Sam had seen another pay phone at a Union 76 service station one block north of Ocean. The station was out of business. The windows were filmed with gray dust, and a hastily lettered FOR SALE sign hung in one of them, as if the owner actually didn't care whether the place was sold or not and had made the sign only because it was expected of him. Crisp, dead leaves and dry pine needles from surrounding trees had blown against the gasoline pumps and lay in snow-like drifts.
The phone booth was against the south wall of the building and visible from the street. Sam stepped through the open door but did not pull it shut, for fear of completing a circuit that would turn on the overhead bulb and draw him to the attention of any cops who happened by.
The line was dead. He deposited a coin, hoping that would activate the dial tone. The line was still dead.
He jiggled the hook from which the handset hung. His coin was returned.
He tried again but to no avail.
He believed that pay phones in or adjacent to a service station or privately owned store were sometimes joint operations, the income shared between the telephone company and the businessman who allowed the phone to be installed. Perhaps they had turned off the phone when the Union 76 had closed up.
However, he suspected the police had used their access to the telephone-company's computer to disable all coin-operated phones in Moonlight Cove. The moment they had learned an undercover federal agent was in town, they could have taken extreme measures to prevent him from contacting the world outside.
Of course he might be overestimating their capabilities. He had to try another phone before giving up hope of contacting the Bureau.
On his walk after dinner, he had passed a coin laundry half a block north of Ocean Avenue and two blocks west of this Union 76. He was pretty sure that when glancing through the plate glass window, he had seen a telephone on the rear wall, at the end of a row of industrial-size dryers with stainless-steel fronts.
He left the Union 76. As much as possible staying away from the streetlamps — which illuminated side streets only in the first block north and south of Ocean — using alleyways where he could, he slipped through the silent town, toward where he remembered having seen the laundry. He wished the wind would die and leave some of the rapidly dissipating fog.
At an intersection one block north of Ocean and half a block from the laundry, he almost walked into plain sight of a cop driving south toward the center of town. The patrolman was half a block from the intersection, coming slowly, surveying both sides of the street. Fortunately he was looking the other way when Sam hurried into the unavoidable fall of lamplight at the corner.
Sam scrambled backward and pressed into a deep entrance way on the side of a three-story brick building that housed some of the town's professionals A plaque in the recess, to the left of the door, listed a dentist, two lawyers, a doctor, and a chiropractor. If the patrol turned left at the corner and came past him, he'd probably be spotted. But if it either went straight on toward Ocean or turned right and headed west, he would not be seen.
Leaning against the locked door and as far back in the shadows as he could go, waiting for the infuriatingly slow car to reach the intersection, Sam had a moment for reflection and realized that even for one-thirty in the morning, Moonlight Cove was peculiarly quiet and the streets unusually deserted. Small towns had night owls as surely as did cities; there should have been a pedestrian or two, a car now and then, some signs of life other than police patrols.
The black-and-white turned right at the corner, heading west and away from him.
Although the danger had passed, Sam remained in the unlighted entrance way, mentally retracing his journey from Cove Lodge to the municipal building, from there to the Union 76, and finally to his current position. He could not recall passing a house where music was playing, where a television blared, or where the laughter of late revelers indicated a party in progress. He had seen no young couples sharing a last kiss in parked cars. The few restaurants and taverns were apparently closed, and the movie theater was out of business, and except for his movements and those of the police, Moonlight Cove might have been a ghost town. Its living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens might have been peopled only by moldering corpses — or by robots that posed as people during the day and were turned off at night to save energy when it was not as essential to maintain the illusion of life.
Increasingly worried by the word 'conversion' and its mysterious meaning in the context of this thing they called the Moonhawk Project, he left the entrance way, turned the corner, and ran along the brightly lighted street to the laundry. He saw the phone as he was pushing open the glass door.
He hurried halfway through the long room-dryers on the right, a double row of washers back-to-back in the middle, some chairs at the end of the washers, more chairs along the left wall with the candy and detergent machines and the laundry-folding counter — before he realized the place was not deserted. A petite blonde in faded jeans and a blue pullover sweater sat on one of the yellow plastic chairs. None of the washers or dryers was running, and the woman did not seem to have a basket of clothes with her.
He was so startled by her — a live person, a live civilian, in this sepulchral night — that he stopped and blinked.
She was perched on the edge of the chair, visibly tense. Her eyes were wide. Her hands were clenched in her lap. She seemed to be holding her breath.
Realizing that he had frightened her, Sam said, 'Sorry.'
She stared at him as if she were a rabbit facing down a fox. Aware that he must look wild-eyed, even frantic, he added, 'I'm not dangerous.'
'They all say that.'
'They do?'
'But I
Confused, he said, 'You are what?'
'Dangerous.'
'Really?'
She stood up.
'I'm a black belt.'
For the first time in days, a genuine smile pulled at Sam's face. 'Can you kill with your hands?'
She stared at him for a moment, pale and shaking. When she spoke, her defensive anger was excessive.
'Hey, don't laugh at me, asshole, or I'll bust you up so bad that when you walk, you'll clink like a bag of broken glass.'
At last, astonished by her vehemency, Sam began to assimilate the observations he'd made on entering. No washers or dryers in operation. No clothes basket. No box of detergent or bottle of fabric softener.
'What's wrong?' he asked, suddenly suspicious.
'Nothing, if you keep your distance.'
He wondered if she knew somehow that the local cops were eager to get hold of him. But that seemed nuts. How could she know?
'What're you doing here if you don't have clothes to wash?'
'What's it your business? You own this dump?' she demanded.
'No. And don't tell me you own it, either.'
She glared at him.
He studied her, gradually absorbing how attractive she was.
She had eyes as piercingly blue as a June sky and skin as clear as summer air, and she seemed radically out of place along this dark, October coast, let alone in a grungy Laundromat at one-thirty in the morning. When her beauty finally, fully registered with him, so did other things about her, including the intensity of her fear, which was revealed in her eyes and in the lines around them and in the set of her mouth. it was fear far out of proportion to any threat he could pose. If he had been a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound, tattooed biker with a revolver in one hand and a ten-inch knife in the other, and if he had burst into the laundry chanting paeans to Satan, the utterly bloodless paleness of her face and the hard edge of terror in her eyes would have been understandable. But he was only Sam Booker, whose greatest attribute as an agent was his guy-next-door ordinariness and an aura of harmlessness.
Unsettled by
