Like a sun porch, it was informally furnished. Just plastic tables and chairs, of the type people used outside. On a Friday like this, and when the dinner hour was in full swing, it filled up fast.
A family group or a gaggle of laughing and screaming students surrounded every other table. Only Rafiel sat alone.
She'd smiled at him when first serving him, and the rest of the time she'd avoided looking too closely at him, as she served the noisy groups around him. But now she was pouring a warm-up of coffee into his cup, and he said, "Come on, please? I need to talk to you."
She would believe him a lot more and talk to him with a far clearer conscience if she couldn't detect, as an undertone to his soap and aftershave smell, the lion's spicy-hot scent. She didn't trust herself around that smell. She behaved very stupidly around it. Instead, she made a big show of looking around, as if mentally counting people. "No way for the next hour or so," she said. "I have to keep refills and desserts and all coming. They allowed me to work because they were two people short. There's no way I can take a break."
To her surprise, he smiled. "Okay, then. I'll have the bowl of rice pudding. A la mode." He lowered his voice, "And then I want to talk to you. There's some very odd autopsy results."
* * *
Stealing the car wasn't hard. Tom walked along the darkened working class neighborhoods first, looking at all the old models of cars parked on the street.
It had to be an old model, because his way of starting a car without a key wouldn't work on the newer models. And in those streets, around Fairfax, with their tiny, decrepit brick houses, the cars spotted with primer on the front, there was a prospect on every corner. He could steal a dozen cars, if he wanted to.
Half a dozen times, he walked up to a sickly looking two-door sedan, a rusted and disreputable pickup and put his hand on the door handle, while he felt in his pocket for the stone he'd picked up from a flower bed near his apartment. The only other piece of equipment necessary to this operation was a screwdriver, which he'd bought from a corner convenience store.
He had everything. So, why didn't he just smash the window, break the ignition housing, start the car, and drive away? Most of these houses looked empty and people were probably still at work or already asleep.
But he'd put his hand on the handle, and reach for the rock, and remember how hard it was to make ends meet from his job at the Athens. How he had never been able to buy a car, but used to read the Sunday paper vehicles for sale ads with the relish of a kid looking through a candy-store window.
From those ads, he knew many of these cars would be a few hundred dollars, no more. But a few hundred dollars was all he had in his pocket, and it had emptied his account. And accumulating it had required endless small sacrifices, in what food he ate, in what clothes he wore. Hell, he didn't even shop the thrift stores at full price. It was always at half-price or dollar-day sales.
Oh, he wasn't complaining. He was lucky to have a job, given his past work history and his lack of training. Correction. He'd been lucky to have a job. Now it was over and he'd be lucky to ever have another. What were the owners of these cars employed at? What did they do?
Fuming, he turned away. Damn. This going-straight thing was like some sort of disease. You caught it, and then you had the hardest trouble getting rid of it. They probably didn't sell honesty-be-gone tablets at the local drugstore.
He walked down one of the cracked sidewalks that ran along the front of the pocket-sized lawns, kicking a stray piece of concrete here and there, to vent his anger. Damn. He couldn't walk out of the city on foot. And he wasn't at all sure he could start flying from inside the city. What if someone saw him? What if . . . they saw him?
He walked along as a thin rain started trickling down on him from the sky above. The rain felt . . . odd. He'd been living in Colorado for six months and this was the first time he'd seen rain. There was a feeling of strangeness, at first, and then, despite the warmth of the night, discomfort at water seeping everywhere and dripping from his hair onto the back of his neck, running down the back of his jacket.
He walked a long time on his still-tender feet and passed a roped-in car dealership. But it was the sort of car dealership you got in this kind of area—selling fifth-or sixth-hand cars. Of course, he thought, as he walked past, his hand idly touching the rope that marked off the lot, he could probably break into those cars far more easily than into any others. But . . . he stared at the wrecks and semi-wrecks under the moonlight. What were the chances that the owner of this lot was living so close to the bone that the theft of a car would really hurt him?