Read Online The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan - Free Book Online Page B

Al.”
    “You will,” he said as one of the attendants pulled up in the car. “Maybe tomorrow night. Look whose car came first,” he said, tilting his chin discreetly toward the attendant, who immediately looked very interested. Chinese people point with their chins. “Looks like you pay for the parking.”
    “You know, Al,” I said. “You should really attend more of those interracial sensitivity sessions.”
    “Can't,” he said. “I'm giving all my time to the homosexual empathy hours.” He opened the door of the sedan and slid heavily in. The car sagged with a certain mechanical irony. “By the way,” he called, “Roy Rogers is alive.”
    My first stop was Horace's, where I picked up Bravo. I'd called from UCLA and volunteered to get him out from underfoot, not saying what I really felt: that he was a living reminder of the twins. Eleanor, who'd answered the phone, hadn't said it either, but she'd been a little too bright about what a good idea it was.
    Horace opened the door, looking like someone who'd just bungee-jumped off the Eiffel Tower tied to a shoelace: hair on end, pouches of flesh beneath the eyes, a broken pencil dangling from his mouth like a dead yellow cigarette. One corner of his shirt collar poked a dimple in his left earlobe.
    “Oh, yeah,” he said by way of greeting. “Bravo's here somewhere.”
    “How are you?”
    “Awake,” he said. “Alive.”
    “Eleanor here?” Bravo bounded out and, seeing me, started to bark.
    “No, she's, I don't know. Shut up, Bravo.”
    “Pansy asleep?”
    “Not now,” Horace said sourly, looking down at Bravo.
    “I’ll get him out of here."
    “Good idea. I'll call you if anything happens.” Horace closed the door on Bravo's rear end, and I stood on the porch, rebuffed. With Bravo at my heels, I went down the stairs and got in the car, feeling walled out.
    Despite all the ups and downs Eleanor and I had endured, this was something new. We'd been friends briefly and then lovers for years, first in various student hovels around UCLA, and then in the awful little shack Eleanor found for us in Topanga Canyon, a tilting, rickety, three-room tribute to threepenny nails and wishful thinking, with nothing to recommend it except the best view in Southern California. I'd been accepted by Horace as a drinking partner almost at once. Mrs. Chan, who, after almost thirty years in the States, still considered all non-Chinese to be foreign devils, was a bit more difficult. It took months before she stopped calling Eleanor every forty-eight hours to harangue her about pure blood. Eventually she invited me home for the sole purpose of feeding me things she was sure no Westerner could eat. Over the course of ten or twelve dinners I swallowed steamed sea cucumber, the eyes and cheeks of fish, a veritable Fannie Farmer Assortment of entrails. I got it all down, nodded, smiled, asked for more. Most of it was delicious, although I have to admit the fish eyes later rolled uninvited into my dreams, goggled at me in threes, and waved at me with tiny white gloves.
    I completed my trial by fire one evening when Mrs. Chan uncovered a dish of brown, dense, grainless meat surrounded by some kind of fungus and proudly announced that it was dog. It was too much.
    “Does it have a name?” I'd asked Eleanor.
    “Spot,” Eleanor said, catching a smile from Horace. “Dick and Jane are out combing the streets for him now.” There were just the four of us at the table; Pansy was still living, undreamed-of, in Singapore. Husband Number Two had skillfully fled the scene after only seven months.
    Mrs. Chan said something to me in Chinese, gave me a thousand-watt smile, and cut off a great whacking piece. It made a slapping noise as it hit the plate.
    “I wonder whether it could do tricks,” I said, feeling my stomach shrink away to nothing and threaten to invert itself.
    “I have to say this very fast,” Horace said, looking at Eleanor but talking to me, “this is really