Time Out of Mind Read Online Free PDF

Where’d you go, Corbin? You didn’t slip into that bus, did you? No. not without a shoehorn and a pot of grease, you didn’t. Down that subway, then. Ah, yes. The subway.
    Lesko did not follow. Instead he pulled his notebook from an inside pocket and, sheltering its pages with his body, peeled back to the penciled address of Gwen Lea- mas—145 East 77th Street. He nodded. Yes. That would explain the BMT subway. A short ride to the East Side and then a switch to the Lexington Avenue line would have them at her address in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Lesko stepped into the roadway at Fifty-fifth Street and waded through the eastbound crawl until he reached the first of those taxis whose Off Duty signs flick on at the first sign of inclement weather. Lesko slammed a fist down on its hood and, having won the driver's attention, waved a gold shield and ID card in front of the wipers.
    “ What, you can't read, pal?” The driver rapped his knuckles against the roof. “That light out there says I'm off duty.”
    Lesko showed his teeth. “We should all be so lucky. Open it.” ' .
    The driver angrily slapped at a lever that popped up the door locks and Lesko climbed in, pocketing his ID before the driver could ask for a closer look at it.
    “ You're on this big case, right?'' the driver snorted. “Cops are always on this big case when they don't feel like taking the subway.”
    Lesko glanced at the hack license on the dashboard. Mar vin Posey. A wimpish name, Lesko thought, for such a surly little bastard.
    “ Marvin,” he said, ”I must get quickly to Seventy- seventh Street between Lexington and Third. I would like you to fly there on the wings of your civic duty.”
    “ What?” The driver's expression dulled.
    “ Get this fucking thing moving.”
    Lesko soon realized that, surly or not, Marvin Posey knew his job. He pushed through a red light and a line of pedestrians onto Sixth Avenue, bullied and honked his way to Central Park, ran another light at the Seventy-second Street exit, and was turning north on Third Avenue in ten minutes flat.
    As the cab crunched into the unplowed snow of East Seventy-seventh Street, Lesko leaned forward to choose a spot from which he could watch both number 145 on his right and the Lexington Avenue subway exit straight ahead.
    “ Pull in right here.” He pointed.
    “ That's a hydrant. Good citizens don't block hydrants.”
    “ Behave yourself, Marvin.” Lesko had counted at least six moving violations since he climbed into the cab. Which was fine. Anything to help Marvin find inner peace. The cab stopped and Lesko stepped partially out of it just in time to see Jonathan Corbin emerging from the subway steps a quarter block ahead of him.
    It was a changed Jonathan Corbin, Lesko noted with in terest. Now it was Corbin who was standing up straight and strong and assisting the Leamas girl instead of the other way around. The sleet was smacking him in the face just as hard but he didn't look like it bothered him. What hap pened? Could the Lexington Avenue subway have curative powers? Or, Lesko wondered, was it the calming attentions of Miss Leamas? Or do Corbin’s devils only hang out down in the high-rent district?
    Lesko watched closely as Corbin and Gwen Leamas crossed Seventy-seventh Street and waded along the un cleared sidewalk toward number 145. He could see Cor bin’s face clearly. The expression he saw was not the look of a man who had just spent four hours biting his drapes. The guy's suddenly happy, thought Lesko. Not relieved, not recovered. Happy. Like everything's been just fine all along. You could ask what's not to be happy about being snowbound for a weekend with his tasty English squeeze. But you could also ask why midtown snow scares him shit less and uptown snow doesn't. For that matter, you could also ask why Raymond Lesko is getting top dollar to bird- dog some stiff whose worst enemy seems to be himself. Ask that question and you already have a big part of