A certain recent parolee wakes up as Hodges and Holly are leaving their movie and Tina is falling in love with Barbara’s brother. Morris has slept all morning and part of the afternoon following a wakeful, fretful night, only dropping off as the first light of that Saturday morning began to creep into his room. His dreams have been worse than bad. In the one that woke him, he opened the trunk to find it full of black widow spiders, thousands of them, all entwined and gorged with poison and pulsing in the moonlight. They came streaming out, pouring over his hands and clittering up his arms.
Morris gasps and chokes his way back into the real world, hugging his chest so tightly he can barely breathe.
He swings his legs out of bed and sits there with his head down, the same way he sat on the toilet after McFarland exited the MAC men’s room the previous afternoon. It’s the not knowing that’s killing him, and that uncertainty cannot be laid to rest too soon.
Andy must have taken them, he thinks. Nothing else makes sense. And you better still have them, pal. God help you if you don’t.
He puts on a fresh pair of jeans and takes a crosstown bus over to the South Side, because he’s decided he wants at least one of his tools, after all. He’ll also take back the Tuff Totes. Because you had to think positive.
Charlie Roberson is once more seated in front of the Harley, now so torn down it hardly looks like a motorcycle at all. He doesn’t seem terribly pleased at this reappearance of the man who helped get him out of jail. ‘How’d it go last night? Did you do what you needed to do?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ Morris says, and offers a smile that feels too wide and loose to be convincing. ‘Four-oh.’
Roberson doesn’t smile back. ‘As long as five-o isn’t involved. You don’t look so great, Morrie.’
‘Well, you know. Things rarely get taken care of all at once. I’ve got a few more details to iron out.’
‘If you need the truck again—’
‘No, no. I left a couple of things in it, is all. Okay if I grab them?’
‘It’s nothing that’s going to come back on me later, is it?’
‘Absolutely not. Just a couple of bags.’
And the hatchet, but he neglects to mention that. He could buy a knife, but there’s something scary about a hatchet. Morris drops it into one of the Tuff Totes, tells Charlie so long, and heads back to the bus stop. The hatchet slides back and forth in the bag with each swing of his arms.
Don’t make me use it, he will tell Andy. I don’t want to hurt you.
But of course part of him does want to use it. Part of him does want to hurt his old pal. Because – notebooks aside – he’s owed a payback, and payback’s a bitch.
5
Lacemaker Lane and the walking mall of which it is a part is busy on this Saturday afternoon. There are hundreds of shops with cutie-poo names like Deb and Buckle, and Forever 21. There’s also one called Lids, which sells nothing but hats. Morris stops in there and buys a Groundhogs cap with an extra-long brim. A little closer to Andrew Halliday Rare Editions, he stops again and purchases a pair of shades at a Sunglasses Hut kiosk.
Just as he spots the sign of his old pal’s business establishment, with its scrolled gold leaf lettering, a dismaying thought occurs to him: what if Andy closes early on Saturday? All the other shops seem to be open, but some rare bookstores keep lazy hours, and wouldn’t that be just his luck?
But when he walks past, swinging the totes (clunk and bump goes the hatchet), secure behind his new shades, he sees the OPEN sign hanging in the door. He sees something else, as well: cameras peeking left and right along the sidewalk. There are probably more inside, too, but that’s okay; Morris has done decades of postgraduate work with thieves.
He idles up the street, looking in the window of a bakery and scanning the wares of a souvenir vendor’s cart (although Morris can’t imagine who’d want a souvenir of this dirty little lakefront city). He even pauses to watch a mime who juggles colored balls and then pretends to climb invisible stairs. Morris tosses a couple of quarters into the mime’s hat. For good luck, he tells himself. Pop music pours down from streetcorner loudspeakers. There’s a smell of chocolate in the air.
He walks back. He sees a couple of young men come out of Andy’s bookshop and head off down the sidewalk. This time Morris pauses to look in the display window, where three books are open on stands beneath pinspots: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, and – surely it’s an omen – The Runner Sees Action. The shop beyond the window is narrow and high-ceilinged. He sees no other customers, but he does see his old pal, the one and only Andy Halliday, sitting at the desk halfway down, reading a paperback.