Dick McCue found the cheese wafers were ashes in his mouth. He chewed mechanically and wondered how he had managed to get simultaneously on all these s.o.b. lists when all he wanted was a little innocent fun for free—
He glanced at Sharon sullenly and saw she was chatting animatedly with Chesbro about a publicity campaign enlisting all media, the possibility of newspaper and magazine space and radio-TV time being donated if they played their cards right. "Tear their heartstrings out," she urged. "Get editorials; I've got some contacts in New York. You'd be The Man Who Saved the Valley, Mr. Chesbro."
"Call me Arthur," he said. "We're going to be working closely together; I can see that. My prestige and your ideas—"
Polly Chesbro came upstairs in her suit and raincoat; they were wrinkled and damply steaming out the smell of wool but they were no longer sopping. She was carrying her blanket; she draped it over the sighing form of the burgess. His breathing was almost a crow. "He'll never make it without penicillin fast," she commented, helped herself to a box of the wafers and began to eat methodically.
Mickey Groff looked around; nobody was making a move for the stairs. He stepped over the body of Sam Zehedi and went down. First outside into the drizzle, where water was ankle-deep. He attended to his needs and went back into the store. A bottle of pop caught his eye and he was suddenly burning with thirst. He tore off the cap on a wall opener and gulped it down as fast as the stuff would gurgle from the narrow neck; after a queasy moment he ran for the door and made it in time. The pop gushed up again violently. He sat down, swaying, on the wooden step up to the door and retched a couple of times experimentally. He'd have to be careful eating and drinking for a while. He had got a stiff dose of the fumes.
Zehedi's blue-green, well-worn panel truck was just visible down the road in water to the hubcaps, looking bulky and competent. The goddam thing. And there stood the two gas pumps, goddam them too, and if you could only get the pumps to work you could pump gas from their underground tank into the truck and away they'd buzz, getting somehow into town where the old man could be pumped full of penicillin and dosed with oxygen as needed instead of dying like a sick dog in this kennel.
He went wearily upstairs and said, "Next."
Sharon got up and said, "Excuse me, Arthur."
"Keep out of the cash drawer," Mrs. Goudeket said sourly.
"Did you leave anything?" Sharon asked, wide-eyed. Arthur Chesbro laughed a laugh which turned hastily into a cough when Mrs. Goudeket glared his way.