Billingsley nodded at the bar. “That come from the old Circle Ranch. Part of the Clayton Loving auction, it was Buzz Hansen n me teamed together and knocked it down for seventeen bucks. Can you b’lieve it.”
“Frankly, no,” Johnny said, trying to imagine what an item like this might go for in one of those precious little shops down in SoHo. He opened the double doors and saw the bar was fully stocked. Good stuff, too. Not primo but good. He closed the doors again in a hurry. The bottles inside called to him in a way the bottle of Beam he’d taken out of the Owl’s had not.
Ralph Carver sat down in a wing-chair and looked out over the empty seats with the dazed hopefulness of a man who dares to think he may be dreaming after all. David went over to the television. “Do you get anything on this-oh, I see.” He had spotted the VCR underneath. He squatted down to look at the cassettes stacked on top of it “Son-” Billingsley began, then gave up.
David shuffled through the boxes quickly-Sex-Starved Co-eds, Dirty Debutantes, Cockpit Honeys, Part 3-and then put them back. “You guys watch these.”
Billingsley shrugged. He looked both tired and embar rassed. “We’re too old to rodeo, son. Someday maybe you’ll understand.”
“Hey, it’s your business,” David said, standing up. ‘I was just asking.”
“Steve, look at this,” Cynthia said. She stepped back raised her arms over her head, crossed them at the wrists and wiggled them. A huge dark shape flapped lazily on the screen, which was dingy with several decades’ worth of accumulated dust. “A crow. Not bad, huh.”
He grinned, stepped next to her, and placed his hands together out in front of him with one finger jutting down.
“An elephant!” Cynthia laughed. “Too cool!”
David laughed with her. It was an easy sound, cheerful and free. His father turned his head toward it and smiled himself.
“Not bad for a kid from Lubbock!” Cynthia said.
“Better watch that, unless you want me to start in calling you cookie again.”
She stuck her tongue out, eyes closed, fingers twiddling in her ears, reminding Johnny so strongly of Terry that he laughed out loud. The sound startled, almost frightened him. He supposed that, somewhere between Entragian and sundown, he had pretty much decided that he would never laugh again… not at the funny stuff, anyway.
Mary Jackson, who had been walking around the onstage living room and looking at everything, now glanced up at Steve’s elephant. “I can make the New York City skyline,”
she announced.
“My ass!” Cynthia said, although she looked intrigued by the concept.
“Let’s see!” David said. He was looking up at the screen as expectantly as a kid waiting for the start of the newest Ace Ventura movie.
“Okay,” Mary said, and raised her hands with the fin-gers pointing up. “Now, let’s see…
give me a second.
I learned this in summer camp, and that was a long time ago—“What the fuck are you people doing.” The strident voice startled Johnny badly, and he wasn’t the only one. Mary gave a little scream. The city skyline which had begun to form on the old movie screen went out of focus and disappeared.
Audrey Wyler was standing halfway between the stage—left entrance and the living-room grouping, her face pale, her eyes wide and hot. Her shadow loomed on the screen behind her, making its own image, all unknown to its cre-ator: Batman’s cloak.
“You guys’re as insane as he is, you must be. He’s out there somewhere, looking for us.
Right now. Don’t you remember the car you heard, Steve. That was him, coming back!
But you stand here… with the lights on… playing party-games!”
“The lights wouldn’t show from the outside even if we had all of them on,” Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense.
as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he’d seen her some—where before. Possibly in Dirty Debutantes. “It’s a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light proof. That’s what we liked about it, my gang.”
“But he’ll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he’ll find us.
When you’re in Despera tion, there aren’t that many places to hide.”
“Let him,” Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger.44. “He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he’s like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him.”
Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes.
She glanced at Mary found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Bill ingsley again.
“He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more.”
“Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies’-room window,” Billingsley said. “I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the windowledge inside. If he opens the window, it’ll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We’ll hear him, ma’am, and when he walks out here we’ll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use im for sinkers He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandi osity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marinville s umble opinion, pretty fooking spectacular.
She continued to look at Billingsley as if she had never seen a bigger fool. “Ever heard of keys, oldtimer. The cops have keys to all the businesses in these little towns “To the open ones, that’s so,” Billingsley replied qui etly. “But The American West hasn’t been open for a long time. The doors ain’t just locked, they’re boarded shut The kids used the fire escape to get in up front, but that ended last March, when it fell down.
Nope, I reckon we’re as safe here as anywhere.”
“Probably safer than out on the street,” Johnny said.
Audrey turned to him, hands on her hips. “Well, what do you intend to do. Stay here and amuse yourselves by making shadow-animals on the goddam movie screen.”
“Take it easy,” Steve said.
“You take it easy!” she almost snarled. “I want to get out of here!”
“We all do, but this isn’t the time,” Johnny said. He looked around at the others. “Does anyone disagree.”
“It’d be insanity to go out there in the dark,” Mary said. “The wind’s got to be blowing fifty miles an hour, and with the sand flying the way it is, he’d be apt to pick us off one by one.”
“What do you think’s going to change tomorrow, when the storm ends and the sun comes out.” Audrey asked. It was Johnny she was asking, not Mary.
“I think that friend Entragian may be dead by the time the storm ends,” he said. “If he’s not already.”
Ralph looked over and nodded. David hunkered by the TV, hands loosely clasped between his knees, looking at Johnny with deep concentration.
“Why.” Audrey asked. “How.”
“You haven’t seen him.” Mary asked her.
“Of course I have. Just not today. Today I only heard him driving around… walking around… and talking to himself. I haven’t actually seen him since yesterday.”
“Is there anything radioactive around here, ma’am.” Ralph asked Audrey. “Was it ever, like, some sort of dumping ground for nuclear waste, or maybe old weap-ons. Missile warheads, or something. Because the cop looked like he was falling apart.”
“I don’t think it was radiation sickness,” Mary said. “I’ve seen pictures of that, and-”
“Whoa,” Johnny said, raising his hands. “I want to make a suggestion. I think we should sit down and talk this out. Okay. It’ll pass the time, if nothing else, and an idea of what we should do next may come Out of it.” He looked at Audrey, gave her his most winning smile, and was delighted to see her relax a little, if not exactly melt. Maybe not all of the old charm had departed after all. “At the very least, it will be more constructive than making shadows on the movie screen.”