When the Stars Come Out by Rob Byrnes Page A

smiled sheep-
    ishly in return.
    His view temporarily blocked by a row of passing tour buses,
    Noah tried to make a quick decision. Should he be bold, and dart
    across the street while he still had the light? Or should he walk
    W H E N T H E S T A R S C O M E O U T
    65
    away, and recognize this for what it was: a chance series of encounters?
    The decision was one that, in the end, he didn’t have to make.
    Because when the buses were gone, so was the stranger.
    Anxiously, he scanned the sidewalk, looking up and down Sixth
    Avenue, but he had completely vanished.
    Noah thought, How the hell does someone disappear like that? Where did he go? And he cursed himself again for letting opportunity slip through his fingers.
    Well, that was strange, Bart thought, as he turned the corner and walked west on Fifty-first Street. Three days, three different parts of Manhattan . . . what were the odds?
    As he approached Seventh Avenue, he thought about those
    odds a little bit more. Running into someone at Bar 51: common.
    Seeing that person a second time near the Whitney: not common,
    but not freakishly uncommon. But coming across the same man
    the next day on Sixth Avenue? Unlikely. Very unlikely.
    Which left two possibilities: either Bart was meant to meet this
    man, or this man was stalking him. He hoped that this wasn’t an-
    other stalker. The last one—the guy he had merely kissed outside
    an East Village bar one night, unfortunately after handing out his cell phone number—had called so frequently and persistently for
    months afterward that Bart was finally forced to change his num-
    ber.
    So if this new guy was a stalker . . . no . Bart tried to put the thought out of his head. It was good to be cautious, but bad to close himself off. He felt he led too cloistered of a life as it was.
    As he waited at the crosswalk for the light to change, so he could cross Seventh Avenue, he had the strongest impulse to dash back to Sixth, to see if the guy from the bar was still looking for him in the shadow of Radio City Music Hall. If he wasn’t a stalker, he might be as intrigued by the coincidences as Bart was. But he fought the impulse back. He had responsibilities.
    He met his first—and, really, only—responsibility when he reached
    Eighth Avenue, where he popped into the parking garage in which
    he had hidden the car three days earlier for its five-night stay, check-ing it for any overnight dents or dings. He probably would have
    66
    R o b B y r n e s
    made this inspection if it were his own car; the fact that it was borrowed from his employer made the inspection imperative. After
    finding the car and giving it a careful eyeballing, he left the garage, satisfied that it had made it through the night intact.
    His next responsibility, the optional one, was at the video store
    next to the garage, where he asked the clerk if some old movies were available yet on DVD. The clerk—young even to Bart, who still considered himself quite young—had never heard of the titles.
    “ Sweet Svetlana ? Darling, I’m Darling ?”
    “Yeah.” Bart was already impatient, having been on the hunt
    without success for months.
    “Let me check.”
    The clerk went to work on his computer terminal, carefully con-
    firming the spelling of the movies with Bart as he slowly typed.
    Finally, he looked up from the screen.
    “I found the Svetlana DVD,” he announced triumphantly.
    “Is it out?”
    “Mid-October. Part of the Kitty Randolph box set.”
    Bart frowned. “Can I order it without the Kitty Randolph movies?”
    He couldn’t; it was all or nothing, so—when the clerk couldn’t
    tell him the names of the other titles in the set—Bart took nothing and let himself out of the store.
    Responsibilities over, he walked another block west until he
    reached Ninth Avenue. Bart hadn’t really intended to stop at Bar
    51 again—not consciously, at least—but he had no better idea on
    how to kill some time, and he liked the place. At least no one at