Jim and the Flims Read Online Free PDF Page B

around my house for my sandals, my keys, my wallet, my cell phone, and Droog’s leash. As I stepped onto my porch, I heard Diane yelling at a kid.
    â€œExcuse me? Excuse me? I think you dropped something?”
    I had a sudden mental image of cutting my landlady into tiny pieces with her electric hedge-clippers and feeding the pieces to the sea lions off the pier at three a.m. Okay, maybe I was a little crazy too—my grief had nearly pushed me over the edge. At least I still had a certain sense of irony. I knew to hold my toxic thoughts in quotes.
    But never mind about Diane, I needed ice cream now, the good stuff from Mahalo Gelato on Pacific Avenue. I headed off down the alley. Droog trotted out from under my porch and dogged my steps. My faithful hound. I’d leash him later.
    It was a perfect summer day, the first of July. The fog had burned off; the air was cool and salty. The faint roar of the surf floated in— along with the barking of the voracious sea lions beneath the pier.
    To tell the truth, sea lions creep me out—I don’t like the way their hind legs are flesh-bound within the blubber of their tapering rears. To me, they look they’re in bondage, inching their ungainly way across a dock. It was easy to imagine that a sea lion would eat human flesh. Dogs eat their owners all the time—that is, they eat friendless owners who die alone with their pets in locked-up homes. Maybe that was in the cards for me.
    A palm tree shuddered overhead, sending criss-cross shadows dancing across the alley like switchblades. Smiling at my not-quite-serious thoughts about Diane and the sea lions, I imagined a sound track of dissonant axe-murderer music. Sometimes I still thought of that murder I’d read about in the paper—and about the green-handled axe that Skeeves had shown me years ago. I put a sneaky crouch into my gait, bending my fingers like claws.
    Droog sniffed one of my hands—just to see if I was holding food—and he glanced up at me with his alert, hazel-brown eyes.
    â€œNever mind, Droogie,” I told him. “I’m only playing.”
    And with that, I forgot about Diane and switched over to a different head game, to wit, the Infinite Paths project that I’d invented over the last few months. My discovery was that, with some thought, I could devise ever-new patterns for traversing familiar routes—without ever running out. It was a good way to stop thinking about Val.
    My cottage on the alley behind Madrone Street lay some six blocks from Mahalo Gelato on Pacific Avenue—basically, I had to go three blocks south and three blocks west. I had a knack for planning routes in my head, and I’d worked out that there were twenty distinct ways to make this trip, assuming that I took an efficient route without any detours.
    But who said that, as a semi-employed guy strolling to town, I had to be completely efficient? I could open up more possibilities by occasionally walking the wrong way. Suppose, for instance, that I allowed a block of retrograde motion to the east, and a compensatory block of extra motion to the west. According to my calculations, this gave me thirty-five times as many routes, yielding a glorious seven hundred possibilities. And if I added a jog to the north cancelled by an extra block to the south, I could find more than thirty-five thousand routes.
    And there was nothing to stop me from detouring through three or even four blocks. Moreover, thanks to numerous alleys and footpaths, I had the option of splitting most Santa Cruz blocks in two, effectively doubling the size of my grid. So there were in fact millions of ways to get to the ice-cream parlor from my cottage—without going very far out of the way. With a certain amount of luck and industry, I planned never to use the same route twice.
    Why? To some extent, my Infinite Paths project was just a distraction. But there was a deeper motive for what I was doing. I