Read Online On the Nickel by John Shannon - Free Book Online

Lewis that she held up, and she was getting a bit crestfallen about her own delusions of being a detective. It was a city of way too many millions of people – ten million or more, if you counted out to the far boundaries of habitation. What did one person matter in all that? Who could care about one sad story in that immensity of sorrow?
    In shop windows she saw dozens of homemade missing person signs and thought of making one for Conor and Xeroxing up several hundred copies, but nobody seemed to be looking at the other sad pleas, either. The signs seemed about as effective as the lost-cat posters on telephone poles, or the famous milk carton photos.
    Maybe the new version of these was the ubiquitous sign she had started seeing at every Freeway offramp. Lose your accent. Speak English like a native. She wondered who on earth those were meant for. Would-be actors? Or just Mexican laborers tired of being treated like shit?
    A bare-chested man with big rings in his nipples strode toward her, muttering something that sounded like the blood of the lamb. Just as he reached her, his head snapped around to glare, and she smiled as unthreateningly as possible. ‘I do fear you,’ he challenged. ‘It was all slick before you came.’ And he hurried on.
    An old black woman in a flowery print dress had her back to the traffic, apparently staring in the window of a T-shirt shop that specialized in Draculas and rock stars. At first Maeve was about to approach her, and then she noticed that the bulky woman was ranting softly into her fist as if it were a microphone. ‘And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.’
    Maeve gave her a wide berth and was just about ready to give up the search on Hollywood Boulevard for the evening when she felt a tug on a fold of her shirt. It was a little girl who couldn’t have been much more than nine, skinny and dirty looking, barefoot, her thin dress ragged. In her free hand she dangled a naked pink plastic doll that dragged one foot on the sidewalk.
    ‘Hi, honey. Can I help you?’
    ‘Millie needs to eat.’
    ‘Are you Millie?’
    ‘Huh-uh.’ She picked up the doll, utterly without a hint of affection for it, as if it were something she had just found in the gutter.
    ‘Hello, Millie,’ Maeve said to the doll. ‘Is your mommy hungry, too?’
    ‘Don’t be a pill, girl. There’s a place to eat right over there.’ She pointed across the street to a shabby-looking diner, narrow as a shotgun shack, which was named Old-Time Movies Cafe. It was at the corner and on the side street just off Hollywood Boulevard the brick was painted with big portraits of W.C. Fields, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and John Wayne. Somebody, undoubtedly after the original artist, had painted a cartoon talk balloon out of John Wayne’s sneer. It said: ‘So I walk funny. What’s it to you, Pilgrim?’
    ‘OK. Who else is eating tonight?’ Maeve had a credit card that would cover it.
    The girl glared at her for a moment as if Maeve had just taken something away from her. ‘My mommy. That better be OK or I scream.’
    The belligerence was breathtaking, and even sadder than the hunger. ‘Of course it’s OK, honey. Go get your mother. We can all eat whatever we want.’
    A woman appeared almost immediately out of a dark alcove, looking like a stretched version of the little girl, barefoot, ragged and skinny, with stringy blond hair.
    ‘Hi,’ Maeve said cheerfully, offering her hand. ‘I’m Maeve.’
    ‘Hi, Maeve. My name is Felice. We’re from San Antonio and we’re lookin’ for my old man name Clarence. You know him?’
    Maeve suppressed a laugh and shook her head. The woman showed her a tattered photo of a cocky-looking, lanky man in a Stetson. It was becoming a whole town of photo-displayers, Maeve thought. It was like after the Twin Towers, with everybody posting photos on a