“Oh, I’ll hang around a bit. Mr. Harkness is coming by in a few minutes to take me to dinner.”
I sat up straight. “Jerry Harkness?”
“Something wrong with that?”
I went back to my bookkeeping. Far be it from me to tell her who she could see. But yes, dammit, now that she mentioned it, there was something a little wrong. She was a sweet young girl and Jerry Harkness was a relatively old man. Honey draws flies, remember? And yeah, I was a little ruffled and I didn’t like it much. Hell, I was too old for her, and Harkness had me by a good eight years. I had gone around the horn to keep my relationship with Pinky Pride on a purely professional level, and she was going out with Jerry Harkness.
“Mr. Janeway? Is something wrong?”
“It’s your business, Miss Pride. He just seems to be a bit old, that’s all I was thinking.”
“Funny I never thought of him that way. But you’re right, he’s got to be almost as old as you are.”
I stared at the ceiling.
“I’m kidding, Mr. Janeway, where’s your sense of humor? Of course he’s too old for me, I’m not going to marry the man… unless…”
“What?” I snapped. “Unless what?”
“I might consider it if he’d be willing to do one of those convenience things that would let me stay in the country per-manently. I might consider anyone who’d do that for me. But Mr. Harkness isn’t going to do that. He wants to buy me a supper and I said yes: nothing more to it than that. If you’ve got something for me to do, though…”
I shook my head. “Just don’t get in any dark corners.”
“I never do, sir, unless they’re of my own making. I hope he’ll tell me some of the finer points of his specialty.”
“I’m sure he will,” I said dryly.
“I want to know it all.”
“Someday you will,” I said, and meant it.
She was learning fast. It’ll be a national tragedy if we have to send her back to Scotland, I thought. The enormity of the book business—the fact that most of the books that even a very old dealer sees in a year are books that he’s never seen before—simply did not faze her. She was fearless and confident at the edge of the bottomless pit. A genius, confining himself to the narrowest possible specialty, could not begin to know it all. This was the task Pinky Pride had set for herself.
She had learned so much in three months that I had her added to my book fund as a co-signer. She bought from book-scouts and signed away my money as freely as I did. She made mistakes but so did I: she also made at least one sensational buy a week. I knew that someday, in the not-too-distant future, she’d be gone, if not back to Scotland then away to a place of her own. For now, for this short and special time we shared, my job was to keep her happy.
“By the way, I’m giving you a raise,” I said.
She considered it for a moment, as if she might turn it down. But she said, “I guess I deserve it.”
I heard a laugh from the back room. It had a familiar ring, like something from an old dream. I heard the two guys talking in low voices, and again one of them laughed.
Then they came up front.
It was Jackie Newton, with some gunsel straight out of old Chicago. Jackie wasn’t carrying anything, but the enforcer was packing a big gun. You learn to spot things like that. My own gun was on my belt, in the small of my back. I couldn’t get it easily, but I’d get it quick enough if something started— probably a lot faster than Jackie would believe.
The gunsel was a bodyguard, a bonecrusher, a cheap hood. They circled the store together and pretended to look at books. I fought down the urge to say something cute (“No coloring books in here, boys” would be a nice touch) and let them do their thing. Miss Pride inched close to the counter and I saw her pluck the scissors out of our supply box.
She was no dummy, Miss Pride.
I looked in her eyes and said, “Why don’t you go home now?”
“Uh-uh. Harkness, remember?”
“Go home, Miss Pride.”
She didn’t move. Jackie turned and looked at her and she stared back at him.
“Wanna go for a ride in a big car?” he said.
