The Doorkeepers Read Online Free PDF Page B

squeezed his hand or murmured some small condolence. Only the small boy with the box remained behind.
    â€œI’m sorry, kid,” Josh repeated. “I can’t see any more animals today.”
    The boy looked up at him in obvious distress. Josh hesitated, and then he went over and said, “Come on then, show me.” He took the lid off the box and there was a cricket lying inside, a cricket with only one leg.
    â€œI just wanted to know if you could sew his other leg back on. I’ve saved it, look.” He produced a carefully-folded piece of Kleenex.
    Josh bent down and gently prodded the cricket with the tip of his finger. It tried to hop but it succeeded only in falling on to its side. “I’m sorry, kid,” Josh told him. “Some things are just beyond saving.”
    He called the number that the deputy had given him. He was told that Detective Sergeant Paul had left for the evening, but that he could call in the morning, around eight. That meant midnight, Pacific time.
    He sorted through his scruffy, higgledy-piggledy phone book, and found the last number that Julia had given him in London, the Golden Rose Employment Agency, in Earl’s Court. He called it, but all he got was a nasal answerphone message. There was nothing else he could do until tonight, when the sun came up over London and everybody went back to work.
    Nancy came in. “How about some coffee?” she asked him, putting her arm around his shoulders and kissing him.
    â€œI think a Jack Daniel’s would go down better. You know what I have to do now, don’t you? I have to phone the folks.”
    â€œOK. One Jack Daniel’s coming up.”
    She held on to him for a moment, and he was glad of it, because right now he really needed her strength. She had always been strong, which was one of the things that had attracted him so much. Her late father had been a Norwegian-born merchant seaman and her mother was an artist, a full-blooded Modoc, which had given Nancy a startling combination of high cheekbones and dark skin and ice-blue eyes. It had also given her an inner toughness, a very sinewy sense of herself, and even though that oftenled them to argue, Josh was glad of it. When he lay in bed at night, he knew who was lying next to him.
    Nancy was very silent at night, he could never hear her breathing, and he used to wake her up to make sure that she wasn’t dead. This had annoyed her, of course, because Josh snored like a riot in a zoo, and she could never get back to sleep again. But Josh had always been noisy and messy and untidy, ever since he was a small boy. He tried his best to be neat. He tried to be organized. But he was always too interested in moving on to the next thing before he had cleared up the thing before.
    Josh was tall, like his father Jack. In fact he looked so much like his father that his mother always called him “Jack” – 6ft 2½ins in his long bare feet, and very lean, with chopped brown hair that looked as if Edward Scissorhands had been at it. He had a long, handsome face and very large brown eyes, but he was the only one in his family to have inherited his great-grandfather’s large triangular nose. He had also inherited his great-grandfather’s extraordinary empathy with animals. The old man had worked with Barnum & Bailey for years before he eventually came to San Francisco and opened up a pet store on Folsom Street, Winward’s World of Waggers.
    Josh had spent his childhood nursing crushed snails and feeding abandoned fledglings with eyedroppers, and he had always wanted to be a veterinarian. But his approach to animal medicine had been so unorthodox that he and the California State Veterinary College had parted company by mutual agreement. At college he had set up a pulsed electromagnetic field in order to improve the general health and intelligence of cats; and he had taught dogs to meditate.
    He swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and then he