“Mid-World Lanes? Never heard of it. Where’s that? Queens?” “Mid-Town, I mean,” Jake thought. God, this was going north instead of south . . . and fast. “You know? On Thirty-third?” “Uh-huh. That’ll do fine.” The cop held out his hand. A black man with dreadlocks spilling over the shoulders of his canary-yellow suit glanced over. “Bussim, ossifer!” this apparition said cheerfully. “Bussiz lil whitebread ass! Do yo duty, now!”
“Shut up and get in the wind, Eli,” the cop said without looking around. Eli laughed, exposing several gold teeth, and moved along. “Why don’t you ask him for some ID?” Jake asked. “Because right now I’m asking you. Snap it up, son.” The cop either had his name or had sensed something wrong about him—which wasn’t so surprising, maybe, since he was the only white in the area who wasn’t obviously trolling. Either way, it came to the same: sitting down here to eat his lunch had been dumb. But his feet had hurt, and he’d been hungry, dammit—hungry.
You’re not going to stop me, Jake thought. / can’t let you stop me. There’s someone I’m supposed to meet this afternoon in Brooklyn . . . and I’m going to be there.
Instead of reaching for his wallet, he reached into his front pocket and brought out the key. He held it up to the policeman; the late-morning sunshine bounced little coins of reflected light onto the man’s cheeks and forehead. His eyes widened.
“Heyy!” he breathed. “What you got there, kid?”
He reached for it, and Jake pulled the key back a little. The reflected circles of light danced hypnotically on the cop’s face. “You don’t need to take it,” Jake said. “You can read my name without doing that, can’t you?” “Yes, sure.”
The curiosity had left the cop’s face. He looked only at the key. His gaze was wide and fixed, but not quite empty. Jake read both amazement and unexpected happiness in his look. That’s me, Jake thought, just spread-ing joy and goodwill wherever I go. The question is, what do I do now? A young woman (probably not u librarian, judging from the green silk hotpants and see-through blouse she was wearing) came wiggle-wob-bling up the sidewalk on a pair of purple f**k-me shoes with three-inch heels. She glanced first at the cop, then at Jake to see what the cop was looking at. When she got a good look, she stopped cold. One of her hands drifted up and touched her throat. A man bumped into her and told her to watch where the damn-hell she was going. The young woman who was probably not a librarian took no notice whatever. Now Jake saw that four or five other people had stopped as well. All were staring at the key. They were gathering as people sometimes will around a very good three-card-monte dealer plying his trade on a streetcorner. You’re doing a great job of being inconspicuous, he thought. Oh yeah. He glanced over the cop’s shoulder, and his eye caught a sign on the far side of the street. Denby’s Discount Drug, it said.
“My name’s Tom Denby,” he told the cop. “It says so right here on my discount bowling card—right?”
“Right, right,” the cop breathed. He had lost all interest in Jake; he was only interested in the key. The little coins of reflected light bounced and spun on his face.
“And you’re not looking for anybody named Tom Denby, are you?” “No,” the cop said. “Never heard of him.” Now there were at least half a dozen people gathered around the cop, all of them staring with silent wonder at the silver key in Jake’s hand. “So I can go, can’t I?”
“Huh? Oh! Oh, sure—go, for your father’s sake!” “Thanks,” Jake said, but for a moment he wasn’t sure how to go. He was hemmed in by a silent crowd of zombies, and more were joining it all the time. They were only coming to see what the deal was, he realized, but the ones who saw the key just stopped dead and stared.
He got to his feet and backed slowly up the wide bank steps, holding the key out in front of him like a lion-tamer with a chair. When he got to the wide concrete plaza at the top, he stuffed it back into his pants pockets, turned, and fled. He stopped just once on the far side of the plaza, and looked back. The small group of people around the place where he had been standing was coming slowly back to life. They looked around at each other with dazed expressions, then walked on. The cop glanced vacantly to his left, to his right, and then straight up at the sky, as if trying to remember how he had gotten here and what he had been meaning to do. Jake had seen enough. It was time to find a subway station and get his ass over to Brooklyn before anything else weird could happen.
AT QUARTER OF TWO that afternoon he walked slowly up the steps of the subway station and stood on the corner of Castle and Brooklyn Ave-nues, looking at the sandstone towers of Co-Op City. He waited for that feeling of sureness and direction—that feeling that was like being able to remember forward in time—to overtake him. It didn’t come. Nothing came. He was just a kid standing on a hot Brooklyn streetcorner with his short shadow lying at his feet like a tired pet. Well, I’m here . . , now what do I do?