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By Root 551 0

exercises. I started them years ago while my face was healing from the repairs. Now I do them sometimes just to help me think. An old man once taught me how to move pain around in my body until I had gathered it in one spot and could then move it entirely outside my skin. It was all in the breathing, and I’ve kept up the exercises ever since. You suck in a heavy gulp of air smoothly through the nose and down into the stomach, expanding it as far as possible and holding for a slow count of thirty. Then you gradually let it out, pulling in the stomach and expanding the chest. I did this twenty times, concentrating my focus on a red dot I had painted on the mirror. When I climbed into the red dot, the room went away and I was free to think about the girl and her problem. I went down every corridor I could open and came up empty. When I climbed out I heard Pansy snoring away, probably dreaming of a nice crunchy thigh bone. I left her where she was, locked the place up, and went downstairs to the garage.

The garage is actually the first floor of my building, with a sliding door opening into a narrow alley. The best part of it is that I can get to it from inside the building, so I can drive the car into the garage and then just disappear. Someone once followed me all the way to the garage when I was hurt and not paying attention. He just sat there and patiently waited for about six hours. The guy was a real professional. Devil (my old Doberman) took him just as he was making a deposit into an empty Coke bottle he carried with him. Turned out later he knew how to play the game—he never gave any information about me to the cops from his hospital bed. Just some tracker who should have done his work on the telephone.

I climbed into the Plymouth carefully. It can look like a lot of different cars, but I had last used it as a gypsy cab and it was still an ungodly mess inside. I lifted the steel plate next to the transmission hump, found the set screws, removed them, and took out the little five-shot Colt Cobra I keep there. Checked the cylinder, emptied the piece, and pocketed it. I thought it would be best to have a friend with me until I had a better idea of what this woman wanted. I screwed the car’s floor back together, climbed out, and went back upstairs.

While I sat waiting for the mysterious lady to return, I went through my latest issue of Hoofbeats, daydreaming about the magnificent yearling I’d own someday. Maybe an Albatross colt out of a Bret Hanover mare, a lovely free-legged pacer eligible for all the big-stakes races. I’d name him Survivor, win a fortune, and be rich and respectable the rest of my natural life. I love animals—they don’t do the things people do unless they absolutely have to, and even then it’s never for fun. Sometimes I’d see the name of a yearling for sale in the magazine and I’d say his name softly to myself and feel like I used to feel in the institution when I was a kid—like I’d never have anything good. But that feeling never lasts.

People won’t let you live the way you want to, but if you’re strong enough or quick enough, at least you don’t have to live the way they want you to. I live, though, no matter what.

The downstairs buzzer bit into my thoughts. I had my secretary answer and sure enough, it was the lady again. Even though I figured she was just coming up with my money, I went backstage and monitored her progress up to the door again. Force of habit.

She walked in wearing the same outfit, so she probably did go to a bank. If she’d gone home to pick up the cash, she would have changed her clothes, at least a little bit. Not all women are like that, I know, but this one seemed to be. The only difference was that the pale lipstick had been replaced with a heavy dark shade. She tossed a thick wad on my desk, wrapped in rubber bands. Just like the gangsters.

“I thought you’d rather have small bills,” she said.

“The bank won’t care,” I replied. She gave me a crooked smile that told me maybe she didn’t just select me at random. “Don’t you want to count it?” she asked.

“That’s all right;