I want you to get out of here. I don't like your looks.
He dialed 9231, and listened to the phone begin to ring back home in Fat City.
You look like bad luck waiting
'Hello?' The voice, expectant and a little breathless, was not Heidi's but Linda's. Lying on his bed in his wedge-shaped hotel room, Billy closed his eyes against the sudden sting of tears. He saw her as she had been on the night he had walked her up Lantern Drive and talked to her about the accident - her old shorts, her long coltish legs.
What are you going to say to her, Billy-boy? That you spent the day at the beach sweating out moisture, that lunch was two beers, and that in spite of a big supper which featured not one but two sirloin steaks, you lost three pounds today instead of the usual two?
'Hello?'
That you're bad luck waiting for a place to happen? That you're sorry you lied, but all parents do it?
'Hello, is anyone there? Is that you, Bobby?'
Eyes still closed, he said: 'It's Dad, Linda.'
'Daddy?'
'Honey, I can't talk,' he said. Because I'm almost crying. 'I'm still losing weight, but I think I've found Lemke's trail. Tell your mother that. I think I've found Lemke's trail, will you remember?'
'Daddy, please come home!' She was crying. Billy's hand whitened on the telephone. 'I miss you and I'm not going to let her send me away anymore.'
Dimly he could hear Heidi now: 'Lin? Is it Dad?'
'I love you, doll,' he said. 'And I love your mother.'
'Daddy -'
A confusion of small sounds. Then Heidi was on the phone. 'Billy? Billy, please stop this and come home to us.'
Billy gently hung the phone up and rolled over on the bed and put his face into his crossed arms.
He checked out of the South Portland Sheraton the next morning and headed north on US 1, the long coastal highway which begins in Fort Kent, Maine, and ends in Key West, Florida. Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor, the old man in the Seven Seas had said, but Billy took no chances. He stopped at every second or third gas station on the northbound side of the road; he stopped at general stores where old men sat out front in lawn chairs, chewing toothpicks or wooden matches. He showed his pictures to everyone who would look; he swapped two one-hundred-dollar traveler's checks for two-dollar bills and passed them out like a man promoting a radio show with dubious ratings. The four photographs he showed most frequently were the girl, Gina, with her clear olive skin and her dark, promising eyes; the converted Cadillac hearse; the VW microbus with the girl and the unicorn painted on the side; Taduz Lemke.
Like Lon Enders, people didn't want to handle that one, or even touch it.
But they were helpful, and Billy Halleck had no trouble at all following the Gypsies up the coast. It wasn't the out-of-state plates; there were lots of out-of-state plates to be seen in Maine during the summer. It was the way the cars and vans traveled together, almost bumper to bumper; the colorful pictures on the sides; the Gypsies themselves. Most of the people Billy talked to claimed that the women or children had stolen things, but all seemed vague on just what had been stolen, and no one, so far as Billy could ascertain, had called the cops because of these supposed thefts.
Mostly they remembered the old Gypsy with the rotting nose - if they had seen him, they remembered him most of all.
Sitting in the Seven Seas with Lon Enders, he had been three weeks behind the Gypsies. The owner of Bob's Speedy-Serv station wasn't able to remember the day he had filled up their cars and trucks and vans, one after another, only that 'they stunk like Injuns.' Billy thought that Bob smelled pretty ripe himself but decided that saying so might be rather imprudent. The college kid working at the Falmouth Beverage Barn across the road from the Speedy-Serv was able to peg the day exactly -it had been June 2, his birthday, and he had been unhappy about working. The day Billy spoke to them was June 20, and he was eighteen days behind. The Gypsies had tried to find a camping place a little farther north in the Brunswick area and had been moved along. On June 4 they had camped in Boothbay Harbor. Not on the seacoast itself, of course, but they had found