Saturday morning than on the tennis court or golf course. Besides, and he wiped his face again, it was good exercise. Harmon, over the past four years and at his wife’s insistence, had enrolled in three different exercise programs and had managed to attend a total of two classes altogether. He kept telling himself to get in shape, once his schedule permitted.
Just now he wished he could find Dillon or somebody. The day was too hot, the sun too unrelenting, for a comfortable stroll through this labyrinth of crumbled steel and shattered glass. He rocked back and forth on the hood of the Marquis, squinting against the glare.
“Yoo hoo! Mister Dillion! There’s trouble brewin’ on Front Street!”
Christ, enough of that! He was getting light-headed. That late-night pizza had been a mistake.
Harmon thought he saw movement farther down along the ravine. He started to call out in earnest, but decided that the general clatter and crash of the junkyard would smother his words. There was the intermittent mutter of the machine shop, and somewhere in the distance a tractor or towtruck, innocent of muffler, was dragging stripped hulks to their doom in the jaws of the yard’s crusher. Grunting, Harmon climbed down from the wreck and plodded toward where he thought he’d glimpsed someone.
The heat seemed worse as he trudged along the rutted pathway. The rows of twisted sheet metal effectively stifled whatever breeze there might have been, at the same time acting as grotesque radiators of the sun’s absorbed heat. Harmon wished he had worn a hat. He had always heard that a hat was a good thing to wear when out in the sun. He touched the spot on the top of his head where his sandy hair was inclining to thin. Unpleasant images of frying eggs came to him.
It smelled hot. The acres of rusted metal smelled like an unclean oven. There was the bitter smell of roasting vinyl, underscored by the musty stench of mildewed upholstery basted in stagnant rainwater. The palpable smell of hot metal vied with the noxious fumes of gasoline and oil and grease—the dried blood of uncounted steel corpses. Underlying it all was a sickly sweet odor that Harmon didn’t like to think about, because it reminded him of his smalltown childhood and walking home on summer days through the alley behind the butcher shop. He supposed they hosed these wrecks down or something, before putting them on the yard, but nonetheless...
Harmon’s gaze caught upon the sagging spiderweb of a windshield above a crumpled steering wheel. He shivered. Strange, to shiver when it was so hot. He seemed to feel his intestines wriggle like a nest of cold eels.
Harmon supposed he had better sit down for a moment.
He did.
“Morris?”
Harmon blinked. He must have dropped off.
“Hey, Morris—you OK?”
Where was he?
“Morris?” The voice was concerned and a hand was gently shaking him.
Harmon blinked again. He was sitting on a ruined front seat in the shade of an eviscerated Falcon van. He jerked upright with a guilty start, like a junior exec caught snoring during a senior staff meeting. Someone was standing over him, someone who knew his name.
“Morris?”
The voice became a face, and the face a person. Arnie Cranshaw. A client. Former client. Harmon decided to stop blinking and stand up. On the second try, he made it to his feet.
Cranshaw stared reproachfully. “Jesus! I thought maybe you were dead.”
“A little too much sun,” he explained. “Thought I’d better sit down in the shade for a minute or two. I’m OK. Just dozed off is all.”
“You sure?” Cranshaw wasn’t so certain. “Maybe you ought to sit back down.”
Harmon shook his head, feeling like a fool. ‘Til be fine once I get out of this heat. Christ, I’d kill for a cold beer right now!”
Not a well-chosen remark, he suddenly reflected. Cranshaw had been his client not quite a year ago in a nasty sort of thing: head-on collision that had left a teenaged girl dead and her date hopelessly crippled. Cranshaw, the other driver involved, had been quite drunk at the time and escaped injury; he also escaped punishment, thanks to Harmon’s legal talents. The other car had crossed the yellow line, no matter that its driver swore that he had lost control in trying to avoid Cranshaw, who had been swerving all over the road—and a technicality resulted in the DUI charges being thrown out as well. It was a victory that raised Harmon’s stock in the estimation of his colleagues, but it was