Motorman Read Free Page B

sent up. What do you think this is, Moldenke? A nightflying outfit? Don't be so casual about it, boy. How would you like to spend an hour in the hot room? I want seriousness from you. Remember, if you don't ease up, you might get plugged.”
    “What are you doing, Bunce? ”
    “What am I doing, he says.”
    “Why the hot room threat, why the sudden restrictions? If this is a mistake I'll forgive it right now, but if it's a josh I don't know what I'll do. Is it a mistake? A josh? A shuck?”
    “No. Perfectly serious. I want your close attention, Moldenke. You're in my hands.”
    “No, Bunce. I decline. I'm hanging up now; maybe I'll run the movie backward a few frames, and the phone won't ring.”
    “Can the tricks, boy.”
    “I don't believe this, Bunce. I need proof, some sign.”
    “You want proof? ”
    “I want a sign.”
    “All right, boy. A sign. Stand there awhile and then go to the lookout.”
    Moldenke waited, went to the lookout, watched an amber cocacola mist fade into a yellow drizzle. Proof? He scanned two horizons, surveyed the streets. Nothing. No sign. Pigeons in eaves across the way. No k-vehicles. The Health Truck passed.
    An ant crawled over Moldenke's shoe and went up a wall.
    Something climbed from shelf to shelf in the refrigerator.
    A dull hissing, distant, then close. He spun in the darkness, saw its eyelike headlight, heard the jelly slosh.
     
    18]
     
    A genuine month before this, Moldenke had been driving his k-rambler along a white boulevard curving around a stadium. At a certain point on the curve he saw a couple, man and woman. The woman knelt over the gutter, favoring her stomach, her face a shade of purple. Moldenke stopped. The man, tobacco-stained and scholarly, asked if Moldenke would be so kind as to give them a ride to a drugstore for a tin of “shark” tablets, for the woman's illness.
    They lifted her onto the back seat and drove on down the wide boulevard, Moldenke beginning to have some doubts about the couple. The woman grunted in the back and gave off an odor.
    “Shark tablets?” Moldenke questioned.
    The man nodded and agreed.
    “For the wife?” Moldenke questioned again.
    The man said, “Yez,” with a “z,” a mannerism Moldenke never enjoyed.
    He saw a slight movement over the man's eye. He looked. An eyebrow dangled over the eye, parts of the face flaking down the suit.
    He took out a cigar, testing.
    “No flames, pliz!” He turned the face toward Moldenke.
    Moldenke held out his cigar lighter, his thumb on the flint. “Why not?” He turned the flint slowly, the car filling with gas.
    The moustache slid down the tie. Above the paper collar the plastic had begun to curl. Now Moldenke was sure-—a pair of jellyheads working the streets. He shouldn't have picked them up, but he had. He would do what Burnheart had told him to do on a number of occasions; he would open them up.
    He gunned the k-rambler and drove toward the bottoms. Traffic thinned and ended. Civilization gave way to a marshland, veined with treeless ridges. At every klick-marker a blind road turned into the bottoms. He picked one and drove along slush ruts until they ended, stopped, and turned off the motor.
    He looked at the rubber face. “Are you a pair of Bunce's jellyheads?”
    In the back the woman sat up, said nothing. Most of the man's features had broken loose and tumbled down to the seat and floor. The head, without makeup, a gray balloon, something sloshing inside it.
    “I asked if you were on Bunce's payroll.” He turned the flint faster.
    They chose silence.
    “Okay,” Moldenke said. “Then get out of the car and take your medicine. I've got you fair. Don't resist me.”
    They climbed out. Moldenke exposed his letter opener.
    “You first.” The man came forward. “Bend over.” The man bowed. With the letter opener, Moldenke opened a small hole in the back of the neck, enough for two fingers. He put a thumb and a forefinger in and widened the hole, a clear jelly spilling