Read Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said for Free Online Page B

everyone with me to the pols. I haven’t done very well here. Except that, as she says, I’ve got allure. Jesus, he thought. And that’s all that stands between me and a forced-labor camp.
    “Okay,” he said, then. It seemed the wiser choice—by far.
    “Go pay Eddy,” she said. “Get that over with and him out of here.”
    “I wondered why he’s still hanging around,” Jason said. “Did he scent more money?”
    “I guess so,” Kathy said.
    “You do this all the time,” Jason said as he got out his money. SOP: standard operating procedure. And he had tumbled for it.
    Kathy said blithely, “Eddy is psionic.”

4
    Two city blocks away, upstairs in an unpainted but once white wooden building, Kathy had a single room with a hot-compart in which to fix one-person meals.
    He looked around him. A girl’s room: the cotlike bed had a handmade spread covering it, tiny green balls of textile fibers in row after row. Like a graveyard for soldiers, he thought morbidly as he moved about, feeling compressed by the smallness of the room.
    On a wicker table a copy of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
.
    “How far’d you get into it?” he asked her.
    “To
Within a Budding Grove
.” Kathy double-locked the door after them and set into operation some kind of electronic gadget; he did not recognize it.
    “That’s not very far,” Jason said.
    Taking off her plastic coat, Kathy asked, “How far did you get into it?” She hung her coat in a tiny closet, taking his, too.
    “I never read it,” Jason said. “But on my program we did a dramatic rendering of a scene…I don’t know which. We got a lot of good mail about it, but we never tried it again. Those out things, you have to be careful and not dole out too much. If you do it kills it dead for everybody, all networks, for the rest of the year.” He prowled, crampedly, about the room, examining a book here, a cassette tape, a micromag. She even had a talking toy. Like a kid, he thought; she’s not really an adult.
    With curiosity, he turned on the talking toy.
    “Hi!” it declared. “I’m Cheerful Charley and I’m definitely tuned in on your wavelength.”
    “Nobody named Cheerful Charley is tuned in on my wave-length,” Jason said. He started to shut it off, but it protested. “Sorry,” Jason told it, “but I’m tuning you out, you creepy little bugger.”
    “But I love you!” Cheerful Charley complained tinnily.
    He paused, thumb on off button. “Prove it,” he said. On his show he had done commercials for junk like this. He hated it and them. Equally. “Give me some money,” he told it.
    “I know how you can get back your name, fame, and game,” Cheerful Charley informed him. “Will that do for openers?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    Cheerful Charley bleated, “Go look up your girl friend.”
    “Who do you mean?” he said guardedly.
    “Heather Hart,” Cheerful Charley bleeped.
    “Hard by,” Jason said, pressing his tongue against his upper incisors. He nodded. “Any more advice?”
    “I’ve heard of Heather Hart,” Kathy said as she brought a bottle of orange juice out of the cold-cupboard of the room’s wall. The bottle had already become three-fourths empty; she shook it up, poured foamy instant ersatz orange juice into two jelly glasses. “She’s beautiful. She has all that long red hair. Is she really your girl friend? Is Charley right?”
    “Everybody knows,” he said, “that Cheerful Charley is always right.”
    “Yes, I guess that’s true.” Kathy poured bad gin (Mount-batten’s Privy Seal Finest) into the orange juice. “Screw-drivers,” she said, proudly.
    “No, thanks,” he said. “Not at this hour of the day.” Not even B & L scotch bottled in Scotland, he thought. This damn little room…isn’t she making anything out of pol-finking and card-forging, whichever it is she does? Is she really a police informer, as she says? he wondered. Strange. Maybe she’s both. Maybe neither.
    “Ask me!” Cheerful