Someplace to Be Flying by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online Page A

appealed to her-but she liked the raw honesty of his delivery and the band could really play. There was no posing, no pretense, just solid musicianship with something to say, albeit at an earsplitting, Spinal Tap/amps-set-to-eleven volume.
    Rory tried to tell her something and she had to shake her head. He repeated it, leaning forward, mouth almost in her ear. “I said, do you want to take any more shots of them?”
    She shook her head again. They waited until the song was over, stood through another, then finally went outside where the usual noise of Foxville’s Lee Street seemed subdued in comparison.
    “Share a cab home?” Rory asked. “Or should we walk?”
    Lily knew a moment’s nervousness, remembering where walking had got her last night, but she refused to let it take hold.
    “Let’s walk,” she said.
    “Okay. But let me be a chauvinist and carry your camera bag for awhile.”
    “It’s all right.”
    “Sure. That’s why you’ve been fidgeting with it all night. If I know you, it weighs a ton.”
    Reluctantly, she handed it over. Rory pretended to stagger under its weight, almost dropping to his knees before he laboriously straightened up.
    Lily smiled. “You know you’ve probably gone down at least thirty cool points so far as these kids are concerned.”
    The kids she referred to stood about like a tide of leather and denim and combat boots, washed up against the wall of the club, pooling in small clusters along the curb and down the pavement, hair spiked here, long there, dark smudges around the eyes of the women, lips bright, the men stony-eyed, looking tough. Some of them probably were, but for most of them it was a pose.
    “Screw ‘em,” Rory said.
    He headed south on Lee Street and Lily fell in step beside him. The farther they got from the club, the quieter the street became. There was still traffic, but the stores here were all closed and there were no clubs or restaurants until one reached the Kelly Street Bridge.
    “So what do you know about gypsy cabs?” Lily asked after they’d been walking for awhile.
    Rory shrugged. “What’s to know? The way the city’s got everything regulated these days, it costs a fortune to get a cab license, that’s just saying you can even get someone to sell one, so some people forgo the formalities and operate without the blessing of city council. From all I hear, it’s been going on forever.”
    Lily nodded to show she was listening.
    “Most of them are two-bit affairs,” Rory went on. “Just some guy with a car cruising the club strips at closing time, maybe he’s selling beer or liquor out of his trunk as well. You settle on a price and he takes you where you want to go. You and me, we never see them-or at least they don’t stop for us- because we don’t look right.”
    “How would we have to look?” Lily asked.
    “I don’t know. I guess it’s not so much a look as an attitude. These people know each other, even if they’ve never met before-you know what I mean?”
    Lily nodded. It was probably the same way she could always tell a serious photographer from someone who was just snapping a shot.
    “Have you ever been in one?” she asked.
    “No, but Christy has.”
    Rory had taken a fiction writing workshop with Christy Riddell a few years ago and they’d hit it off, becoming friends. They didn’t write the same sort of thing at all-Christy specialized in collecting urban folklore, writing it up either as short stories or, more rarely, in a more traditional scholarly style-but they both seemed to suffer from the same block of not being able to write anything longer than a novella. Lily had met him a few times and liked him. She knew some people thought there was something a bit standoffish about him, as though he observed the world, rather than let himself be engaged by it and the people in it, but she’d long since discovered it was only a front.
    “I wonder if he’d know this Joey Bennett fellow who helped me out last night,”