He was, in a way, like Pavlovs dogs. Dimly he seemed to hear some madly enthusiastic sportscaster Howard Cosell or Warner Wolf or perhaps that all-time crazy Johnny Most describing the scene, as if his effort to get at her drug supply before the pain killed him was some strange sporting event a trial substitution for Monday Night Football, perhaps.
Theres really no one else. Not great, and there were plenty of details still to be worked out, but it looked okay. He heard the kitchen screen door bang shut and eased the wheelchair close enough to the window so he could remain in an angle of shadow and still peek out. It was too easy to imagine how his shattered bones would feel after ten or fifteen minutes of wriggling through cold puddles and melting snow, like a dying tadpole.
She looked at it briefly, contemptuously, then began to shake a finger in his face, more of those empty white balloons puffing from her mouth. The plainclothesmans coat.
Another part of him was furiously trying out ideas, rejecting them, trying to combine them, rejecting the combinations. At some point the conversation had turned to the Jews living in Germany during the uneasy four or five years before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland and the festivities began in earnest.