Hanging Time Read Online Free PDF

minutes. But he was slowly getting better.
    Today he turned his head suddenly and said, “The clock stopped.”
    “It must be slightly off balance,” Jason replied. “Balance is everything in these old clocks.”
    “Is it a new one?” Brian asked.
    “Yes,” Jason answered. He’d bought it about three weeks ago.
    “Can you get it going again?” The pendulum had a brass sun on the end. Brian frowned at it.
    “Yes,” Jason said. Some of his patients knew about his passion for clocks and some didn’t. Brian did because it helped him to know that Jason could make broken things work.
    Jason started the pendulum swinging again. It mightstop in five minutes, an hour, five hours, or not until he next left town and wasn’t there to wind it. He watched it swing back and forth. Maybe the tiny adjustment would be enough.
    It was Monday, a long time from Friday, when he was scheduled to speak with Emma again. Jason didn’t know whether to look forward to the phone call or not. He turned to another, more reliable clock, trying to shake off the pervasive feeling that too much was wrong with his world. Now the feeling included a vague uneasiness that lingered from the previous day in Southampton.
    Something about it was odd, and even way after midnight he hadn’t felt comfortable letting Milicia Honiger-Stanton drive him all the way to his building. He had no reason to ask her to let him off at Columbus Avenue, several long blocks from his apartment on Riverside Drive, but he did. He figured it was some kind of symbolic thing that had to do with Emma. He lived alone now, wanted to walk home alone. Crawl home like an injured animal was more like it.
    He had gotten out of the car and was surprised to hear Milicia say, “I’d like to see you again.”
    He didn’t reply immediately, and she hesitated, as if she weren’t used to having to say those words to a man herself, much less follow them up.
    A faint breeze stirred the air. Somewhere a siren howled.
    “Hey, man, got a quarter? I got to get me sumpin’ to eat.”
    The plaintive voice of a large black man with long, matted hair rose to a wail as he menaced a young couple halfway down the block. Jason stiffened, ready to move in their direction. Sometimes he had Mace in his pocket, but not today. Not having the Mace didn’t bother him. Even from where he stood Jason could tell the man was unsettling but not dangerous. He didn’t have to rescue the couple though. On the hot summer night there were still a lot of people on the street. A cop emerged from the dark and moved the man along.
    Jason returned his attention to Milicia. He was startled by how beautiful she looked in the dark. The glow from thestreetlights backlit her red hair, giving it the appearance of a fiery halo. Her face was as pale as the moon, which at the moment hung low in the sky over Central Park and seemed to hover over her head, very ripe, and just a day or so short of being full.
    Her wide-eyed look of sudden shyness and innocence was belied by the display of deeply tanned thighs, visible almost to the crotch, and parted with the business of dealing with a gearshift. Jason noted that her old Mercedes needed a tune-up. It idled high in neutral. The woman’s whole being exuded a powerful sexuality. No thanks, he wasn’t buying.
    “Thanks for the ride,” he said coolly.
    She caught her bottom lip with her teeth and struggled a little with her breathing. “I need someone to talk to,” she said faintly.
    “Oh?” Jason hesitated although he was already long gone, preoccupied by a thousand important matters to avoid thinking about what weighed most heavily on his mind.
    Right then he was thinking about his schedule for the next day, the precious hours he had wasted going to Southampton to see Charles and Brenda when he should have been working on the paper he had to present at a conference in Baltimore at the end of the week. He was aware that the black man was now lurching in their direction.
    He