Reflex by Steven Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

clerk, "Is there someplace around here that sells cell phones?"
    Forty minutes later she had a local cell phone with several hundred pre-bought minutes. And, most important, a phone number.
    On the way back to Kinko's, she stopped in a hardware store and picked up a hammer-stapler and a box of staples. When she left Kinko's, she had one hundred sheets with Davy's picture and the words, "Have you seen this man?" the new cell phone number, and the place and date he had last been seen.
    She started at Interrobang and worked her way west on H over to George Washington University, putting them up on the phone poles and the occasional plywood fence that blocked off construction. At Twentieth she went north, first, up to Pennsylvania Avenue, then went back and did the stretch down to G street, then east as far as Eighteenth.
    Every homeless person she saw she gave two bucks and a flyer. "Hi, I'm looking for my husband. This is his picture. Have you seen him?"
    No.
    Next person.
    No.
    She worked her way in a large square around the abduction site and the Interrobang. She'd almost completed the square, coming west on H back from Eighteenth when she tried a pair of men playing cards on a packing crate. One of them was clearly a recycler, leaning against three enormous plastic bags filled with aluminum cans. The other had a bedroll and a basset hound.
    "Nah. Never seen him," said the recycler.
    "Me neither," said the man with the dog as he laid down a card. "Gin. You oughta try Retarded Kaneesha. She sees everything." He tilted his head to the alleyway across the street.
    Millie could just make out a woman in a maroon knee-length coat leaning against the alley wall just off the sidewalk. Her head and shoulders were in shadow.
    Millie gave the men some money and walked slowly across the street. She could tell the woman was watching her, so perhaps she really did see everything, but Millie wasn't particularly heartened by the appellation "retarded." As she got closer, she noticed the woman's face was never still. Her lips were pursing in and out and occasionally her tongue would protrude. Her eyebrows kept rising as if she were being continually surprised. She'd blink, but it wasn't a normal blink. Both eyes would squeeze shut, then open again, on a regular basis, longer than a blink.
    Blepharospasm. Millie let out a deep breath of understanding. Retarded Kaneesha! Ha.
    "I like your coat," Millie said, and she meant it. It was heavy wool with a large hood that seemed to be lined in black satin. The rain was beaded on it, not soaking in.
    The woman nodded. "Me, too."
    Millie held out her hand. "My name is Millie."
    The woman's face stopped twitching as she smiled slightly, but she wouldn't meet Millie's eyes. She did shake Millie's hand briefly. "My name is Sojee."
    "Please excuse me for asking this, but you've got tardive dyskinesia, don't you?" Retarded Kaneesha.
    "Got it bad. You a doctor or something? Most people see it and run." While Sojee was talking and while she smiled, the twitching went away, but while she listened for Millie's answer, it started again, sudden jerks of her jaw to one side or the other, accompanied by lip smacking. Her eyes roamed the street past Millie's shoulder, watching purposefully in a way that contrasted sharply with the random movements of her jaw.
    Millie shook her head. "I'm a psychotherapist. I've studied it in school. What were you on, that caused the TD?"
    "I was on Haldol for paranoid schizophrenia." She said it like "I have brown eyes" or "I'm five foot eight."
    "This is none of my business, so feel free to tell me to shove off. Did you change medications?"
    Sojee shook her head. "Stopped taking it. Couldn't sleep on it. Plus this—" She gestured at her face. "They say it might never go away."
    "They?"
    "The people over at St. Elizabeth's Hospital." Sojee's tongue lunged out of her mouth and retreated. Her eyebrows arched. "You know, where they keep Hinkley, the guy what shot Reagan."
    "How did