| OCR Text |
Show Anting Alone Page 213 away almost with Sam's head still in it. "Whatever happened to academic freedom?" Sam screamed after them. His guts were turned inside out completely. In real pain, he screamed inarticulately in several directions for a few minutes. Then he heard the voice. It came from behind him. "Hey. Fut the shuck up." Sam had a weak moment, just before he turned around, when he told himself, Oh Christ. I think I may have changed my mind about this. . . This was Bouncy1s parking lot, the one he guarded all unhired. And it was the Poean Imp of the Perverse which had timed that late luncheon just exactly right, which had brought Sam exactly here, at this specific moment when Bouncy was coming on his self-appointed night watch. Sam turned to face Bouncy. Not so much out of bravery as out of pure delirium - long-standing emotional exhaustion combined with Mexican sun blisters, nose infection, red wine. Sam began to approach Bouncy, or at least to stumble in his general direction. He got one fairly well-focused look at the leather, the rivets, the shaven head, the legs that erupted Borneo python veins even through thick denim: the killer standing in the exact center of a scarlet puddle of transmission fluid from some long-gone car. Sam's mind deserted him like a rat. It went skittering off to other places, left Sam to cross the parking lot alone, mindlessly. . . For the first time in his life Sam's brain began seriously to wonder where his money was going to come from next: his student loan had pissed |
