Spares Read Online Free PDF Page B

restaurant, in a bar, in the John—Dath wouldbe somewhere just out of sight, talking loudly about postmodernism. It eventually drove the target crazy.
    He always denied it. I was never sure.
    “You heard about the contract on me?” I asked Dath. He nodded. “You a player?”
    “Nah,” he said slowly. “Think HI wait till it goes up to ten.”
    Then he winked, and I smiled as I walked past him back out into the streets.
    Good bye to all that, I thought.

The guy behind the counter was looking at me strangely, but I went quickly about my business, walking the mart’s dusty aisles and picking out what we needed. I got a couple packs of soya bars, powdered milk, cheap food in heata Tins—and the biggest jar of Frapan pickles I could see. Every couple of minutes I glanced down the aisle and saw the guy was still looking at me. Not all the time, but enough. It was beginning to piss me off.
    At the exit of the service shaft, I’d given the guys the hundred seventy dollars I owed them. They were pleasantly surprised, said it had been a pleasure doing business with me, and gave me their card for future reference. The main man also said that Mr. Amos had sent a message saying that I had a free pass in future. I told him I wouldn’t be coming back.
    “Yeah, he said you’d say that,” the man said.
    Which left me with a little under seven hundred dollars, just about enough for a beat-up truck and the gas to get us out of the state. After that, who knew what was going to happen? Certainly not me. I was in kind ofa bad mood by then; wishing I’d had another drink with Howie, wishing I’d had several more, in fact, and just forgotten about the spares. I’ve never been good with responsibility. That much at least seemed not to have changed.
    All I could sense for the future was the sound of road beneath tires and the chill of winter evenings in places I didn’t know. After so long away from New Richmond I could hardly believe this was it: a quick score, and then scurrying away back into the wilderness. The feeling got so strong that I actually stopped walking, turned and looked back up at the city. Other pedestrians had to pass on either side of me, muttering and glaring, and what they saw was a man just standing, staring up at a building, probably with an expression somewhere between love and hate in his eyes.
    Halfway back to Mal’s I’d stopped at the Minimart, knowing there were things we needed. I expected a fast and joyless shopping experience. I didn’t expect to be stared at. I knew my clothes looked ragged, and I’ve got a couple of scars on my face—but who hasn’t, these days? This is a time for scars. It’s a feature. The counterman didn’t look especially charming himself. He had the slab knuckles of someone who’d grown up fighting, and the flat eyes of a man who could watch bad things and not feel too much about them. He was big in the shoulders but going to seed out front, and his face looked like someone had spent a happy afternoon flattening it out with a spade. The few other customers I’d seen were fumbling for the cheapest brands of alcohol and shambling up to the counter to pay with heaps of small change. Derelicts, in other words, in a store run by an ex-hood where the linoleum on the floor was yellowed and worn with age and curled up at every join to show the stained concrete underneath.
    Maybe I looked too refined.
    There was a convex plastic mirror hanging at the end of the aisle, bent in the middle from some past impact and so dirty as to be nearly opaque. It was there tostop people lifting stuff from the dead zone, but I doubt the proprietor could see much more in it than ghosts. As I walked slowly toward the cold goods I caught sight of my battered reflection. I guess I might have looked a little wired, and in certain lights my eyes can look a little weird. I have the Bright Eyes, for a start, though it generally requires a certain kind of slanting light to show them, rather than the