Stories: All-New Tales - By Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio Page 0,88

would go to a bar or restaurant, or walk in a shopping mall, or sit in a movie theater, simply to be among strangers. But most of the time his own company was company enough.

One rainy afternoon he picked a book from the shelf. It was The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton, and he’d read it through countless times and flipped through it many times more. He always seemed to find something worth thinking about between its covers.

God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling, he read. The line resonated with him, as it always did, and he decided the only change he could make would be to the final word of it. He preferred fishing to angling, fisherman to angler. Stephen Leacock, after all, had observed that angling was the name given to fishing by people who couldn’t fish.

On the first clear day, he made a grocery list and went to the mall. He pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next, picking up eggs and bacon and pasta and canned sauce, and he was weighing the merits of two brands of laundry detergent when he saw the woman.

He hadn’t been looking for her, hadn’t been looking for anyone. The only thing on his mind was detergent and fabric softener, and then he looked up and there she was.

She was beautiful, not young-pretty like the hitchhiker or slutty-available like Marni the barfly, but genuinely beautiful. She could have been an actress or a model, though he somehow knew she wasn’t.

Long dark hair, long legs, a figure that was at once athletic and womanly. An oval face, a strong nose, high cheekbones. But it wasn’t her beauty he found himself responding to, it was something else, some indefinable quality that suddenly rendered the Tide and the Downy, indeed all the contents of his shopping cart, entirely unimportant.

She was wearing slacks and an unbuttoned long-sleeved canvas shirt over a pale blue T-shirt, and there was nothing terribly provocative about her outfit, but it scarcely mattered what she wore. He saw that she had a long shopping list she consulted, and only a few items already in her cart. He had time, he decided, time enough to wheel his cart to the bank of cashiers and pay cash for his groceries. That was better than simply walking away from the cart. People tended to remember you when you did that.

He loaded the bags of groceries back into his cart, and on the way to his SUV he turned periodically for a look at the entrance. He stowed the bags in back, got behind the wheel, and found a good spot to wait for her.

He sat there patiently with the motor idling. He wasn’t paying attention to the time, was scarcely conscious of its passage, but felt he’d be comfortable waiting forever for the doors to slide open and the woman to emerge. The impatient man was not meant for fishing, and indeed waiting, patient passive waiting, was part of the pleasure of the pastime. If you got a bite every time your hook broke the water’s surface, if you hauled up one fish after another, why, where was the joy? Might as well drag a net. Hell, might as well toss a grenade into a trout stream and scoop up what floated to the surface.

Ah. There she was.

“I’M A FISHERMAN,” HE SAID.

These were not the first words he spoke to her. Those were, “Let me give you a hand.” He’d pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand, three C batteries in a hard rubber case, and he took her by the shoulder and swung her around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently.

In no time at all she was propped up in the passenger seat of his SUV, and her groceries were in her trunk and the lid slammed shut. She was out cold, and for a moment he thought he might have struck too hard a blow, but he checked and found she had a pulse. He used duct tape on her wrists and ankles and across her mouth, fastened her seat belt, and drove off with her.

And, as patiently as he’d