The girl behind the monitor’s name was Bailey. She unlocked a little office upstairs in the back so Carynne could make a few phone calls, but C. instead sat and motioned for me to close the door behind me and join her. “Mister Zee’s off the edge,” she said as she sat down behind an […]
I was neither worried nor upset by the fact that Ziggy was nowhere to be found when we left the hotel. Digger and Carynne were both around, and managing him was their job now. As it turned out he was sitting on the loading dock of the music hall when we pulled up, holding hands […]
The lobby clock showed two a.m. when I walked to the elevators, now feeling a little itchy for a shower. When I got up to the suite I heard people laughing inside and I knocked instead of opening the door with the key. Bart opened it. “Here you are!” I stepped past him and saw […]
If in other towns I’d had trouble because there was nowhere to go, in San Francisco I almost had the opposite problem. It was hard to decide where to go for all the choices. In the end I took a cab to Castro Street where, even with the night chill in the air, there were […]
We were still sitting there on the couch some half hour later, Ziggy telling a long involved story about where he got the idea for “Cross to Bear,” most of which I was pretty sure was fiction, when there was a thumping knock on the door. Carynne must have left the room entirely since she […]
Susan Walsh set a tape recorder on the coffee table and cleared her throat. “Oh, yeah, ” she said brightly, as if she was picking up a piece of earlier conversation, even though we hadn’t had any conversation yet, “Michael said to apologize for him.” Blank stares from our side. “Who?” I said.
When the wakeup call came I was lying face down on top of my left hand and my thumb was numb. Bart picked the receiver up and then lay back groaning. Sunlight lined the blackout curtains like white fire. I sat up and shook my hand. “Shit.” “Wha’d you do?” Bart said, standing up and […]