The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan Page B

houses, or at least no one I could see. I got up and stretched and ambled across the street, just your average wired guy out strolling at the crack of dawn, and then I ducked under the arbors and ran, half bent over, to the wall of the house that faced the street, positioning myself against a section of clapboard between two large windows.
    I heard singing, and the window to my left lit up. Growing in front of it was some sort of bush that someone who knew something about bushes could probably have identified. With the low arbors behind me I felt secure from the street, so I sidled like a good moth toward the light and waited behind the bush, peering through the gossamer or crinoline or whatever it was for all to be revealed.
    What was revealed, eventually, was a woman in her late seventies having tea with her breakfast. I learned a new way to break and eat a soft-boiled egg, and I learned that Mrs. Summerson used linen napkins even when she ate alone and that she refolded them neatly to present a clean surface each time she touched one to her lips, which was often, and in general I learned that my standards of gentility were precariously low. Abandoning the light, I left her to her protein and checked every window I could see through and found the rooms on the other side empty. No lamps came on anywhere else in the house. If Mrs. Summerson was secretly playing host to Uncle Lo or to several thousand tong members, they were apparently breakfasting in the rooms upstairs. In the dark.
    The orange rim of the sun was barging its way over the horizon by the time I arrived at the Chan apartment and found all the lights blazing away. I went up the stairs two at a time to try to burn off a little of the caffeine and walked into bedlam.
    Pansy was on her knees in the corner, directly below the cross that Mrs. Chan, who took no chances where religion was concerned, had hung next to the family's Taoist shrine. Horace was pacing the rug around the dining-room table in precise rectangles, changing direction every time he reached the chair at the head of the table. He was holding his wristwatch in his hand. Eleanor was pouring coffee onto her wrist, missing a cup on top of the television set by inches, staring at me.
    “How—but how did you know?” she sputtered.
    “Know what?”
    The coffee hit her foot, and she looked down. “Lord,” she said, without force, “look at that. He's called, Simeon. He called about twenty minutes ago.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Just said hold tight, he'd call back.” She picked up the cup and poured into it, rattling it badly against the spout of the coffeepot, and extended it to me.
    “Thanks anyway,” I said, feeling something hot rise in the back of my throat.
    She nodded absently and started to look at her watch. She was holding the cup in the hand that had the watch on it, so I reached out and took the cup before she dumped coffee all over her stomach. Since I had it, I drank some.
    “What time, what time?” Pansy demanded, getting up from her place of worship. Her pillow had pressed her hair flat on the left side of her head, and her cheeks were flaming red. She'd buttoned her blouse crooked.
    “Five-eighteen,” Horace said, reversing direction around the table. He looked like one of the wooden soldiers in The Nutcracker. “Five-nineteen,” he corrected himself, staring at the watch in his hand as he marched. He walked into a chair and knocked it over.
    The phone rang.
    Everybody stopped dead.
    “Simeon,” Eleanor said. “The extension in the bedroom. Horace, you take this one. Pick up, both of you, at the end of the third ring.” Pansy stood absolutely still in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front of her stomach like an old-fashioned opera singer about to embark on the big aria.
    The bedroom was a mess, blankets thrown to the floor and clothes spilling out of the closet. I unplugged the cord leading into the handset, lifted the handset, and plugged the cord back in at