“Madam,” he said, “would you consider doing me a small favor?” Her smile was replaced with a look of caution.

“It depends on what it is, but I’m not in the habit of doing favors for strangers.” That, of course, was an understatement. She wasn’t even used to talking to strangers. He looked almost embarrassed, and this had a reassuring effect on her.

“Yes, well, I suppose it’ll sound odd, but it might benefit both of us. My name is Lefferts, by the way. Rob Lefferts.”

“Rosie McClendon,” she said. She thought about holding out her hand and rejected the idea. Probably she shouldn’t even have given him her name.

“I really don’t think I have time to do any favors, Mr Lefferts-I’m running a little late, and-”

“Please.” He put down his weary briefcase, reached into the small brown bag he was holding in his other hand, and brought out one of the old paperbacks he’d found inside the pawnshop. On the cover was a stylized picture of a man in a black-and-white-striped prison outfit stepping into what might have been a cave or the mouth of a tunnel.

“All I want is for you to read the first paragraph of this book. Out loud.”

“Here?” She looked around.

“Right here on the street? In heaven’s name, why?” He only repeated

“Please,” and she took the book, thinking that if she did as he asked, she might be able to get away from him without any further foolishness. That would be fine, because she was starting to think he was a little nuts. Maybe not dangerous, but nuts, all the same. And if he did turn out to be dangerous, she wanted to find out while the Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn-and Bill Steiner-was still within dashing distance. The name of the book was Dark Passage, the author David Goodis. As she paged past the copyright notice, Rosie decided it wasn’t surprising she’d never heard of him (although the tide of the novel rang a faint bell); Dark Passage had been published in 1946, sixteen years before she was born. She looked up at Rob Lefferts. He nodded eagerly at her, almost vibrating with anticipation… and hope? How could that be? But it certainly looked like hope. Feeling a little excited herself now (like calls to like, her mother had often said), Rosie began to read. The first paragraph was short, at least.

“It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life. But there was too much on the other side and on his side of it there was practically nothing. The jury decided he was guilty. The judge handed him a life sentence and he was taken to San Quentin.” She looked up, closed the book, held it out to him.

“Okay?” He was smiling, clearly delighted.

“Very much okay, Ms McClendon. Now wait… just one more… humor me…”

He went paging rapidly through the book, then handed it back to her.

“Just the dialogue, please. The scene is between Parry and a cab-driver. From

“Well, it’s funny.” Do you see it?” She saw, and this time she didn’t demur. She had decided Lefferts wasn’t dangerous, and that maybe he wasn’t crazy, either. Also, she still felt that queer sense of excitement, as if something really interesting was going to happen… or was happening already. Yes, sure, you bet, the voice inside told her happily. The picture, Rosie-remember? Sure, of course. The picture. Just thinking of it lifted her heart and made her feel lucky.

“This is very peculiar,” she said, but she was smiling. She couldn’t help herself. He nodded, and she had an idea that he would have nodded in exacdy the same way if she’d told him her name was Madame Bovary.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure it seems that way, but… do you see where I want you to start?”

“Uh-huh.” She scanned the dialogue quickly, trying to get a sense of who these people were from what they were saying. The cab-driver was easy; she quickly formed a mental picture of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners reruns they showed on Channel 18 in the afternoons. Parry was a little harder-generic hero, she supposed, comes in a white can. Oh, well; it was no big deal either way. She cleared her throat and began, quickly forgetting that she was standing on a busy streetcorner with a wrapped painting under her arm, unaware of the curious glances she and Lefferts were drawing.

“"Well, it’s funny,” the driver said.

“From faces I can tell what people think. I can tell what they do. Sometimes I can even tell who they are… you, for instance.”

“"All right, me. What about me?”

“'You’re a guy with troubles.”

“I don’t have a trouble in the world,” Parry said.

“"Don’t tell me, brother,” the driver said.

“I know. I know people. I’ll tell you something else. Your trouble is women.”

“"Strike one. I’m happily married."” Suddenly, just like that, she had a voice for Parry: he was James Woods, nervous and high-strung, but with a brittle sense of humor. This delighted her and she went on, warming to the story now, seeing a scene from a movie that had never been made inside her head-Jackie Gleason and James Woods sparring in a cab that was racing through the streets of some anonymous city after dark.

“"Call it a two-base hit. You’re not married. But you used to be, and it wasn’t happy.”

“"Oh, I get it. You were there. You were hiding in the closet all the time.”

“The driver said, “I’ll tell you about her. She wasn’t easy to get along with. She wanted things. The more she got, the more she wanted. And she always got what she wanted. That’s the picture."” Rosie had reached the bottom of the page. Feeling a strange chill up her back, she silently handed the book back to Lefferts, who now looked happy enough to hug himself.

“Your voice is absolutely wonderful!” he told her.

“Low but not drony, melodious and very clear, with no definable accent-I knew all that at once, but voice alone means very little. You can read, though! You can actually read!”

“Of course I can read,” Rosie said. She didn’t know whether to be amused or exasperated. “do I look like I was raised by wolves?”

“No, of course not, but often even very good readers aren’t able to read aloud-even if they don’t actually stumble over the words, they have very little in the way of expression. And dialogue is much tougher than narration… the acid test, one might say. But I heard two different people. I actually heard them!”

“Yes, so did I. Mr Lefferts, I really have to go now. I-”

He reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder as she started to turn away. A woman with a bit more experience of the world would have known an audition, even one on a streetcorner, for what it was and consequently would not have been entirely surprised by what Lefferts said next. Rosie, however, was stunned to temporary silence when he cleared his throat and offered her a job.

At the moment Rob Lefferts was listening to his fugitive wife read on a streetcorner, Norman Daniels was sitting in his small office cubicle on the fourth floor of police headquarters with his feet up on his desk and his hands laced behind his head. It was the first time in years that it had been possible for him to put his feet up; under ordinary circumstances, his desk was heaped high with forms, fast-food wrappers, half-written reports, departmental circulars, memos, and other assorted trash. Norman was not the sort of man who picks up after himself without thinking about it (in just five weeks the house which Rosie kept pin-neat across all the years had come to look quite a bit like Miami after Hurricane Andrew), and usually his office reflected this, but now it looked positively austere. He had spent most of the day cleaning it out, taking three large plastic garbage bags full of swill down to the waste-disposal site in the basement, not wanting to leave the job to the nigger women who came in to clean between midnight and six on weekday mornings. What was left to niggers didn’t get done-this was a lesson Norman’s father had taught him, and it was a true lesson. There was one basic fact which the politicians and the do-gooders either could not or would not understand: niggers didn’t understand work. It was their African temperament. Norman ran his gaze slowly across the top of his desk, upon which nothing now rested but his feet and his phone, then shifted his eyes to the wall on his right. For years this had been papered with want-sheets, hot-sheets, lab results, and takeout menus-not to mention his calendar with pending court-dates noted in red-but now it was completely bare. He finished his visual tour by noting the stack of cardboard liquor cartons by the door. As he did so, he reflected how unpredictable life was. He had a temper, and he would have been the first to admit it. That his temper had a way of getting him in trouble and keeping him in trouble was also something he would have freely admitted. And if, a year ago, he had been granted a vision of his office as it was today, he would have drawn a simple conclusion from it: his temper had finally gotten him into a jam he couldn’t wiggle out of, and he had been canned. Either he had finally piled up enough reprimands in his jacket to warrant dismissal under departmental rules, or he had been caught really hurting someone, as he supposed he had really hurt the little spick, Ramon Sanders. The idea that it mattered if a queerboy like Ramon got hurt a little was ridiculous, of course-Saint Anthony he was not-but you had to abide by the rules of the game… or at least not be caught breaking them. It was like not saying out loud that niggers didn’t understand the concept of work, although everybody (everybody white, at least) knew it. But he was not being canned. He was moving, that was all. Moving from this shitty little cubicle which had been home since the first year of the Bush Presidency. Moving into a real office, where the walls went all the way up to the ceiling and came all the way down to the floor. Not canned; promoted. It made him think of a Chuck Berry song, one that went C'est la vie, it goes to show you never can tell. The bust had happened, the big one, and things couldn’t have gone better for him if he’d written the script himself. An almost unbelievable transmutation had taken place: his ass had turned to gold, at least around here. It had been a city-wide crack ring, the sort of combine you never get whole and complete… except this time he had. Everything had fallen into place; it had been like rolling a dozen straight sevens at a crap-table in Atlantic City and doubling your money every time. His team had ended up arresting over twenty people, half a dozen of them really big bugs, and the busts were righteous-not so much as a whiff of entrapment. The D.A. was probably reaching heights of orgasm unmatched since cornholing his cocker spaniel back in junior high school. Norman, who had once believed he might end up being prosecuted by that geeky little fuck if he couldn’t manage to put a checkrein on his temper, had become the D.A.’s fair-haired boy. Chuck Berry had been right: you never could tell.