Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [2]
Stepping up onto the raised cement sidewalk that flanked the town’s only street, he pushed through the outer glass door, walked through the insulated double entryway, and then pushed through the second. His senses were instantly assaulted by a mountain mélange of pumped-up music, loud conversation, raucous laughter, fried food, and pool cues brutalizing orbs of imitation ivory on a felt field of play. Their perfectly round glass eyes as dead and black as those of great white sharks, the cranial components of violently demised ungulates gazed blankly at each other from opposing walls. There was also a bear head, its petrified jaws parted in a rictus of false fury; old metal traps stained with the rust and blood of years and furry critters past; brightly illuminated animated beer advertisements that in a thousand years would no doubt be regarded by awed historians as great works of art; car license plates from other states gnawed through by rust and time; and much other well-traveled detritus.
Though the rapidly falling temperature of the air outside only whispered of approaching autumn, Bunyanesque lengths of amputated oak crackled for attention within the Stygian depths of a corner fireplace fashioned of hand-laid river rock. In a mutually destructive seppuku of air and wood, reflected flames danced off the insides of triple-paned windows that looked out on the parking lot, vehicles, big trees, and mountain slopes beyond.
No one paid him the slightest attention as he sauntered toward the bar. As a trader whose work sometimes took him overseas, he knew how to blend in with the natives. Though he would never be able to pass for a local, after five days up at the lake his flannel shirt, cheap jeans, and hiking boots were suitably soiled.
“Stoli on the rocks,” he told the jaded woman behind the bar. She looked, as he had once heard a visiting Texas trader say about another lady, as if she had been rode hard and put up wet. But his drink arrived as fast as one in any fancy drinking establishment in the Loop, and was more honest.
As he sat on his chosen stool and sipped, he contemplated the milling throng with the quiet, self-contained detachment of a visiting anthropologist. There didn’t seem to be many other vacationers. Too late in the season, perhaps, what with the local school districts now back in session and the onset of colder weather. It explained why, except for a few locals fishing for end-of-season browns and rainbows, he had much of the lake and the surrounding stolid, slate gray mountains to himself.
Halfway through the Stoli, he started grinning at nothing in particular. Partly it was due to the effects of the iced potato juice, partly to the knowledge that he was going to win the bet with his friends. To a man, and one woman, they had insisted he would be home before the weekend, his tail between his legs—if not gnawed raw by blood-sucking mosquitoes, rabid marmots, and who knew what other horrors the primordial backwoods of California could produce.
Well, they’d underestimated him. Marcus Walker was tougher than any of them suspected. Few knew of his years as an undersized linebacker at the major midwestern university where he had matriculated. Filling holes in the defensive line, he’d sacrificed his body many times. Wildlife didn’t frighten him. Isolation didn’t psych him. After a couple of days of earnest effort up at the lake, he’d even managed to catch fresh fish for dinner. Without their PDAs, laptops, and cell phones, most of his friends couldn’t catch a cold.
And on top of everything else, the woman who materialized next to him filled out her flannel shirt and faded jeans as effectively and impressively as she did the blank space between himself and the next bar stool over. She was his age or a little younger. Having already essentially won his bet with his friends, he promptly made a private bet with himself.
“Jack and water, Jill,” she told the bartender. With an effort, Walker forbore from articulating the obvious gambit. Even in backwoods downtown Bug Jump, she’d no doubt heard