Текст книги "Death Wish"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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It bothered him: was Sam really chagrined? Did he feel it would be awkward? Maybe Paul shouldn’t have asked.…

“I know exactly what you mean,” Dundee was saying. “That time Anne was in the hospital, the kids all away at school—I was never so happy as when she got home and on her feet again. I suppose it makes me a male chauvinist pig, but I swear to God they bulk that frozen dreck with sawdust and cast-iron filings.”

A smell was bothering Paul; sicksweet and thick. He finally ascertained it was Dundee’s barber-shave.

Dundee’s smile had gone rigid—as if he had jut realized his anecdote had been misplaced. Anne had come home from the hospital after her operation. Esther would never come home again. It was what Dundee was thinking: he always wore his thoughts on his face: and Paul couldn’t think of a way to dispel Dundee’s guilt without making things even more tedious and awkward than they were already. The best thing to do was overlook it, pretend he was oblivious to it, press on. He said as quickly as he could, “I began to get the very distinct feeling things around here were starting to fall apart in my absence. So I have returned. Partly to see whose fingers I might catch in the cookie jar”—a laugh, too loud and hearty, from Dundee—“and partly to start undoing all the damage you guys must have been doing to my clients’ affairs.”

Sam Kreutzer said, “As a matter of fact we were talking over one of your clients just now when you came in. Nemserman. Son of a bitch really got his tail caught in a crack, didn’t he.”

“Has he been bugging you?”

“He calls every day or two, wanting to know how soon you’ll be back in harness. He told me to convey his sympathies, by the way.”

Paul wondered if that was true. He doubted it; Nemserman lacked that brand of consideration. Probably Sam had made it up on the spur of the moment because it was something that ought to be said.

Dundee said, “I talked to him yesterday—Sam was out when he called. He must’ve been calling from some bookie joint—the background noise was unbelievable.”

“What’d he have to say?”

“Number one, when was Paul Benjamin going to quit sitting on his ass and get back to work. I’m quoting more or less verbatim. Number two, he seems to have learned a lesson—temporarily anyway—from getting stung on that unearned income he thought was a capital gain. He instructed his broker to double-check back with him for six-month spans every time he takes a notion to sell a block of stock. Number three, he said this problem has brought to mind another difficulty and he wanted to discuss it.”

“And did he?”

“Well, yes. I don’t mean to get sly with your clients, Paul—I’ve put all of them off, I’m not trying to steal your people away from you. But Nemserman’s been hot under the collar for the past week. I finally broke down and gave him the advice he was looking for.”

“Advice about what?”

“Well, he’s got a suitcase full of blue-chips he’s had for a thousand years. I mean he’s been holding some of the damn things since Roosevelt’s first administration.”

“Franklin,” Sam Kreutzer said drily, “or Teddy?”

Dundee said, “If he sells the things now, of course, he’ll have to pay a whopping capital gains tax on the increment. Some of those things have gone up in the past forty years, counting splits and stock dividends, from ten dollars to six hundred dollars. He was desperate to find a way to avoid paying out all that loot.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Told him to establish some trusts and sink the stocks into the trusts. Then just hang on to them. If he keeps them until he dies they’ll pass on to his heirs, and the heirs can sell it without paying capital gains tax. And if he puts the stocks in trust for his heirs, it’ll help get around some of the estate taxes.”

Dundee was talking too much and too fast. Paul tried to set him at ease. “That’s exactly what I’d have told him, Bill. Don’t worry about it. I don’t think he’ll take your advice anyway, but at least he won’t be able to complain later that we fouled him up.”

Sam Kreutzer said, “Why won’t he do it?”

“Far as I know he’s only got two heirs—a sister and a nephew—and he hates their guts.”

“Then why doesn’t he set up a charitable foundation?”

“I’ve been trying to talk him into that for years. He keeps saying he’ll get around to it. He never will. Hasn’t got a charitable bone in his body.”

“So he’ll leave it all to two people he hates, and let the Government grab most of it on inheritance taxes. Well, I doubt he gives a damn what happens to it after he’s dead. It’s all monopoly money to guys like Nemserman. It’s the way they keep score in the games they play. Once Nemserman dies and the game ends, who cares what happens to the chips?”

Dundee said, “I wish I could afford to look at it that way.”

Paul settled into a chair. “Maybe he’s right. There are times I’m convinced there’s nothing more to existence in this world than a black desert where blind people pick up rocks and grope around to kill one another.”

He hadn’t meant to get onto that; it had been on the back of his tongue and he had let it slip out. When he saw how they reacted to it he regretted having spoken. Dundee was suddenly busy trying to find a neutral corner on which to settle his attention and Sam Kreutzer fixed his stare against the knot of Paul’s necktie and said, “Well sure, Paul, I guess we know how you feel. I imagine things will look a little less bleak to you as time goes by.”

“I doubt it,” Paul said—evenly, without force; he didn’t want to get into a heated dispute but he felt there were things inside him that needed airing. “Remember that piece in the Sunday Times Magazine? We read those things all the time but we don’t really buy them. You don’t believe these things actually happen—not until they happen to you personally.”

“You can’t blame people, Paul. They’re exposed to it night and day—they get jaded with it. It’s like crying ‘wolf’—people hear about crime in the streets so often and so regularly that it ceases to have any meaning for them. And maybe that’s a good thing. We all need some kind of defense mechanism—otherwise we’d all be stark raving mad.”

Carol.…

Deliberately he forced himself forward. “Sam, it’s got to have some kind of effect when you read how even seeing-eye dogs are having nervous breakdowns from the strain of living in this city. They’re knifing policemen right in the precinct squad rooms—doesn’t it mean something that in the city of New York you can’t walk into some police stations without ringing the doorbell and waiting to be buzzed in?”

“Why do you think we’re trying to find a place to live outside the city?” Sam’s implication was clear.

“Maybe that’s the answer, I don’t know. Maybe—maybe Esther would still be.…”

“Oh Christ, Paul, try to take it easy, will you?”

“I’m all right. I’m not about to break down all over your carpet, Sam. It’s just that I’ve been doing a lot of reconsidering these last few days. It’s not easy to realize that you just may have dedicated a good part of your life to a group of causes that turn out to be dead wrong.”

Sam shook his head. “I can’t believe that, Paul—and neither will you when you’ve had time to settle down and put this vicious thing behind you.”

The conversation wasn’t continued until that evening because Paul’s reply was cut off by the arrival in Sam’s office of Henry Ives, the senior partner. “Marilyn told us you’d come in. Glad to see you, Paul—glad to see you.”

Paul shook the knobby old hand. The rigidity of Ives’s coin-slot mouth was a clue to his unease. “I can’t tell you how sorry we all are over this terrible thing, Paul—sorry and angry. Angry right down to the soles of my feet, to tell you the truth. The fact that our so-called public servants allow these things to happen and keep allowing them to happen over and over again”—he drew a shuddering long breath to continue—“it’s a source of bitter shame to all of us, Paul. Do they know anything about these hoodlums? I understand they haven’t caught them yet. A disgrace, an utter disgrace.”

The shift in topics almost caught Paul unawares; once Ives launched into a set-piece speech he almost invariably continued at length until it had run its course: Ives held himself with the religious fervor of the passionate egoist and all his posturings and attitudes were long and well rehearsed.

“No,” Paul said, “they haven’t turned them up yet. They’re still working on it. I’ve been keeping in touch with the police. They do have one or two leads.”

“Well by God they’d better act on them. I understand it was a group of young ones—teen-age thugs, is that right?”

“Apparently so.”

“A disgrace,” Ives said again, and held up a finger as if to forestall an interruption, which no one had offered. “These young scum grow up in a welfare state where they see that violence goes unpunished and the old virtues are for stupid pious fools. What can we expect of them that’s any better than this random vicious despair? These radicals keep arsenals in their attics and advocate the overthrow of an economic system which has graduated more people out of poverty than any other system in history. They arm themselves to attack honest hard-working citizens like you and me, and to shoot down beleaguered policemen, and what happens? The public is propagandized into outrage over the behavior of the police in defending themselves and the public!”

Behind Ives’s back Sam and Dundee were exchanging bemused glances of tolerant patience; their occasional nods and affirmative grunts were not quite patronizing enough to alert the old man.

Things went on in their peculiarly arcane fashion, as if nothing ever changed; and perhaps nothing had changed for Henry Ives and the others. For Paul everything was different; the shape and color of the world was changed completely from what it had been.

That night across the dinner table he said to Sam, “We’re all born into this society congenitally naive, you know. And those of us who don’t outgrow it become the liberals.”

“Oh now wait a minute, Paul, you can’t–”

“But I can. I most certainly can. Who has a better right than I do?”

It was a question to which neither Sam nor Adele chose to reply.

“It came to me a little while ago what we really are, we liberals. We demand reforms, we want to improve the situation of the underprivileged—why? To make them better off materially? Nuts. It’s only to make ourselves feel less guilty. We rend our garments, we’re eager to show how willing we are to accept any outrageous demand so long as it’s black, or youthful, or put by someone who thinks he’s got a grievance. We want to appease everybody—you know what a liberal is? A liberal is a guy who walks out of the room when the fight starts.”

“I think,” Adele Kreutzer said in a light let’s-clear-the-air tone, “we are witnessing the right-wing radicalization of Paul Benjamin.” She had a strong voice; it went with her long narrow jaw. She was thin and dark and wore a faint aura of self-mocking melancholy. “Of course it’s true there’s no way to go on living in New York. The kind of bastards who do these awful things can only survive in cities like this—put them out in a country village and the exposure would be instantly fatal. There’d be no place for them to hide.”

“You may be right,” Paul said. “But I’m not sure running away is the only answer.”

“I can think of another one,” Sam said, and when he had both their attention he continued complacently: “Drop a ten-megaton nuke with the Empire State Building at ground zero.”

“He’s got it,” Adele said gaily, “by George he’s got it!”

Their clowning was weak but it made its point. For the rest of the evening Paul eschewed the subject but he found it hard to keep his mind on anything else; there were chunks of time when he let their conversation pass him by.

He left early, planning to be home by ten-thirty so that he could call Jack. The Kreutzers seemed relieved to see him go; it would be a while, he thought, before they invited him again.

Well, to hell with them. He disembarked from the elevator and crossed the lobby, noticing that their doorman was nowhere in sight. Anybody could just walk in. His jaw crept forward. He went out onto Forty-fifth and searched the street for a cab but there was nothing in sight; the Kreutzers lived far over on the East Side near the U.N. complex and it wasn’t a busy night-traffic area.

The air was clouded with a fine drizzle. He turned up his jacket collar and put his hands in his pockets and walked up toward Second Avenue, avoiding puddles and refuse. He stayed to the curb edge of the sidewalk because the buildings—parking lots, loading bays—were filled with deep shadows where anyone could be lurking. Only half a block from the lights and traffic of the avenue; but places like this seethed with muggers, he knew. Sour spirals came up from his stomach. His shoulders lifted, his gut hardened. One pace at a time up the gray street, raindrops chilling the back of his neck. His heels echoed on the wet pavement.

It was like running a gauntlet. When he reached the corner he felt he had achieved something.

Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet avenue. He crossed it and stood waiting for the roof-light of a free cab to come in sight. Waited several minutes but by then he knew it was going to be one of those nights when there wasn’t a taxi anywhere in the world. He turned a full circle on his heels, making a sweep—nothing. Trucks, the occasional green bus headed downtown, big sedans rushing past with pneumatic hissings, occupied taxis.

A half block north of him a figure staggered into sight under the lights of a storefront: a drunk trying to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Coming right toward Paul. In fear he turned quickly and began to walk west along Forty-fifth Street.

It was early but the neighborhood had a four-o’clock-in-the-morning feeling. He didn’t see anyone at all until he got near the corner of Third Avenue. A young couple came in sight, walking uptown, a pudgy fluffy young man in a flared jacket and a girl in belled slacks with straight hair down to her waist: liberated singles, carefully not touching each other, talking animatedly about something fashionable and banal. Perhaps they were deciding whether to go to her apartment or his; perhaps they had already reached the stage of sharing an apartment, their surnames connected by hyphenation on the mailbox. They looked as if they didn’t like each other very much.

Paul waved at an approaching taxi. Its cruise-light was illuminated but it swished past him without slowing. He fought the impulse to yell at it.

He waited through four red lights before a taxi stopped by him. “Seventieth and West End,” he said through his teeth; sat back and banged the top of his head against the car’s fiberboard ceiling. Was it just taxicabs or were the rear seats of all modern cars impossible to sit in without slouching and cringing? Paul hadn’t owned a car since they had returned to the city from their brief fling at suburban life; other than taxis the only car he had been inside in the past year had been the mortuary limousine.

Through the Plexiglas screen that sealed off the rear compartment he had a bad view of the driver; he had an impression of a huge Negro head, a hard roll of dark flesh at the back of the neck. Neither of them said a word.

A red light ahead was out of synch and the driver avoided it by swinging left on Forty-seventh and heading across town. All along the block west of Eighth Avenue there were girls leaning against the walk in dark doorways. On Ninth Avenue there was a troubleseeking cluster of teenage kids with their hands inevitably in their pockets, faces closed up into an unbreakable apathy. Addicts? Perhaps it was just that nothing short of the most violent brutality excited them any more. They looked as if they were waiting to kill someone.

Would he have had the same thought two weeks ago? Probably not, he thought; probably he would have sensed their boredom and resolved to dedicate more time to the neighborhood athletic league: “What these kids need is an interest. We need to set up some ball teams. Now let’s get a committee together and raise a little money for equipment.”

It was no longer the answer. Why should play-at-war games attract them when they had real wars to go to?

These were new thoughts for him and he wasn’t comfortable with them but they kept crowding everything else out of his mind. By the time they passed Lincoln Towers he was deep into a fanciful daydream about a ball-team of vicious teenagers to whom Paul was supplying high-explosive shrapnel grenades, disguised as baseballs, designed to annihilate teenage gangs.

He paid through the little tilt-slot in the plexiglass and got out on the corner. He was about to cross the street when his eye fell on a convertible parked in front of the supermarket. Part of the roof had been slashed open; it hung in gaping shreds. Probably there had been some item of minuscule value visible on the back seat; someone had pulled a knife, ripped the car open, reached in and stolen the object. People ought to know better than to park canvas-topped cars on the streets.…

He stopped, drew himself up. What the hell kind of thinking is that?

Do we have to give up every God damned right we have? Do we have to let them scare us into giving up everything?

Fallen rain gleamed on the street like precious gems. He looked over toward the river—along the block, under the concrete of the West Side Highway. The lights of a boat were sliding past. Out there on the filthy river in a boat you’d be safe.

Safe, he thought. And that’s all we have left to shoot for?

The light changed and he had crossed the street and stepped up onto the sidewalk before he saw the man standing in the shadows right by the corner of the building. Standing against the wall, shoulder tilted, arms folded, smiling slightly. A black man in a tight jacket and a cowboy hat. As lean and efficiently designed as a bayonet.

Paul’s toes curled inside his shoes. His hair rose; the adrenalin pumped through his body and made his hands shake. They stood face to face with a yard of drizzling rain between them. The black man never stirred. Paul turned very slowly and put his foot forward and walked up the street with the sound of his heart in his ears.

A panel truck was parked in front of his apartment house, facing the wrong direction for the traffic; there was a police parking ticket on its windshield but it hadn’t been towed away: someone had slipped a few dollars to someone. Paul stopped beside the truck and used its big outside mirror to look back along the street. The black man stood where he had been, indistinct in the shadows. Streaming sweat, Paul went into the building.

The man’s smile: did he know who Paul was? Was he one of the ones who had killed Esther?

He was letting his imagination run away with him. Come on, get a grip on yourself. Kids, Carol had said. Teenagers. This guy was full-grown—he wasn’t one of them. Probably his amusement had been purely the result of Paul’s all-too-obvious fear; probably he was an intellectual, a playwright or a musician who’d just decided to post himself on that corner and see how long it would take the cops to roust him along—some sort of experiment to prove something about white bigotry.

Paul thought about going back outside and telling the guy it wasn’t a very wise experiment. If I’d had a gun in my pocket and you’d looked at me like that you might have been in a lot of trouble, fella. It was only a fantasy; there was no possibility of his going back outside. He nodded to the doorman and went back to the elevator.

A common enough fantasy though, I’ll bet. If I’d been there when that guy slashed that roof—if I’d seen it happen, and I’d been armed at the time….

8

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Ives?”

“Have a seat, Paul.”

Ives was the remaining survivor of the three nimble-penciled accountants who had founded the firm in 1926. It had moved uptown in stages from Beaver Street to Forty-third. The old man’s office was a repository for oddments of decor from each of the firm’s stopping places. An antique stock-ticker, a pair of grandmother clocks and four hideous gilt cherubs as wall decorations. The furnishings were pleasantly mismatched, the products of several different decades and levels of company prosperity: in one corner sat a modern Danish chair, a mock-Victorian step-end table, and a brass floorlamp from the ‘Twenties with a plain, cheap shade.

It was a huge office, plushly carpeted, occupying five hundred square feet of corner space with enormous windows on both exterior walls—a good view of the U.N. Building and the East River.

Paul pulled a chair forward and sat. Ives said, “How’s your daughter getting along?”

“Not much change from last week, I’m afraid.”

“A crying shame,” the old man said. “I certainly hope she pulls out of it.”

“The doctors have every confidence she will.”

“Yes. Well. Still I expect you’re very worried and anxious about her.”

“Yes, naturally.”

“There is something I can do to help—or to be exact, to help you to help yourself. That’s why I asked you to come by. It’s a job for you, and there ought to be a sizable bonus in it if everything works out as it should. I’m sure the hospital expenses are quite heavy for you—I realize you’ve got that major-medical policy, but all the same there are always considerable expenses the insurance won’t cover.”

“Yes sir, that’s quite true. I’ve had to dip into our little securities portfolio.”

“Then this ought to help handily.”

“I appreciate your consideration, Mr. Ives, but I’d prefer not to accept charity.”

“Nothing of the kind, Paul. You’ll earn it.” Ives had his elbows on the leather arms of his high-backed swivel chair. He steepled his fingers and squinted, making it clear he was going to be strictly business about it. “Of course it’s this Amercon situation. I had a call from George Eng this morning. Their board of directors wants to proceed in the direction he outlined to you a few weeks ago.”

“A merger with Jainchill Industries, you mean.”

“Yes. Howard Jainchill was here in the city last week and George Eng had several meetings with him. Everything seemed to go reasonably well, but of course they can’t sit down to do any serious dickering until the two companies have examined each other’s books. Naturally that’s where we come in, as Amercon’s accountants.”

“We’re to go over the Jainchill figures.”

“Yes, quite. Of course the Jainchill home-office is out in Arizona.”

Paul got a very straight look; Ives went on: “I thought, frankly, a trip away from the city might be good for you at this juncture.”

“Well, I hadn’t thought about it but it might be a good idea,” Paul said uncertainly.

Ives seemed to be waiting for a rider to the statement. When Paul added nothing the old man said, “Well then, that’s settled, you’ll fly out with George Eng the end of next week.”

“It’s very kind of you, Mr. Ives, but on a matter this big, shouldn’t one of the senior members handle it?”

“Not necessarily. It’s your kind of job.”

“Well, I’d like to be sure it’s not going to—cause friction.”

“Paul, I’m not concerned with doing a favor for you, except tangentially. You have a keen eye for other bookkeepers’ elastic accounting methods, you’ve always been willing to call a spade a spade. You handled the Masting case last year, so you’re a bit more up-to-date on this particular variety of merger than most of the rest of the members. And you–”

“Excuse me, Mr. Ives, but in the Masting case we knew they were cooking the books and it couldn’t help give us an edge—we knew what to look for. Are you suggesting the Jainchill people are doing the same thing?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.” Ives said it with a tiny smile on his strict mouth. “I don’t know Jainchill personally but he’s got a reputation for being a man with the business ethics of a bankrupt car dealer.”

“Do the people at Amercon suspect anything specific?”

“Not according to George Eng. But Jainchill knows Amercon’s been sniffing around his company for quite some time. He’d be a fool if he hadn’t done a bit of juggling to inflate his profit picture. Everyone does it when he’s trying to promote a merger.

“Now we do know, for example, that for the past year Jainchill has been reducing the rate at which he’s been writing off the cost of new plant facilities—he switched from rapid to straight-line depreciation. Naturally it reduced the amount he had to set aside on his books to reflect the deterioration of plant and equipment. You’ll want to look into that to ascertain the real figures and find out how much it increased their reported profits.

“When it comes to deciphering the footnotes that clutter up corporate reports, there isn’t a man in this office any better than you. It’s a sure bet Jainchill’s earnings reports look fatter than they really are. The question is, how much fatter? Basically that’s up to you to ascertain, but you’ll also want to look for all the other likely possibilities. Amercon has to have a clear picture of what they’re buying before they’ll make an offer for it.”

“Of course.”

“Then you’re all set. I only wanted to make sure you were feeling up to it—it will be a tough job, Paul. It’s going to take all your time for several weeks. I wanted to check with you this far in advance because you have to be certain you’re willing to be away from your daughter for that period of time and ready to devote your complete attention to it.”

He hadn’t been allowed to see Carol anyway. The trip away from the city might clear his head; things were pressing in on him. “I’ll be glad to do it, Mr. Ives. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

“We’ll go over the details with George Eng before you leave. You’ve got a couple of weeks to prepare yourself. I know you’ll do a fine job with it, Paul—I’ve always had every confidence in you.”

Paul walked in relief to the door. When he glanced back across the length of the room Ives had a copy of the Revenue Code open and was scowling furiously at it.

9

“Well, you got pretty good hinges on this door,” the locksmith said. “Lucky. Some of these newer buildings, they got hinges you could bust with a toothpick.”

The first locksmith with whom Paul had made an appointment had failed to show up. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time and he’d forgotten it for a while. He’d called this fellow two days ago—a squat bald man with a cauliflower ear and feral eyes. He had tools all over the foyer carpet; curlings of sawdust beneath the door where he was drilling into its edge. “Now you realize you can’t just pull the door shut with this lock. You got to turn the key, otherwise it’s not locked at all.”

“I understand that. What concerns me is that nobody should be able to get in when it’s locked. If I leave it unlocked it’s my own stupidity.”

“Sure. Well, there ain’t no lock in the world that’s sure proof against an experienced pickman, but there ain’t many of them around and they usually don’t go for buildings like this one. Where you get trouble with them’s over on the East Side mostly—Fifth along the park, the East Sixties, Sutton Place, like that. I got one place I put three locks on their front door, most expensive locks you can buy, but didn’t stop some pickman from getting in the day after he read in the papers about these folks sailing to Europe. Stripped the place clean.”

The locksmith scraped sawdust out of the hole he had cut and began to fit an enormous device into it. “It sure don’t pay to tell the newspapers you’re going away,” he said. “Listen, you wasn’t planning to sell any valuables, are you?”

“Why?”

“If you do, don’t put your name and address in the ad. That’s an engraved invitation to thieves.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Listen, there’s plenty of things you can do to make it harder on these guys. Most people just leave one little light on when they go out—that’s stupid. Every burglar in the world knows that leave-the-light-on routine. What I always tell my clients, when you go out for the evening or to the office for the day or whatever, leave two-three lights on and turn your radio on so a guy can hear it if he’s standing outside your door. And there’s another thing—the middle of the hot summer days, these dope addicts go along the street lookin’ up at all the apartment house windows. They see an air conditioner sticking out a window that’s not turned on and dripping, they know nobody’s home. It don’t cost that much electricity to leave a few lights on and run your air conditioner on low when you ain’t home, and leave the radio on. Cheap insurance, I always call it.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

He hadn’t skied since 1948, and then only a few timorous times, but in his dream he was skiing down a long white slope—faster and ever faster, and then the slope grew steeper and he could not turn, the cold wind scissored his ears, the skis whispered under him with terrifying sluicing speed, and the hill kept tilting downward and he could not turn.

He awoke with chilled feet and lay in bed listening to the garbage trucks and watching shards of dim light flash through the blinds. Out there they were killing people. There was nothing to think about but that; and nothing to do but think about it in the insomniac night.

His feet were cold and yet the room was filled with a dense stale heat and the thick-tongued smell of bad sleep. He got up and switched on the air conditioner, went to the refrigerator and poured a glass of milk and brought it back to the nightstand by the bed. Now over the chill drumming whisper of the air conditioner he heard the swishing of cars in the street—it had started raining. His eyes dreamily tracked the wavering liquid light-movements on the ceiling; he heard the rain when a gust of wind blew it against the window. Unable to stand it any longer he got up again and took a pair of wool socks from the drawer, put them on and got back into bed, pulling the covers up neatly over him. The edge of the sheet dragged the glass of milk over and spilled it to the carpet. He cursed at the top of his lungs; slammed out of bed and went to get the sponge and paper towels.