"Is it my imagination or does this place look completely different than it did three hours ago?" T.S. asked out loud.
"Is it my imagination or do many of these people look like they ought to be in junior high school, not here?" Lilah answered.
She was right. The night had brought out New York's young runaways. They huddled in empty doorways, wan and unfed, their dark, bright eyes hungrily scrutinizing passers-by with a cynical knowledge far beyond their young years.
Lilah sighed and shook her head. "Thank God my daughters are at college."
The twenty-four-hour photo store was, apparently, a bustling center of cheap nightly entertainment. T.S. had to push through a crowd of twenty or more chattering teenagers to reach the front door. They stood clustered in front of the store's picture window watching a small, dark brown man tinker among the automatic photo-developing conveyor belts. The man straightened up wearily and stuck a screwdriver back into his rear pocket.
"Yo, man. It's fixed," someone in the crowd announced with satisfaction. "We gonna get us another peek now."
This crowd must really be bored, T.S. thought as he squeezed in the front door. Surely there were better things to do than watch bad photos of other people's birthday celebrations and vacations crawl by.
The optimistic voice in the crowd had been right. The machinery was fixed. The conveyor belt groaned slowly forward just as T.S. approached the front counter. The bored cashier was gone, replaced by a small Pakistani man who emerged from the elaborate developing contraption holding a wrench in one hand like a weapon.
"I pay much money for this franchise and equipment," he told T.S. "Damn thing breaks down every night. Holy shit."
"What a shame for the neighborhood," T.S. remarked drily as he handed over his receipt. "Looks like this is a real hotspot for cheap entertainment."
The proprietor shrugged philosophically. "Not always. But tonight, some pervert drop off whole roll of pictures of a poor dead woman. As old as my beloved mother. What someone want with such photos, I do not know. This is sick city. Sick city, indeed." He nodded toward the picture window. "The machine jammed in the middle of the order and the crowd that you see gathered. They love death, this bunch. Look at them. They salivate like animals at the kill."
T.S. froze. Outside, the crowd began pushing forward to get a better view. The strip of pictures affixed to the conveyor belt rounded a turn and approached the picture window once again. Eyes grew wide and the jokes began, boys nudging their girlfriends and grabbing the backs of their necks in hopes of eliciting squeals.
"Oh dear," T.S. murmured lightly, running a finger under his collar. It did no good. The flush began at the base of his neck and quickly spread across his face. He was humiliated. He was the pervert.
The proprietor had already discovered that fact. He stared at the number on T.S.'s receipt and raised his eyebrows in slow recognition. He surveyed T.S. from head to toe, then peered over his shoulder at the waiting limousine without comment. Then he inched away from T.S., making it plain that he preferred to stand by his conveyor belts rather than be in close proximity to such a clearly debauched human being. Crossing his arms primly, the proprietor took turns staring back and forth between T.S. and the crowd outside while he waited for the morbid photos to make their tortuous way through the labyrinth of belts. Some in the crowd got the proprietor's hint and began to eye T.S. with great interest.
T.S. carefully brushed dirt from his shoe, straightened his shirt collar and tried hard to imagine himself somewhere else. When that failed, he thought of the ways he might seek revenge against Auntie Lil for sending him on this mission. After a two-minute wait that seemed more like a two-year prison sentence, his pictures reached the end of their mechanical journey. As the strip of photos neared the automatic cutter, T.S. saw that his exposure settings and framing had, alas for his immediate reputation, been outstanding. The images of a dead Emily were crisp and relentless. At least fifty eyes stared at him intently as the proprietor made a great show of holding up each finished photo before ceremoniously placing it into the order bag.
Once the last damning photo had finally been plucked from the stares of the enraptured crowd, the proprietor marched across the room with the bag pinched between two