Berta was conveniently on her lunch break but Keith B. timed it that way. Drugs in Biff Carter’s last coffee and also last donut just to make sure — he’ll be snoozing for a while. Time to take a gander at that 3n1 file he knew Dr. Mouse dropped off just day before yesterday on a visit to his old detective pal. Said to him: find this girl, before she separates out again and all is lost.
Entering the downtown building, he couldn’t see the evidence right in front of his face. A spacer this one is, always thinking about the next operation in a broader sense of the word. He’d just met with Dr. Grayson uptown at his Serapis Club, a potential replacement. Dr. Brown is no longer an option, since he perished in that Millbank haunted house explosion back in the last photo-novel. By Dr. Mouse’s hands no less. Brown maybe knew too much about the 3n1 since he had the same last name as one of the 3 components (Frankie “Beige” Brown) — he couldn’t take a chance. And all that talk about preservation and Halloween being a perpetual holiday from him. Nonsense! That would cut out his favorite one of all which was of course Christmas, Xmas as he liked to call it, not being a practicing religionist. Science is instead his thing of worship. If there is a God, he’s determined, he’ll have on a lab coat when he meets him at the Pearly Gates, with a beaker in one hand and a test tube in the other. Maybe some kind of Adam-Frankenstein laying on a nearby gurney. And of course an Xmas tree in back adorned with more beakers and test tubes. He’s pictured the scene quite a few times now. Makes him merry.
He feels like he has control of the city but it’s just an illusion caused by a game. An in-disguise Marsha “Pink” Krakow enthusiastically claps from across the midtown diner after he breaks the jackpot once again. He turns.
In fact, I don’t think there’s any way he could have missed that Pink Pawn sign and made the connection. Marsha did that as well. She’s covering her tracks. In fact, this is what she looked like to Dr. Mouse when he turned from his still dinging and clanging and whooping machine.
“Alice??” he exclaimed. His daughter.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 