“I’m staying out at the Shed,” Joe told him awkwardly. “My family’s known Major Holt a long time. I’m staying at his house behind the Shed.”
Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“Better get out there then,” said the Chief. “It’s midnight, and they might want to lock up. There’s your bus.”
A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed aboard the bus.
“We’ll turn up early,” said the Chief. “This won’t be a shift job. We’ll look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?”
“Right,” said Joe. “And thanks.”
“We’ll be there with our hair in braids,” said Mike, in his cracked voice. “Now a glass of beer and so to bed. ’Night.”
Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.
Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise of festivity.
There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe’s window. He started and looked out. Braun—battered, and bleeding from the corner of his mouth—motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe went.