Time Travelers Strictly Cash Read Free Page B

Innkeeper, gimme coffee, light and sweet.”
    She picked somebody’s empty from the bar, got down unsteadily from her chair, and walked with great care to the chalk line. “You people like toasts? I’ll give you a toast. To fivesight,” she said, and whipped her glass so hard she nearly fell. It smashed in the geometrical center of the fireplace, and residual alcohol made the flames ripple through the spectrum.
    I made a small sound.
    By the time she had regained her balance, young Tommy was straightening up from the chair be had placed behind her, brushing his hair back over his shoulders. She sat gratefully. We formed a ragged half-circle in front of her, and Shorty Steinitz brought her the coffee. I sat at her feet and studied her as she sipped it. Her face was still not pretty, but now that the lights were back on in it, you could see that she was beautiful, and I’ll take that any day. Go chase a pretty one and see what it gets you. The coffee Seemed to help steady her.
    “It starts out prosaic,” she began. “Three years ago my first husband, Freddie, took off with a sculptress named, God help us, Kitten, leaving me with empty savings and checking, a mortgage I couldn’t cut, and a seven-year-old son. Freddie was the life of the party. Lily of the valley. So I got myself a job on a specialist newspaper. Little businessmen’s daily, average subscriber’s median income fifty kay~ The front-page story always happened to be about the firm that had bought the most ad space that week. Got the picture? I did a weekly Leisure Supplement, ten pages every Thursday, with a… you don’t care about this crap. I don’t care about this crap.
    “So one day I’m sitting at my little steel-desk. This place is a reconverted warehouse, one immense office, and the editorial department is six desks pushed together in the back, near the paste-up tables and the library and the wire. Everybody else is gone to lunch, and I’m just gonna leave myself when this guy from accounting comes over. I couldn’t remember his name; he was one of those grim, stolid, fatalistic guys that accounting departments run to. He hands me two envelopes. ‘This is for you, ‘he says, ‘and this one’s for Tom.’ Tom was the hippy who put out the weekly Real Estate Supplement.
    So I start to open mine-it feels like there’s candy in it-and he gives me this look and says, ‘Oh no, not now.’ I look at him like huh? and he says, ‘Not until it’s time. You’ll know when,’ and he leaves. Okay, I say to myself, and I put both envelopes in a drawer, and I go to lunch and forget it.
    “About three o’clock I wrap up my work, and I get to thinking about how strange his face looked when he gave me
    those envelopes. So I take out mine and open it. Inside it are two very big downs-you know, powerful tranquilizers. I sit
    up straight. I open Tom’s envelope, and if I hadn’t worked in a drugstore once, I never would have recognized it. Demerol. Synthetic morphine, one of the most addictive drugs in the world.
    “Now Tom is a hippie-booking guy; like I say, long hair and mustache, not long like yours, but long for a newspaper.
    So I figure this accounting guy is maybe his pusher and somehow he’s got the idea I’m a potential customer. I was kind of fidgety and tense in those days. So I get mad as hell, and I’m just thinking about taking Tom into the darkroom and chewing him out good, and I look up, and the guy from accounting is staring at me from all the way across the room. No expression at all, he just looks. It gives me the heebiejeebies.
    “Now, overhead is this gigantic air-conditioning unit, from the old warehouse days, that’s supposed to cool the whole building and never does. What it does is drip water on editorial and make so much goddamn noise you can’t talk on the phone while it’s on. And what it does, right at that moment, is rip loose and drop straight down; maybe eight hundred pounds. It crushes all the desks in