Kaleidoscope Read Online Free PDF

fervor to urge a change in the situation Sally had so recently endured. They seemed so earnest, these nouveau riche, so flushed with painless purpose, the women dressed in summer skirts and cloche hats, their necks draped in wreaths of beaded necklaces. The husbands congregating casually in Oxford baggies, or jodhpurs, their eyes shaded by derbies or motor caps.
    Sally forged past the well-intended party, keeping her eyes on the ground just beyond her feet. It was hard after being imprisoned not to be distracted by so much activity. Ladies and gents were everywhere, tapping bunting onto booths erected in the landscaped park across the street, raising voices in warbled exhortation, or song, or prayer.
    Adding to that congestion were leisure seekers and hangers-on. There were at least a dozen cyclists, real pests, showing off their ridiculous contraptions, drawing protests from trolleybus jockeys as they played chicken across the tracks. And vendors hawked their wares from all points of the compass, their wheeled stalls a barrier along the street.
    Sally inhaled deeply. Food! The smells of sausage and chilli and cinnamon! But first the letter. Sally rummaged inside her fabric bag to find the manila envelope. She opened it carefully, almost reverently. And with the expected letter she found as well a handful of ten-dollar bills. Sally counted them quickly—
    Fifty dollars!
    It wasn’t hard to find a private cranny behind a vendor’s cart. Within moments she was gorging down the first real food of a year-and-a-half, the letter pressed smooth over her skirted knee as a Coney dog oozed chilli onto a napkin fashioned from the latest Enquirer .
    Dear S,
You’re out! Sensational! I’ll see you, but it won’t be until sometime in the evening. Could be late. You’ll have found the cash inside the envelope, so go enjoy yourself for the day and then check into the Hotel Milner. It’s off Vine. There is a room reserved in your name. Check in some time around five o’clock, treat yourself to a good dinner and wait for me.
Looking forward to seeing you,
Alex Goodman
     
    Sally read the well-penned instructions once again. Then she returned the letter to its envelope, stuffing it along with the cash deep inside her blouse, pausing a moment, then, to consider—
    It was a long time until five o’clock. How best to spend her first day of freedom?
    Sally straightened suddenly. She walked with purpose to the front of the chilli dogcart. Waited for the vendor to acknowledge her presence.
    “Yeah?”
    “There a cross-town to Vine?”
    “Trolley, yeah. Be by in a snap.”
    “And then can I take Vine to the zoo?”
    “You want Number 78.” He lipped a cigarette. “Straight up.”
     
     
    Jack Romaine did not find Sally Price as she negotiated a course through knots of gentlemen, ladies, and cyclists on her way to the trolley bus that arrived in a shower of sparks. Jack was pacing back and forth on the prison side of the street, a hound anxious to pick up a buried scent. Once again he checked the faded lithograph that Bladehorn had provided.
    That was Sally. Bad skin, angular face, narrow eyes and mousy hair.
    “Jesus,” Jack had protested when Fist gave him the picture. “You expect me to know her from this?”
    “She’s the only one they’re lettin’ out,” Fist returned. “Just be there.”
    But Jack was late, way late. It was nearly eight o’clock, the street already busy as a bee in a tar bucket, and he had no idea where to look for Sally Price.
    A bell rang sharply. The trolley. Through a shifting crowd of cyclists and commuters Jack glimpsed a woman juggling a portmanteau and a Coney dog. Not too many women carrying suitcases, this morning. In fact—
    “Gotcha.”
    Jack sprinted across the street just in time to take a bicycle’s wheel square across his knee, rider and runner falling to the bricks together like a couple of footballers.
    The rider cursing from a pretzel of broken spokes.
    “Hell with you,” Jack