Ladies' Night Read Free Page A

wrecking crew. At this rate it would be hours before they could pry the tank away. In the meantime it would probably be a good idea to talk with the boys in the lab. Find out what this stuff was. Check the plates on the tanker. A company registration, maybe, for LADIES, INC. Punch it up on the computer.
    "Listen," he said to McCann, "if anything breaks you call me, okay?"
    "Sure."
    "Especially on that route-sheet."
    "Will do."
    Lederer crossed the street, headed back to his car. It was 2:30 in the afternoon and the day was hot — hot and humid even with the breeze, ennervating — and he suddenly had the feeling there was going to be a whole lot of work to do before his shift was over.
    Halfway down Columbus it hit him.
    The smell.
    It was weaker here, weak enough so that he could finally get a handle on it — something specific and not just a too-sweet reek. It made no sense. But what it reminded him of filled him with a kind of strange elation.
    Cherry , he thought.
    Cherry lollipops, to be more exact. That good bright artificial smell he remembered liking so much as a kid, wafting along on a westerly breeze. Cherry-flavored lollipops.
    His favorite kind.

Breezing the Apple

    The winds were island winds swirling off the Hudson.
    At Riverside Park a small black boy climbed out of the trees and chased his baseball cap through the gutter as it tumbled away. At Lincoln Center in front of Avery Fisher Hall a fashion model returning home from another round of go-sees stepped into a tiny whirlwind of swirling city debris and felt a speck of grit lodge itself beneath her green-tinted contact lens. In mid-town a stack of the New York Times tugged at its paperweight, inching it off-center.
    The winds coursed through the wide city streets, swept upwards in a sudden rush against skyscrapers and high-rises to disperse slowly into the calmer air above. By far the winds blew strongest west to southeast — the cool ocean breeze out of the east stopped them dead, forcing steel-and-concrete superheated air up to the cloudless sky like an uppercut to the chin of a boxer. Random currents reached eastward into the 80s and slid south down through the Village and Soho , though much diffused in power.
    But mostly they poured through the open mouth of the west of Manhattan, down Riverside, down Columbus and Amsterdam, down Broadway, until other currents scattered them, eviscerating their inland thrust.
    North as far as West 86th Street, south as far as 39th, east to Central Park and in pockets beyond, Manhattanites , tourists, and bus-and-tunnel commuters to New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island and Connecticut could be seen to pause a moment to sniff the air as something rushed by them and then darted swiftly on, something sweet, redolent of memories of near or distant pasts, of sunny summer days much like this one, when their worlds were simpler, easier.
    Before the world and they grew old.

Party on the Roof

    "What you missed," Susan was saying, "was the security strike."
    Tom Braun looked at his wife and then at Elizabeth and thought, I've probably got the two most attractive women in the building standing here — so why do I feel like I need a real drink?
    "It was actually fun in a way," said Susan. "They had no other choice but to enlist the tenants so Tom and I sat desk-duty four nights running. You'd be amazed at what goes on around here."
    Elizabeth smiled. "Tell."
    Susan looked around to see if anyone was in listening range. She needn't have bothered. The party was winding down now, the food mostly gone and the wine running low, only twenty-five or thirty of them left up there on the rooftop, their laughter and conversation fading back into the noise from the street twenty-two stories below, into the warm evening breeze.
    It was one of those amazing summer evenings where it almost would have taken an act of will to have kept him indoors. The day's humidity had finally given way. Had the Dorset Towers Tenants'