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Dinosaur Beach

by Keith Laumer

This book is affectionately dedicated to Anne Taylor, RN.

1

It was a pleasant summer evening. We were sitting on the porch swing, Lisa and I, watching the last of the pink fade out of the sky and listening to Fred Hunnicut pushing a lawn mower over his weed crop next door. A cricket in the woodwork started up his fiddle, sounding businesslike and full of energy. A car rattled by, its weak yellow headlights pushing shadows along the brick street and reflecting in the foliage of the sycamores that arched over the pavement. Somewhere a radio sang about harbor lights.

A pleasant evening, a pleasant place. I hated to leave it. But I took a breath of crisp air lightly laced with leafsmoke and newcut grass and got to my feet.

Lisa looked up at me. She had a heart-shaped face, and a short nose, and big, wide-spaced eyes and the prettiest smile in the world. Even the tiny scar on her cheekbone only added to her charm: the flaw that makes perfection perfect.

“Think I’ll walk down to Simon’s for some beer,” I said.

“Dinner will be ready when you get back, darlin’,” she said, and smiled the smile. “Baked ham and corn on the cob. ”

She stood and moved against me all in one fluid dancer’s motion, and her lips touched my ear.

I went down the steps and paused on the walk to look back and see her silhouetted against the lighted screen door, slim and graceful.

“Hurry back, darlin’,” she said, and waved and was gone.

Gone forever.

She didn’t know I wouldn’t be coming back.

2

A streetcar clacked and sparked past the intersection, a big toy with cutout heads pasted against the row of little square windows. Horns tooted.

Traffic lights winked. People hurried past, on their way home after a long day in the store or the office or the cement plant. I bucked the tide, not hurrying, not dawdling. I had plenty of time. That was one lesson I’d learned. You can’t speed it up, you can’t slow it down. Sometimes you can avoid it completely, but that’s a different matter.

These reflections carried me the four blocks to the taxi stand on Delaware. I climbed in the back of a Reo that looked as if it should have been retired a decade back and told the man where I wanted to go. He gave me a look that wondered what a cleancut young fellow like me wanted in that part of town. He opened his mouth to say it, and I said, “Make it under seven minutes and there’s five in it. ”

He dropped the flag and almost tore the clutch out of the Reo getting away from the curb. All the way there he watched me in the mirror, mentally trying out various approaches to the questions he wanted to ask. I saw the neon letters, the color of red-hot iron, half a block ahead and pulled him over, shoved the five into his hand and was on my way before he’d figured out just how to phrase it.

It was a shabby-genteel cocktail bar, the class of the neighborhood, with two steps down into a room that had been a nice one once, well before Prohibition. The dark paneled walls hadn’t suffered much from the years, and aside from a patina of grime, the figured ceiling was passable; but the maroon carpet had a wide, worn strip that meandered like a jungle trail across to the long bar, branching off to get lost among the chair legs. The solid leather seats in the booths along the wall had lost a lot of their color, and some of their stitching had been patched with tape; and nobody had bothered to polish away the rings left by generations of beers on the oak tabletops. I took a booth halfway back, with a little brass lamp with a parchment shade and a framed print on the wall showing somebody’s champion steeplechaser circa 1910. The clock over the bar said 7:44.