the guard. And Myron stopped in the lobby and looked over his shoulder. The slim man was watching him through the glass double doors, and then with a shrug he slunk away.
“No running,” said the guard again, trying not to look at Myron’s face.
When Gloria turned up again, wearing a strand of pearls she had just won, Myron excitedly told her what had happened. The Rosicrucians were in Portland! Must be Portland, Oregon! All they needed to do was take their winnings and hop a bus!
But Gloria waved him off. “Myron, that fellow was obviously the ermine, and the ermine has never been trustworthy. The whole thing is a trap.”
“No, no, I tricked him into revealing the location,” Myron insisted.
“You didn’t trick him, he was trapping you.”
“So the Rosicrucians aren’t in Portland?”
“They’re probably in Portland. Myron, truth is more dangerous than lies at this point.”
“We can go scope the place out at least.”
But Gloria had invested all their savings in lottery tickets, which, it turns out, gave them a microscopic chance of being able to travel to the West Coast in a private jet and a very good chance of not being able to afford leaving Chicago at all.
“You said,” Myron objected, “that you don’t need money when you’re on the C. Why can’t you just talk your way onto a bus?” She’d more or less done it before, after all.
But Gloria wanted to wait for the lottery drawing. She said Myron didn’t know when he had a good thing. She insisted (against all evidence) that it was safer in Chicago.
“How can it be safer here?” Myron asked. The lion knows we’re here.”
If Gloria was thinking, Well, he knows you’re here, she was too smart to say it out loud. “I’ll tell you what. If one more person gets wise to us, we’ll leave.”
But she was no more careful than before, and two days later a Volkswagen Bug pulled up next to the two of them as they were trying to hustle a businessman at a bus stop. You should have seen Myron’s eyes light up when he saw who was driving.
I was, of course. And that’s when his adventures began.
IX. The Adventure Begins
And there was the body—mere flesh and blood, no more—but such flesh, and so much blood!
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
1.
It will be unnecessary for me to enumerate the tricks and schemes I went through to find Myron. I’d heard a few rumors about Mignon Emanuel’s plans, of course, but I’d heard them all too late. And then a friend of a friend of an acquaintance had a tip that led me to a back-alley unlicensed tattoo parlor in Hartford, where Angel Sanchez told me he had learned that Gloria and some “mutant kid” were looking for him. Gloria wasn’t answering my calls (I think she had actually lost her phone), and Alice, with her pickup truck and my forty-five, was three thousand miles away—so I borrowed the Bug from Angel “for a day or two” (which was a lie) and drove to Chicago. I didn’t find Myron right away, but I found him. It can be a small world, this animal world of ours.
The boy was practically giddy with excitement. We stopped by Gloria’s nest to grab Myron’s stuff. I noticed that the tape seal had been broken around one end of the doomsday device, but Myron claimed he’d never opened it all the way. I grabbed from the trunk two canvas bags and stashed the device in one, Myron’s compound bow in the other. Both ended up on the back seat. I also pulled out my typewriter, a jadeite green Hermes 2000 in a leatherette case. I have a job, naturally—I would never admit it to Myron, but I currently ghostwrite the best-selling Magic Pony Club books—but I was currently behind on more than one deadline, so I’d brought the typewriter to try to catch up on the road, and I stuck it in the back seat, partially in case I needed it and mostly to clutter up the back seat so it would look there was no room for Gloria to come along. Oh, I invited her for appearances’ sake, but the answer was never really in question. The adventure was beginning, why bother with the hindrances of the past? She gave Myron a sawbuck and a bit of advice (“Never play cards with an actuary”), also an awkward hug, and we were off. After several unpleasant potholes and a steam grate that was frankly blinding,