providential old aunt in the Texas Panhandle or the mountains of Tennessee. She looks at the doors to the street, perhaps thinking of leaving, of finding a room for the night, a door to put between her and the whole wide confusing indifferent dangerous world—she has money enough for a room, thanks to his ATM card—but does she do it?
Norman stopped by the foot of the escalator, frowning, changing the shape of the question: Do I do it?
No, he decided, I don’t. I don’t want to check into a motel at three-thirty and be kicked out at noon, for one thing; it’s bad value for my money. I can stay up a little longer, run on my nerves a little longer, if I have to. But there’s something else keeping me here, as well: I’m in a strange city, and dawn is still at least two hours away. I’ve seen a lot of TV crime-shows, I’ve read a lot of paperback mysteries, and I’m married to a cop. I know what can happen to a woman who goes out into the darkness by herself, and I think I’ll wait for sunrise.
So what do I do? How do I pass the time?
His stomach answered the question for him, rumbling.
Yes, I have something to eat. The last rest-stop was at six in the evening, and I’m pretty hungry.
There was a cafeteria not far from the ticket-windows and Norman went that way, stepping over the bag-bums and restraining the urge to kick a few ugly, lice-ridden heads into the nearest steel chair-leg. This was an urge he had to restrain more and more often these days. He hated homeless people; thought of them as dog turds with legs. He hated their whining excuses and their inept pretenses at insanity. When one who was only semi-comatose stumbled over to him and asked if he had any spare change, Norman was barely able to resist an impulse to grab the bum’s arm and heat him up with an old-fashioned Indian Burn. Instead he said, “Leave me alone, please,” in a soft voice, because that’s what she would have said and how she would have said it.
He started to grab bacon and scrambled eggs from the steam-table, then remembered she didn’t eat that stuff unless he insisted, which he sometimes did (what she ate wasn’t important to him, but her not forgetting who was boss of the shooting match was important, very important). He ordered cold cereal instead, along with a foul cup of coffee and half a grapefruit that looked as if it might have come over on the Mayflower. The food made him feel better, more awake. When he was done he grabbed automatically for a cigarette, briefly touched the pack in his shirt pocket, then let his hand drop away. Rose didn’t smoke, therefore Rose wouldn’t be subject to the craving he now felt. After a moment or two of meditation on this subject, the craving retreated, as he had known it would.
The first thing he saw as he came out of the cafeteria and stood there, tucking in the back of his shirt with the hand that wasn’t holding his wallet, was a large lighted blue-and-white circle with the words TRAVELERS AID printed on the outer stripe.
Inside Norman’s head, a bright light suddenly went on.
Do I go there? Do I go to the booth under that big, comforting sign? Do I see if there’s anything there for me?
Of course I do—where else?
He walked over there, but on a slant, first sliding past the booth and then hooking back toward it again, getting a good look at the booth’s occupant from both sides. He was a pencil-necked Jewboy who looked about fifty and about as dangerous as Bambi’s friend Thumper. He was reading a newspaper Norman recognized as Pravda, and every now and then he would raise his head from it and shoot a meaningless, random glance out into the terminal. If Norman had still been doing Rose, Thumper would undoubtedly have spotted him, but Norman was doing Norman again, Detective Inspector Daniels on stakeout, and that meant he blended into the scene. Mostly he kept moving back and forth in a gentle arc behind the booth (keeping in motion was the important part; in places like this you didn’t run much risk of being noticed unless you stood still), staying out of Thumper’s view but within earshot of Thumper’s conversations.
Around a quarter past four, a crying woman came up to the Travelers