The Hanging of Samuel Ash by Sheldon Russell

disappeared in quantities, dragged to the counter by satisfied patrons who would read away the summer at bargain prices.
    Hook picked up a first-edition Sherwood Anderson, and Exiles, A Play, by James Joyce. He spotted a first edition of Cabbages and Kings, by O. Henry, under a stack of magazines. But the Baskervilles, the one book he wanted most, could not be found.
    He filled out the remainder of his purchases with reading copies of whatever struck his fancy, and by then the stack had dwindled to a few ragged pulps and a random assortment of encyclopedias.
    Hook placed his purchases on the floor next to the overstuffed chair by the newspaper rack and sat down for a rest.
    At what point the thought came to him, he couldn’t be sure. In fact, it might not have been a thought at all, at least not a conscious thought, but a feeling, a drawing by some force from outside of himself.
    He rose and worked his way into the stacks, and there it sat on the shelf with its crimson cover. He pulled it down and took it back to his chair to peruse.
    He thumbed its pages, and the smell of time and promise rose up from them. This copy, were it his, would bring closure to a collection he had worked on for a good long while.
    Looking around, he slipped it into his stack of bargain books, gathered them up, and made his way to the counter.

 
    10
    Â 
    B ACK AT THE caboose, Hook filled Mixer’s water dish before laying out the day’s acquisitions. When he came to the Hound of the Baskervilles he’d taken from the library, a small knot twisted in the back of his throat. He’d never considered himself a thief, except for the usual childhood transgressions: a pack of cigarettes from his father’s nightstand and a comic book from the drugstore, which he’d hidden for days in a coffee can buried under the front porch.
    So maybe it hadn’t been right, him taking the book like that, but then he could trade it out, couldn’t he? His London edition would be considered in very good condition by even the most meticulous collector. Anyway, the library and its patrons would never know the difference. They could not care less about editions and points and impressions. Such things mattered only in the minds of collectors with their obsessions for rarity.
    Taking his knife out, he removed the library-card pocket from the American first and attached it to the London edition, after which he slipped the book under his belt and pulled his shirt down over it.
    He waited until nearly closing time before returning to the library, where he placed the London edition on the shelf.
    The librarian, who stood behind the checkout counting the day’s receipts, only nodded as Hook made his way out the door.
    *   *   *
    Mixer awakened him at eight with a slurp across his ear.
    Hook sat up and rubbed his cheek dry with his shoulder. “Damn it, Mixer,” he said. “Can’t you hold it?” Mixer went to the door and whined. “Okay, okay,” Hook said, looking for his shoes.
    Determined to make up for the money he’d spent on books the day before, Hook skipped breakfast and walked to the signal department in the yards. The smell of oil and grease filled the morning, and the drum of idling diesels pooled in his core as he picked his way over the tracks. Pigeons pranced on the roof of the roundhouse like sentries and chortled their disapproval.
    He found the day shift just arriving, men in overalls and denim shirts with their lunch boxes in tow. Slope Hurley, the signal foreman, sat on the tailgate of the crew truck.
    They called him Slope because, according to Slope himself, his skull had been squeezed through a birth canal no bigger than a banana. So narrow had been the passageway that he shot out like a champagne cork and with his skull cast into a permanent ski slope. Slope claimed that he remembered the exact moment still after fifty-odd years, though he was just a newborn at the time.
    Hook