It

tight in the tits!’
‘Have Delores let one of them out,’ he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them famous rich people, everything had to look just right. These shoes no longer looked just right . . . but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would —
But then the blackness threatened and he felt his throat beginning to close up. Eddie realized with real panic that he had packed the whole damned drugstore and had left the most important thing of all — his aspirator — downstairs on top of the stereo cabinet.
He banged the suitcase closed and latched it. He looked around at Myra, who was standing there in the hallway with her hand pressed against the short thick column of her neck as if she were the one with the asthma. She was staring at him, her face full of perplexity and terror, and he might have felt sorry for her if his heart had not already been so filled with terror for himself.
‘What’s happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, aren’t you? What kind of trouble are you in?’
He walked toward her, zipper-bag in one hand and suitcase in the other, standing more or less straight now that he was more evenly weighted. She moved in front of him, blocking off the stairway, and at first he thought she would not give way. Then, when his face was about to crash into the soft roadblock of her breasts, she did give way . . . fearfully. As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears.
‘I can’t drive Al Pacino!’ she bawled. ‘I’ll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I’m scaaarrred!’
He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The canned-sounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Maine — that one had left La Guardia at eight-twenty-five. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Perm Station at eleven-thirty. It would drop him off at South Station, where he could take a cab to the offices of Cape Cod Limousine on Arlington Street. Cape Cod and Eddie’s company, Royal Crest, had worked out a useful and friendly reciprocal arrangement over the years. A quick call to Butch Carrington in Boston had taken care of his transportation north — Butch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no pain-in-the –ass client sitting in the back seat, stinking the air up with a big cigar and asking if Eddie knew where he could score a broad or a few grams of coke or both.
Going in style, all right, he thought. Only way you could go in more style would be if you were going in a hearse. But don’t worry, Eddie — that’s probably how you’ll come back. If there’s enough of you left to pick up, that is.
‘Eddie?’
Nine-twenty. Plenty of time to talk to her, plenty of time to be kind. Ah, but it would have been so much better if this had been her whist night, if he could have just slipped out, leaving a note under one of the magnets on the refrigerator door (the refrigerator door was where he left all his notes for Myra, because there she never missed them). Leaving that way — like a fugitive — would not have been good, but this was even worse. This was like having to leave home all over again, and that had been so hard he’d had to do it three times.
Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Unfortunately, it’s also the place where, once you’re in there, they don’t ever want to let you out.
He stood at the head of the stairs, forward motion temporarily spent, filled with fear, breath wheezing noisily in and out of the pinhole his throat had become, and regarded