... except this time he had. Everything had fallen into place; it had been like rolling a dozen straight sevens at a crap-table in Atlantic City and doubling your money every time. His team had ended up arresting over twenty people, half a dozen of them really big bugs, and the busts were righteous—not so much as a whiff of entrapment. The D.A. was probably reaching heights of orgasm unmatched since cornholing his cocker spaniel back in junior high school. Norman, who had once believed he might end up being prosecuted by that geeky little fuck if he couldn’t manage to put a checkrein on his temper, had become the D.A.’s fair-haired boy. Chuck Berry had been right: you never could tell.
“The Coolerator was jammed with TV dinners and ginger ale, ” Norman sang, and smiled. It was a cheerful smile, one that made most people want to smile back at him, but it would have chilled Rosie’s skin and made her frantically wish to be invisible. She thought of it as Norman’s biting smile.
A very good spring on top, a very good spring indeed, but underneath it had been a very bad spring. A totally shitty spring, to be exact, and Rose was the reason why. He had expected to settle her hash long before now, but he hadn’t. Somehow Rose was still out there. Still out there somewhere.
He had gone to Portside on the very same day he had interrogated his good friend Ramon in the park across from the station. He had gone with a picture of Rose, but it hadn’t been much help. When he mentioned the sunglasses and the bright red scarf (valuable details he had found in the transcripts of Ramon Sanders’ original interrogation), one of Continental’s two daytime ticket-sellers had hollered Bingo. The only problem was that the ticket-seller couldn’t remember what her destination had been, and there was no way to check the records, because there were no records. She had paid cash for her ticket and checked no baggage.
Continental’s schedule had offered three possibilities, but Norman thought the third—a bus which had departed on the southern route at 1:45 p.m.—was unlikely. She wouldn’t have wanted to hang around that long. That left two other choices: a city two hundred and fifty miles away and another, larger city in the heart of the midwest.
He had then made what he was slowly coming to believe had been a mistake, one which had cost him at least two weeks: he had assumed that she wouldn’t want to go too far from home, from the area where she’d grown up—not a scared little mouse like her. But now—
Norman’s palms were covered with a faint lacework of semicircular white scars. They had been made by his fingernails, but their real source was deep inside his head, an oven which had been running at broil for most of his life.
“You better be scared,” he murmured. “And if you’re not now, I guarantee you will be soon. ”
Yes. He had to have her. Without Rose, everything that had happened this spring—the glamour bust, the good press, the reporters who had stunned him by asking respectful questions for a change, even the promotion—meant nothing. The women he had slept with since