The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams by Richard Sanders

however, wasn’t quite as satisfying. Wooly was
pissed to high hell by the day’s shooting, by Alex Tarkashian’s
rude words. Genevieve, Nickie and I listened while he ranted about
the sheer amount of nutjobbery he’d been subjected to. And when
Genevieve pointed out that, even though someone had tried to kill
him, it didn’t take, he flew off the roof. It would’ve been nice,
he said, if she’d shed at least one tear after the ordeal. She said
she had shed a
tear—several of them, in fact. He said he hadn’t noticed a one.
Then you weren’t looking, she said, because they were big , big tears. Didn’t matter, he said,
his days were numbered. Time was only moving in one
direction.
    And speaking of time, he
thought I was wasting mine on Monte Slater. All I was doing was
jig-jagging around, in his humble opinion. The whole question of
Monte, as he put it, was as interesting as porn after you’ve shot
your wad.
    More cheese
sauce?
    No, the true bane of his
existence, he said, was Georgiana Copely. She’s like a horrible human being—I think I might’ve
mentioned this.
    Monte, on the other hand,
his only sin was being deadly broke. And having no regard for
testing. Speaking of which, he was going to take me on a tour of
Material Witness tomorrow. It’ll be fun.
I’m fun to be with.
    But not tonight. He
couldn’t maintain his manic flow. Conversation ebbed, trickled to a
chit-chat stream and lapped into silence. Toward the end of the
meal, all that was left was the clinking of knives and forks on the
plates.
    Wooly said he was tired,
drained by the day’s travails. He was even going to skip dessert, a
startling announcement in itself. He was going to turn in early—he
really needed to pack some zzzs away.
     
    >>>>>>
     
    Nickie and I helped
Genevieve clean up. She said she knew her husband’s sanity could
wear dangerously thin at times—just the way he is. The first time
someone shot at him, she said, he came home and fixated on eggs.
Decided they had too many eggs in the house. He took them all out,
boiled them up and made a gigantic bowl of egg salad. Then he
forced everyone who walked in the door to eat egg salad sandwiches.
That included Genevieve, people from the factory who came to see if
he was all right, Alex Tarkashian when he came to interview him
again. Of course that wasn’t enough so he took the bowl to work and
insisted all his employees have an egg salad sandwich.
    “I think every person is
like a drug,” said Genevieve. “We all come with side effects. You
always have to ask yourself, if I’m going to be with this person,
if I’m going to take this drug, can I handle the side
effects?”
     
    >>>>>>
     
    When Genevieve went to
bed, Nickie and I stayed at the kitchen table. We did a lot of
talking—how to survive Wooly World, how to get by working in
agencies, how you’re always asking can I find a place here for
myself? We talked about cases we’d worked, people we might’ve
known.
    Something seemed to happen
to her face as the night went on. It seemed to slowly unfold to me,
like a flower coming to bloom. I paid more and more attention to
the dark honey color of her skin, her chocolate eyes, her white
teeth. Even the scars came to seem natural, as if any woman
wouldn’t want them there.
    Of course, I tend to think
highly of any woman who saves my life.
    At one point she was in
the mood for something sweet. She missed having dessert. A jar of
homemade plum cherry jam was sitting on a shelf in the
refrigerator. She brought it to the table with a spoon, began
eating it out of the jar. It’s delicious, she said. Try
some.
    I took a big heaping
spoonful and managed to get half of it in my mouth. The other half
fell plop on the table.
    “Such a mess you’re
making,” she said.
    “I’ll get a
sponge.”
    “Hold on.”
    She scooped the jam up
with her fingers and smeared it on my face. On my right cheek, the
same place her scars were. I just sat there, totally