Charles hurried. Beau, looking wildly up and down the street, rushed away, not recognizing Charles. He went totteringly, and the younger man stopped. Several things had become plain to him in that instant. Beau’s eye was cut and bleeding and his nose was bloody.
But he had not been looking for help. His face, in the arc light, had been tormented by fear; he had been furtive. The chance that the man he noted, in the shadows, but near enough to recognize him, would be somebody able to identify him did not even enter Beau’s head: most people he knew didn’t frequent The Block. Beau rushed on, lurching a little, toward Market Street, and Charles decided he had better not follow: Beau had probably been in a fight; the less said about which, the better.
When Charles reached the river he walked across the bridge slowly. But he was not thinking, this time, of his boyhood. He was thinking of a young woman whose father got in fights in River City hellholes. He was wondering if such a girl, after all, would make a mother for half a dozen kids like his nieces and nephews. Then he began wondering if their mother was any better for them than Lenore would be. Lenore, after all, was a realist. Even a Geigerman.
And not guiltily scared of any weapons—Russian, male, human or animal. A not-scarable girl.
He caught an Edgeplains bus, which meant he’d have to let himself out while a red light somewhere up toward Walnut Street stopped it. The company franchise didn’t allow conductors to drop passengers short of Windmere Parkway, except in rush hour—which showed, he thought, nodding into a half-sleep, that everybody was nuts.
He came over Walnut Street and saw a Jaguar parked in front of the Bailey house. He slowed to admire the red-leather upholstery, the complex controls panel. He wondered whose it was and saw the monogram: KLS.
Kit Sloan.
When Charles entered his house and his mother called, “You’re back pretty early!” he concealed an emptiness. “Yeah. Got in a bicker with Ruth about the world situation. Jim politely threw me out. Remind me to phone and make up in the morning.”
He started upstairs.
His mother, in the second-floor sitting room, spread a gingham dress on the sofa. “Poor Ruth! As if she didn’t have worries enough, with six kids and only thirty-two hundred!”