4

The house was two stories and large by Baumen standards, white-painted brick with a driveway running under a portico on the side. Large old trees shaded it, oaks and maples whose leaves, turned lemon yellow and scarlet, glowed almost incandescent in the autumn afternoon sunlight.

Flame touched Garreth, too, but it was inside, licking at him as they stood before the door.

Toews pushed the bell. A small, elderly, white-haired woman answered the door. Toews touched the visor of his cap. "Hello, Mrs. Schoning. Is Helen home?"

The woman nodded. "I'll get her. Please come in."

They followed her into a wide hallway flooded with rainbow light from a stained-glass window at the turn of the stairs. Mrs. Schoning left them there to disappear into the rear of the house.

"You ought to have a good chance." Toews said. "I don't know who else in town she'd have to rent to."

Garreth crossed his fingers.

He needed somewhere besides the hotel to live, somewhere free of the fear of a maid coming in to find his earth pallet on the bed or in the closet and gossiping about it. A town this size had no apartments, though, just houses. Except maybe one over the garage of Helen Schoning, the Clerk of the Municipal Court.

Miss Schoning appeared, a slender woman in her late forties with only a trace of gray in short chestnut hair. Blood-smell eddied warmly from her. Garreth fought a sudden surge of hunger.

She smiled at them. "What brings you here, Nat?"

"This is our new officer Garreth Mikaelian. He's interested in the apartment."

"Ah, yes, the Frisco Kid." She studied him keenly for a minute, then extended her hand. If the coolness of his skin surprised her, she did not show it. "Welcome to Baumen. The garage is this way."

Out a side door into the portico and back along the drive to a large two-car garage. She led the way up a set of steps on the side to the second floor.

"It's small. I take it you don't have a family."

"No, ma'am."

Unlocking the door, she stood back to let him enter first. "Call me Helen, please. Here you are."

Half the area had been furnished as a den, with wood paneling, built-in bookcases, and a large leather couch and chair. A rear corner was partitioned for the bathroom. Between it and a set of french doors leading out onto a deck above the garage doors stretched the cabinets and small appliances of an apartment kitchen.

Helen opened the couch out into a bed. "I can provide sheets and blankets. The phone is an extension from the house. You can use that and pay part of the bill or put in a private line. Half the garage is yours to use, too. It's $75.00 a month."

"Baumen 303," the radio on Toews's hip muttered. "See Mrs. Linda Mostert at 415 South Eighth about a missing person."

"En route," Toews said. "It sounds like Mr. Halverson is out again, partner. Come on."

Following him out, Garreth called back, "I'll take it. May I move in tonight?"

"Just knock on the side door and I'll give you the key."

He waved thanks.

Mr. Amos Halverson turned out to be Mrs. Mostert's father, a healthy but sometimes confused old man who regularly took walks and forgot his way home. By talking to people in yards along the street, they learned the old man had headed north. Twenty minutes later they located him working on his third beer in the Cowboy Palace and drove him home.

Returning to patrol, Garreth said, "I wonder if he's all that con­fused. Do you realize we just paid for his beer and gave him transporta­tion home?"

Toews grinned. "He's earned it. He ran a grocery store when I was a kid and I remember a lot of times when he gave me and my sisters free candy. Where do you want to eat tonight?"

Not that they had a great deal of choice. Garreth said, "The Main Street."

"We ate there last night. How about the Pioneer?"

Garreth's lungs clogged just remembering the garlic reek from it. He thought fast. "I . . . got sick once in an Italian restaurant and since then I haven't been able to stand the smell of garlic."

Toews grinned. "So how long have you been a vampire?"

Every nerve in Garreth overloaded. He gaped at Toews, feeling the bomb explode in him . . . unable to move, scarcely able to think. "A . . . what?" He guessed; he knows! What an idiot you are, Mikaelian, to ever have opened your mouth about garlic.

The other's grin broaded. "You're a little slow on the uptake, city boy. Vampires can't stand garlic, so if you can't, you must be one, right? Tell me, how do you manage to shave without a mirror?"

Garreth groped in confusion for almost a minute before he real­ized Toews was joking. Then he cursed himself. A guilty conscience obstructeth logic . . . not to mention strangled the sense of humor. He had better say something quickly, though, before the lack of reply be­trayed that he had taken Toews seriously. "I use an electic razor."

Toews chucked. "The benefits of technology. Okay, it's the Main Street again."

Garreth drank tea and pretended to study the Criminal Code. Inside he still shook. That had been a near call.

Toews wolfed down a cheeseburger. "You better eat something more than tea, partner. Friday and Saturday are our busy nights."

Garreth quickly learned what he meant. As dark approached, every parking space along Kansas Avenue and up the side streets filled with locals coming downtown to the bars and private clubs, the latter the only place dry Kansas allowed hard liquor. Garreth and Toews wrote up two accident reports for fender benders resulting from trying to park more cars than intended in the diagonal spaces along the tracks.

Every teenager in the area also appeared to be downtown, but since they could not drink, the ones not attending the movie theatre drove, making a loop that went north on Kansas to the Sonic Drive-In, across the tracks, south seven blocks to the A & W, and back across the tracks to go north again, endlessly. They drove cars, pickups, and vans, and car­ried on conversations by driving alongside each other and leaning out the windows to shout across the space between.

Toews ticketed only flagrant violations, the most flagrant being a blue van weaving wildly through the traffic, and broke up a couple of impending fights. They also checked businesses along Kansas. Later came drunk-and-disorderly calls, and an accident in the parking lot out­side the VFW. Taking a report from one driver while Toews talked to the other, watching a couple pass non-too-steadily toward their own car, Garreth shook his head. This was a dry state?