The Man With No Time Read Online Free Page A

barking that was more frantic and deep-chested than simple welcome.
    The gate was always kept closed. It was the last thing Pansy checked every night and the first thing she rechecked in the morning.  She took the stairs two at a time, cameras banging against her body and each other, and bolted through the open back door. Horace trudged resignedly up behind her, and Eleanor pushed past me, her face grim and tight, a mask of muscle.
    Then Pansy screamed. It was a virtuoso, three-octave shrill. A diva's scream, breaking at the top of the scale and shivering its way down again. Eleanor and I got through the door just in time to see Pansy, hands pressed against her cheeks, fill her lungs all the way to her knees and start a new one.
    Horace had reached her by then, hoisting her like a sack of rice and carrying her backward. Following, I saw the kitchen.
    It had been trashed: utensils spilled glittering onto the floor, flour dumped everywhere, the first snowfall after the bomb. Bravo thundered away somewhere near.
    The hallway took me past the kitchen and into the combination dining and living room. The table lay on its top, legs sticking up into the air as stiff as a dead cow's. Upholstered chairs had been slit open and eviscerated. The rugs had been pulled aside. Pictures, including some from Pansy's rogues' gallery, had been torn from the walls and trampled. The family shrine had been bent and smashed, and a hole had been kicked in the wall below the mantel on which it stood.
    Horace deposited Pansy on a sofa that looked like it had vomited its intestines and headed off toward the bedrooms, and I followed, leaving Eleanor to try to take Pansy in hand. Horace was already in the twins' room by the time I hit the hallway behind him. I could see that one of the beds was lying on its side.
    “Shit,” he said, and the door to the hall closet buckled outward and then snapped back, held by a childproof external bolt five feet from the floor. I slid the bolt, and Bravo rocketed out between my legs, hitting me so hard that the door slammed shut again. I was turning away to join Horace, who was shouting something to Pansy from the twins' room, when I saw the piece of paper tacked to the door.
    It said: Theyre okay, dont do nothing.
    The sign drew my eyes back toward the door. I opened it and saw a surprisingly large and very dead Chinese man. He had a small mustache and wide empty eyes. He was no one I knew.
    From the driveway, far below, I heard Bravo loose a long, bereaved howl.

3 - Table Talk
    T he dead man's gaze gripped me. Even when I looked away I could sense it tugging at me as I shifted from foot to foot, feeling like a boat on a short rope. I forced myself to take a big enough step backward to break the strand. Free, I stood irresolute for a long moment, looking at nothing, and then I closed the door and followed the sounds of grief back into the living room.
    Pansy lay facedown on the erupting sofa, her body shivering under spasms of sobs that threatened to break her into pieces. Eleanor was massaging her rhythmically, stroking upward from the base of Pansy's spine in long, steady motions, as regular as the waves on a good beach. She was softly singing what sounded like a Chinese lullaby.
    Horace was still yelping and swearing in the nursery. Eleanor looked at me and then through me, indicating that there wasn't much I could do to help with Pansy, so I turned around and went to join him. Halfway there, I realized I was operating on automatic pilot: Head aimlessly for the living room, get bumped from the living room, head for the bedroom. Running on physics, not feelings or intellect, bouncing off other people's emotions like a human pachinko ball. I wasn't feeling anything yet.
    The nursery was hurricane country. It looked like one of those amusement-park houses where the furniture is on the walls in one room and on the ceiling in the next. Horace sat in the center of the floor holding on to a quilt Pansy had made for the