“Sure, if you’re a show-off.” She gave a giggle. “Lie low — learn to move behind things quick. There’s a bunch of trees over on the west side that nobody goes around much.”
“I’m just supposed to — kind of hang around?”
“You’re not supposed to do anything. Do whatever you want to do. Go back to Hollywood if you want.”
“No.” I was through with my big idea of a comeback. “Am I still in a holding pattern?”
“I think so.”
“I thought I blew everything back at the hotel.”
“I don’t know what you did at the hotel. You’re here now — make the best of it.” She slid off the tombstone. “And take care of those really great teeth.”
She gave me a smile and a wag of her fingers, then turned and walked away. I watched her start to kind of fade at the edges. Then she was gone. All there was left was me and the tombstones.
So here I sit, on top of my memorial — a somewhat unprepossessing character in a gamy overcoat and a stained hat, my bare teeth grinning all over the place, though I don’t feel like grinning. I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay in this holding pattern. That grey mist seems to be coming down.
I’d rather be working at Zack’s. There I’d have guys to talk to, customers to yell at on the phone, and gradually I could start building myself up.
But maybe that’s not true either. Maybe there isn’t any Zack’s. Maybe they all came out of my head, and maybe even the cemetery and my tombstone I’m sitting on doesn’t exist, or the funky clothes I’m wearing.
Maybe I wasn’t ever in my coffin.
Maybe what really happened is that I’ve been shot by Alfred Grout and I’m badly wounded, maybe dying, and all this crazy stuff has whirled through my head in just a few seconds. The mist has gotten heavier, everything around me is misty, but it’ll clear, and maybe out of it will come the face of a little nurse, smiling, and I’ll hear her murmur, “Well, so you decided to come back to us. You’re going to be all right now — you’re going to be fine.”
That’s what I’ll fix on. Because, in this town, if you want good things to happen you’ve got to expect that they will.
So when the mist clears I’ll find myself in a hospital bed with a pretty nurse smiling at me, telling me everything’s O.K., and it’s nothing but a superficial wound.
I hear something. I’ve heard it before.
A mournful howl. Like a sick, scraggly little dog.
I guess I really am in the cemetery. Where I’ll stay, as resident spook, until some way I get out of this holding pattern and move onto something else.
The mist is lifting. And there’s the dog, sitting looking up at me with its foolish, pathetic eyes.
“Hello, you miserable screwed-up little mutt.”
It sure looks hungry.
Maybe if I look around I can find something for it to eat.