Repairman Jack [05]-Hosts Read Free

apartment.
    Got to save those steps. He figured everyone was allotted only so many, and if you use them up too fast you're looking at early death or a wheelchair. Obviously marathoners and the hordes of joggers crowding the city parks either were unaware of or gave little credence to the Sandy Palmer theory of step preservation and reclamation. They'd regret it later on.
    Sandy glanced around the car at his fellow passengers. Seven years now riding either the Nine or the One, starting with his first semester at Columbia Journalism and the frequent trips down to the Village or SoHo, now every damn day getting jammed in on the way down to midtown and back for his job with The Light . And in all that time his fellow riders still looked pretty much the same as they always had. Maybe a few more whites in the mix these days, but not many.
    Take this car, for instance: Relatively crowded for a post-rush-hour run, but not SRO. Still a couple of empty seats. Working people—nurse's aides, bus drivers, jackhammer operators, store clerks, short order cooks, garment workers. Their skin tones ran a bell curve, starting with very black, peaking in the mid-browns, and tapering off into lily-white land. After growing up in Caucasian Connecticut, Sandy had had to get used to being a member of a minority on the subway. He'd been a little uneasy at first, thinking that people were staring at him; it took months before he felt comfortable again in his white skin.
    The white guy dozing diagonally across from him on the L-shaped plastic bench they shared mid-car looked pretty comfortable. Talk about generic pale male—if Sandy hadn't been thinking about white people he probably wouldn't have noticed him. Clean shaven, brown hair sticking out from under the dark blue knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, an oversized white Jets shirt with a big green 80, jeans, and scuffed work boots. The color of his eyes was up for grabs because they were closed.
    Sandy wondered what he did for a living. The clothes gave no clue other than the fact that he wasn't white collar. Clean hands, not overly callused, though his thumbnails seemed unusually long.
    The train slowed then and about a third of the passengers rose as signs announcing FORTY-SECOND STREET / TIMES SQUARE started slipping past the windows. The generic pale male opened his eyes to check the stop, then closed them again. Mild brown eyes. Definitely a GPM—an infinitely interchangeable example of the species.
    Not like me, he thought. With my blond hair, hazel eyes, thick glasses, this big nose, and acne scars left over from my pre-Accutane teenage years, anyone could pick me out of a lineup in a minute.
    New riders replaced those debarking almost one for one, spreading through the car in search of seats. He saw a slim young woman move toward a double seat at the very front of the car, but the man in it, a scraggly-bearded Asian guy in a stained fatigue jacket, with wild hair and wilder eyes, had his gym bag and a boom box on the empty half and he brusquely waved her away.
    Wisely, she didn't argue—he looked like the sort who was heavy into soliloquies—and went elsewhere in search of a seat. Sandy figured that was a potential blessing in disguise because she was moving toward the middle of the car, toward him.
    Keep coming, he thought, wishing he were telepathic. I've got your seat—right here next to me.
    She looked about twenty or so, all in black—sweater, tights, shoes, even the wire rims on her tiny funky glasses. She'd done one of those shoe-black dye jobs on her short, Winona Ryder-style hair, which made her pale face—not Winona Ryder's face, unfortunately, but still pretty—look all the paler.
    Sandy slid to his left, leaving half of his butt off the edge of the seat to give her plenty of room. She took the bait and slipped in next to him. She didn't look at him, simply opened her book and began to read.
    Instead of rejoicing, Sandy felt his insides tighten. What now? What to