Track 19

The shoplifter was dressed exactly like a movie shoplifter in wrinkled grey cotton slacks and stained parka, set off with a five-day beard and fuzzy, aging rasta braids. Half-hanging from the arms of the cops who were wearing yellow rubber gloves, he said, Hey!

Devonport! That you, Louis? Louis didn't look so good. His weight was down fifty pounds and maybe more since the last time Lucas had seen him. It's me, Louis said. You look sort of fucked up, Lucas said, licking the cone.

Got the AIDS man. His eyes turned up to Lucas, and Lucas could see that the whites were going yellow. Ah, Jesus, Louis. Gonna get you sooner or later, Louis said. Louis wasn't exactly gay, but he was for sale.

Don't plead out. Take the jail time, Lucas said. Louis was insulted. Hey, what you think I'm doing? Getting caught. Lucas said, don't pass it on, man. You get in there, you sleep on your back.

Louis' eyes turned back to the floor. What's gonna happen? Gonna happen. What it is, is what it is. Let's talk to the sheriff's guys," one of the uniforms said. Lucas nodded and ambled on, looking in store windows, said hello to a salesman at the Hubert White Men's Store.

Let himself get pulled inside to look in an Italian summer suit, a steel at $2,495, and then crossed Nicolette Mall on the Skyway Bridge to Macy's and found cosmetics. A woman in a white jacket behind the Dior counter was staring into space.

He walked through the space and she didn't blink. Charlene Mobry? Now she blinked, took him in, sighed and turned and looked down the counter at another woman in a white jacket, who was rearranging a shelf of ota-kolone bottles.