Lucy's Launderette Read Online Free PDF Page B

Until my brother had been dealt with, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I hailed a cab, got in and looked over my shoulder the whole way home. No one was following me. I paid the driver with the last of my spare change, raced through my front door and double locked it once I was inside.
    I went into the bedroom and took off my all-purpose little black cocktail dress. I could hear the Viking in the other room. Without knocking, she opened my door and handed me an envelope. “This for you,” she told me.
    â€œWho left it?” I asked. There was no stamp on it. She just shook her head in linguistic bewilderment and walked away.
    I ripped it open. Scrawled on a tattered piece of paper were the words “I’M SENDING YOU TO THE PHANTOM ZONE.”
    I ran to the phone and dialed the first number on my list. I was expecting another answering machine but a real voice said, “Sam Trelawny here.”
    â€œIt’s Lucy Madison. Am I glad to get you,” I said, “I think I just got a threat.” I told him about Dirk’s note.
    â€œThe guy moves fast,” he said. “Listen, just hang on. Don’t panic. I know, easy to say when you’re not there. There’ve been more reports. It seems Dirk is making his presence felt all over town. He was hanging around eating people’s leftovers at a restaurant in the West End this afternoon. We’re going to have him picked up as soon as we can locate him. You hear anything more from him, call me straightaway. Here, I’ll give you my private cell-phone number. And, Lucy?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œDon’t worry. We’ll have him looking and behaving like Clark Kent at his desk in the Daily Planet in no time.”
    I began to wonder what kind of face went with Sam Trelawny’s plummy reassuring voice.

4
    T he next morning, I left for work at six-thirty, hoping the semidarkness would give me cover. I snuck out of my apartment dressed like an escapee from a black-and-white British movie. One of those dowdy sixties flicks. Georgy Girl. The Carry On gang. My hair was squashed under the kind of head scarf that you tie under your chin, a silk souvenir covered with sketches of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian urchin children. I wore a huge wooly coat with sloping shoulders, a pair of black gumboots and dark glasses. I had hoped to look a little like Jackie Kennedy sneaking past the paparazzi incognito, but in fact I looked more like Jackie Kennedy’s cleaning lady. Taking these precautions was exhausting, but I counted on the fact that Dirk could sometimes be thrown by small things.
    Along with the Superman disguise, Dirk had a few other personas in his manic closet. One was a tatty spy. Duringone endless spring, Dirk had introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond,” then waved the plastic pistol in everyone’s face and told them he was off to squash Goldfinger. For this Bond personality, Dirk had a very grotty white tuxedo, a garment he’d acquired from a bum in California, who’d claimed he’d got it from Our Man in Havana. The suit was several inches too short in the pants and jacket cuffs, covered with stains whose origins I preferred not to think about, and so creased you knew he and a dozen other people had slept in it.
    He also had several sporting personas. Sometimes he pretended he was Tiger Woods, roaming around with an old golfing iron, swinging dangerously in all directions. I’d mistakenly tried to reason with Dirk, telling him that he was the wrong color to start with, would always be the wrong color, and how he lacked the discipline to be a golfing champion. This enraged him. I still hadn’t learned that you can’t reason with a man who’s down on his lithium. I always hoped that I’d get through that thick, sick hide of his, get through to that other Dirk who had to be in there somewhere.
    Maybe I was overestimating him. After all, Dirk had been no great shakes as a child