American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,27

be right,” he says. “I apologize for missing this. What would you like me to do?”

The stock ticker comes to life again. It prints out:

FIND OUT WHO SHE IS

“I will,” says Bolan. “I promise I will. I’ll find out right away and let you know. Is that all you want me to do?”

The stock ticker does not answer. It is not dead, he knows, but dormant. Sometime, maybe soon, it will come to life again.

He tears off the tape, takes out a lighter, and sets it alight. Then he drops it on the floor and watches it wither into ash before stamping it out. The floor is black and ashen there. It has been for years. How many secret orders has he taken here? he thinks. How many cryptic little messages has he burned at this spot? Sometimes they are so simple: pick up a box there, mail it here; have someone put a line of paint on this window; threaten this man, and mention this woman; or, perhaps, go trawling through the sewers of Wink looking for a dark, tiny passageway that ends in a round chamber, and in this chamber will be a pile of many, many little skulls, and you must bring one skull to this person at this place, but you must be so, so careful not to touch it…

And now this. There is someone new in Wink, something that has not happened in years, and Bolan missed it.

He charges back down out of the hall and storms into his office. Mallory is at the liquor cabinet again, hair fixed and dress arranged as if nothing has happened: she is a creature used to abuse, both the giving and receiving of it.

“Bad news?” she asks.

“Go and get Dord,” Bolan snarls.

“Why?”

Bolan marches over to her, takes the glass out of her hand, and flings it against the wall. It shatters, leaving a dark stain spreading on the crimson wallpaper. “Go and get fucking Dord,” he says. “Or so help me God you will be drinking out of a fucking straw, you hear me?”

“Fine,” Mallory says mildly, and—with an intentionally slow, graceful pace—walks out the door and down the stairs.

Bolan stands in his office for a moment, fists clenched. Then he looks back down the hall at the stock ticker. He half expects it to move, printing out some other harrowing little request. But it does not, and thankfully remains silent. He shuts the closet door, locks it, and leans up against it as if there were something behind it fighting to get out. Then he lets out a breath.

The stock ticker was installed in his office not long after he made his agreement with the visitor from Wink. There was no explanation offered: the installation crew, all blank-faced little men in gray jumpsuits, just handed him an envelope with his name on it before walking into the Roadhouse and going to work. Inside was a card that read:

PAY ATTENTION.

And for the past three years it has ticked out orders for him now and again, and each time he obeyed his fortunes improved. Only once did he dare get curious: he examined the cord running to the ticker and followed it throughout the Roadhouse, through the walls and across the ceilings and down the stairs (and how did the installation men do that in an hour? Had they been, he wondered, secretly entering the Roadhouse during closed hours and laying yet more line?) until it went outside, snaking into the lot behind in a small tin pipe… where it finally ended in the woods, the end of the pipe unsealed and open. When Bolan found this, he stared at it. The pipe went nowhere? How could that be? But his confusion increased when he knelt and peered into the pipe, and saw the end of the fraying wire exposed, unconnected to anything at all.

The night after he followed the pipe into the woods, the stock ticker printed out a single command, and this time it was familiar:

PAY ATTENTION.

Now, whenever the ticker springs to life, Bolan’s heart almost stops. He does not know how it receives any signal, but, like so many things in his new endeavors, he does not really want to know.

But sometimes they send someone along to make sure he gets the message. And tonight, as Bolan waits for Dord to come lumbering up the stairs to explain why he missed the arrival of this new girl in the red car, he wonders again if they