things they give you when you buy a new furnace, containing your guarantee and operating instructions and numbers to call when you screw them up. They always outlast the furnaces and usually wind up holding family recipes and newspaper clippings. This one was jammed tight with double-spaced, neatly typewritten sheets. It weighed at least three pounds. When I flipped back the cover, the title page went over with it and I was looking at the first page.
In August, after the defoliants have done their work, the trees around the harbor stand naked and it looks like November in Michigan. Only it’s August in Southeast Asia and with no shade to protect it the water gives forth crawling waves of heat like sun on concrete and those fish that are too large to loll in the shade of the sunken timbers lie on the surface with their sunburned fins turning white.
I peeled the title page away from the cover.
Cold Steel, Hot Lead
by
Barry Evan Stackpole
“Barry, you bastard,” I said.
I had suggested the title to him when we were in that hole in Cambodia, and at the time, with Charlie spraying orange tracers into the bushes all around us, it had seemed a pretty good joke, the way a chance reference in a certain context that wouldn’t make you smile on a straight sober morning blows the roof off a late-night party after everyone’s stopped counting his sloe gin fizzes. It had been our toast for a long time and had come to mean nothing more than throwing spilled salt over a shoulder. I’d thought. All the while he’d been writing the book and, no doubt, grinning every time he typed the title at the top of a fresh page.
I riffled the pages with a thumb, reading the numbers. They went up to 462. I’d be the best part of my retainer making copies, and dollars to bullets there was nothing in it that would lead me to where Barry was cooling leather. I cast a glance behind me to make sure the doorway was empty, popped open the steel rings, folded the block of pages inside the topcoat I’d been carrying all day, and replaced them with a like quantity of blank newsprint from one of the shelves in the office. Then I returned to the stack.
It gave up a number of scratch sheets with unidentified telephone numbers written on them, a fresh-looking manila file folder containing dated clippings from old copies of the News and Free Press, and a trio of Detroit Metropolitan telephone directories for the past three years. He’d once told me he never kept personal address or telephone books because they were always getting lost, and that when his mental Rolodex failed him, every other Leap Year Day, there was usually a directory handy. He never forgot an unlisted number. Half the time I had to look up mine. I took down some of the scribbled numbers into my pocket notebook and opened the most recent directory and copied some of the ones circled there in ink. I felt like a goat in the city dump.
There was nothing else for me. I rebuilt the heap, replaced the wire and warning sign so as not to disappoint the bomb detail, took a last quick look around for purloined letters, and left the office carrying the folder full of clippings and the package wrapped in my topcoat. The editor who didn’t like Democrats sat in his cubicle next to Barry’s, scowling at someone’s story on his VDT, and a woman reporter at one of the open desks was changing from high heels into brown loafers. She had slim feet and wore no stockings. Jed Dutt fell into step beside me from somewhere on the way to the copying machine. “Anything?”
“Couple of telephone numbers,” I said. “And this.” I handed him the folder.
He read the clippings as he walked. I adjusted the coat over my left arm, bunching it to conceal the square corners underneath. It was getting heavy.
He said, “Some of these stories are mine from back when I was on cophouse. They go back a few years. What’s the connection?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t have to make copies. I think best on my
In August, after the defoliants have done their work, the trees around the harbor stand naked and it looks like November in Michigan. Only it’s August in Southeast Asia and with no shade to protect it the water gives forth crawling waves of heat like sun on concrete and those fish that are too large to loll in the shade of the sunken timbers lie on the surface with their sunburned fins turning white.
I peeled the title page away from the cover.
Cold Steel, Hot Lead
by
Barry Evan Stackpole
“Barry, you bastard,” I said.
I had suggested the title to him when we were in that hole in Cambodia, and at the time, with Charlie spraying orange tracers into the bushes all around us, it had seemed a pretty good joke, the way a chance reference in a certain context that wouldn’t make you smile on a straight sober morning blows the roof off a late-night party after everyone’s stopped counting his sloe gin fizzes. It had been our toast for a long time and had come to mean nothing more than throwing spilled salt over a shoulder. I’d thought. All the while he’d been writing the book and, no doubt, grinning every time he typed the title at the top of a fresh page.
I riffled the pages with a thumb, reading the numbers. They went up to 462. I’d be the best part of my retainer making copies, and dollars to bullets there was nothing in it that would lead me to where Barry was cooling leather. I cast a glance behind me to make sure the doorway was empty, popped open the steel rings, folded the block of pages inside the topcoat I’d been carrying all day, and replaced them with a like quantity of blank newsprint from one of the shelves in the office. Then I returned to the stack.
It gave up a number of scratch sheets with unidentified telephone numbers written on them, a fresh-looking manila file folder containing dated clippings from old copies of the News and Free Press, and a trio of Detroit Metropolitan telephone directories for the past three years. He’d once told me he never kept personal address or telephone books because they were always getting lost, and that when his mental Rolodex failed him, every other Leap Year Day, there was usually a directory handy. He never forgot an unlisted number. Half the time I had to look up mine. I took down some of the scribbled numbers into my pocket notebook and opened the most recent directory and copied some of the ones circled there in ink. I felt like a goat in the city dump.
There was nothing else for me. I rebuilt the heap, replaced the wire and warning sign so as not to disappoint the bomb detail, took a last quick look around for purloined letters, and left the office carrying the folder full of clippings and the package wrapped in my topcoat. The editor who didn’t like Democrats sat in his cubicle next to Barry’s, scowling at someone’s story on his VDT, and a woman reporter at one of the open desks was changing from high heels into brown loafers. She had slim feet and wore no stockings. Jed Dutt fell into step beside me from somewhere on the way to the copying machine. “Anything?”
“Couple of telephone numbers,” I said. “And this.” I handed him the folder.
He read the clippings as he walked. I adjusted the coat over my left arm, bunching it to conceal the square corners underneath. It was getting heavy.
He said, “Some of these stories are mine from back when I was on cophouse. They go back a few years. What’s the connection?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t have to make copies. I think best on my
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