The Waiting Room Read Online Free PDF

again—the name of the cab company. The Wilson Cab Company. And the number of the cab. Number 432.
    ~ * ~
    The Wilson Cab Company was in a cramped and seedy garage on West 61st Street. I talked to the dispatcher, a skinny white-haired black woman named Iris, who was in her late fifties, I guessed, and who kept an unlighted Tiparillo sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she spoke. I asked her about cab number 432.
    She asked if I was a cop, gave me a quick once-over, which was the first time she'd looked at me, decided I wasn't a cop, and said that the Wilson Cab Company didn't have a cab number 432. "Used to," she said. "Ten years ago, till it went into the Harlem River one night, and that's the last anybody seen of it in this world.''
    I told her that I'd seen it the day before.
    She let the corner of her mouth that was free of the Tiparillo rise in a half grin. "Then it was somebody else's cab, mister," she said.
    "Back to square one," I said.
    ~ * ~
    When I take a long look backward, I think that Abner's been into the grim and grisly for quite a while. Like it's a hobby. He used to write poems about it, about death. He used to talk about it, used to hold séances (though I'll have to be fair about that—I think he held those fruity séances because he was trying to make it with some of the women he'd conned into coming along), and I swear that when he talked about death—about going to someone's funeral, for instance, or about what might be going on over there, on the Other Side—he got this tiny, contented gleam in his eye, as if he were eating warm chocolate pudding. And all of his sentences, no matter what grisly thing he was talking about, would end on a little, wispy high note, like someone who lives in Buffalo talking about going to Florida for the winter. There were plenty of times that he spooked the hell out of me.
    ~ * ~
    I was into the grim and grisly, too. Especially that night twenty years ago that Abner and I broke into the Hammet Mausoleum. Hell, I enjoyed it just as much as he did. I got a real kick out of putting Flora's bleached skull in the center of the cement floor, and setting candles around it, and making ghostly noises at it, as if it were some kind of link to somewhere.
    We all get into death at one time or another. Some of us shrug it off, or put it in a back pocket, or we lock it up tight in one of the billion tiny rooms the brain has, and some of us don't. Some of us pick at it like it's a scab.
    ~ * ~
    I caught Abner the third time I saw him. I got him by the arm, wheeled him around, and said loudly and happily to him, "Damn, Abner, it's me, Sam! Don't you remember me?"
    Then I focused on his face. The way I had when he'd peered at me from the back seat of cab number 432 a couple of weeks earlier. And I said, my voice low and tight, "Good Lord, Abner, have you been doing drugs or what?"
    He smiled crookedly, as if it hurt. "Sure, Sam," he said, "something like that."
    As I said, Abner's kind of odd-looking. He's not a Quasimodo clone, people don't run screaming from him, but he's no threat to Tom Selleck or Robert Redford, either. It's mostly his eyes. They're too deeply set, and his brow shades them well so he looks like he's been brooding in a cellar for a long time. And his head is large and angular, a little too large and angular, in fact, to look comfortably balanced on top of his long, lean frame. In high school he was into long-distance running for a while and it toned him up, made him look healthy. But he fell, broke his ankle, decided that running wasn't very interesting anyway, and soon got back that sick and brooding look. Some women find it attractive. Stacy did. And Phyllis did, of course. But I always thought he looked like he needed sunlight, and air.
    And that third time I saw him in New York, when I caught him, he looked like he'd been on speed for a year or two. His skin was a light gray-pink, his eyes were nearly puffed shut, and he looked like he