The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

getting away with it.
    Gabe and Val watched this ritual without moving from their spot by the pinball machine. Val was cautious, just waiting for the right moment to move to the bar and ask if Theo had called. Gabe was, as usual, just being socially awkward.
    Mavis retreated to her spot by the coffeepot presumably out of death's reach, and called down to the couple. "You two want something to drink, or you just window-shopping?"
    Gabe led them down the bar."Two coffees please." He looked quickly to Val for her approval, but she was fixated on Catfish, who was seated across from Mavis near the end of the bar. Just beyond him was another man, an incredibly gaunt gentleman whose skin was so white it appeared translucent under the haze of Mavis's cigarette smoke.
    "Hello, uh, Mr. Fish," Val said.
    Catfish, who was staring at the bottom of a shot glass, looked up and forced a smile through a face betraying hangdog sorrow. "It'sJefferson," he said. "Catfish is my first name."
    "Sorry," Val said.
    Mavis made a mental note of the new couple. She recognized Gabe, he'd been in with Theophilus Crowe a number of times, but the woman was a new face to her. She put the two coffees in front of
    Gabe and Val. "Mavis Sand," Mavis said, but she didn't offer her hand. For years she'd avoided shaking hands because the grip often hurt her arthritis. Now, with her new titanium joints and levers, she had to be careful not to crush the delicate phalanges of her customers.
    "I'm sorry," Gabe said. "Mavis, this is Dr. Valerie Riordan. She has a psychiatric practice here in town."
    Mavis stepped back and Val could see the apparatus in the woman's eye focusing – when the light from over the snooker table caught it right, the eye appeared to glow red.
    "Pleased," Mavis said. "You know Howard Phillips?" Mavis nodded to the gaunt man at the end of the bar.
    "H.P.," Gabe added, nodding to Howard."Of H.P.'s Cafe."
    Howard Phillips might have been forty, or sixty, or seventy, or he might have died young for all the animation in his face. He wore a black suit out of the nineteenth century, right down to the button shoes, and he was nursing a glass of Guinness Stout although he didn't look as if he'd had any caloric intake for months.
    Val said, "We just came from your restaurant.Lovely place."
    Without changing expression, Howard said, "As a psychiatrist, does it bother you that Jung was a Nazi sympathizer?" He had a flat upper-class British accent and Val felt vaguely as if she'd just been spat upon.
    "Ray of sunshine, Howard is," Mavis said. "Looks like death, don't he?"
    Howard cleared his throat and said, "Mavis has come to mock death, since most of her mortal parts have been replaced with machinery."
    Mavis leaned into Gabe and Val as if guarding a secret even as she raised her voice to make sure Howard could hear. "He's been cranky for some ten years now – anddrunk most of that time."
    "I had hoped to develop a laudanum habit in the tradition of Byron and Shelley," Howard said, "but procurement of the substance is, to say the least, difficult."
    "Yeah, that month you drank Nyquil on the rocks didn't help either. He'd drop off at the bar stool sittin' straight up, sit there asleep sometimes for four hours, then wake up and finish his drink. I have to say, though, Howard, you never coughed once." Again Mavis leaned into the bar. "He pretends to have consumption sometimes."
    "I'm sure the good doctor is not interested in the particulars of my substance abuse, Mavis."
    "Actually," Gabe said, "we're just waiting for a call from Theo."
    "And I think I'd prefer a Bloody Mary to coffee," Val said.
    "Ya'llain't goin to talk me into chasin no monster, so don't even try," Catfish said. "I got the Blues on me and I got some drinkin to do."
    "Don't be a wuss, Catfish," Mavis said as she mixed Val's cocktail. "Monsters are no big deal.
    Howard and me got one, huh, Howard?"
    "Walk in the proverbial park," Howard said.
    Catfish, Val, and Gabe just stared at Howard, waiting.
    Mavis said, "Course your drinking started right after the lastone, didn't it?"
    "Nonstop," Howard said.
    Theo It occurred to Theo, as he tried to keep a safe distance from the sheriff's Caddy turning into the ranch, that he had never been trained in the proper procedure for tailing someone. He'd never really followed anyone. Well, there was a sixth-month period in the seventies when he had followed the Grateful Dead around the country, but with them, you just followed the trail of