Free Time Dancers by Steve Cash

train station. Even saw Star and the baby…man, oh, man, Z…you did it, you really did it. Then I thought I had better come on down directly, and here I am.”
    “How long have you been in the States?”
    “That’s the ‘now’ part of the answer. About two months ago, I hitched up as a batboy with a Venezuelan exhibition team while they were in Veracruz. That got me into the States through Miami. A couple days later I felt a kind of storm, but different…strange…in the direction of St. Louis. By the time I got a little closer, maybe five hundred miles or so, I knew it was something else.”
    He stopped talking and looked at me closely, like a doctor examining his patient, then he grinned and tapped me in the middle of my forehead with the end of his finger. He said, “I think all it was, was you worrying, Z. So, as long as I was already in the area, I thought I might as well save your ass…again.”
    “When are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”
    “When we get gone.”
    “Gone where?”
    “To do this thing. Owen told me, remember? You might need some help with Unai and Usoa and the trip back to Spain, to the Pyrenees. You ought to know by now two brains are better than one.”
    I stared at Ray and smiled. I couldn’t wait to see him in his bowler again. “How was it?” I asked. “I mean, over all, how was it…because you look good, Ray.”
    “Well, let me just say I learned a few things, and I also didn’t see a few things coming, like Mozart, for example.”
    “Mozart? The composer?”
    “Yeah, same guy. I tell you, Z, I really came to love his music. Never expected that. And I like a little modern painting now and then, know what I mean, Z?”
    “No,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. What could Ray, Mozart, and modern painting possibly have in common? “No, Ray, I haven’t got a clue, but I can’t wait for you to tell me.”
    “Ready to go?” It was Carolina. The game was over and the Browns had lost. Babe Ruth got the win for the Red Sox.
    “Yeah,” Ray yelled back. “We’re ready. Ain’t we, Z?”
    “We’re ready.”
         
    As soon as we left Sportsman’s Park, Ray began peppering me with questions concerning Nova. I told him everything I knew about her current location, but he wanted to know more than her address and state of welfare. For some reason he never seemed to doubt that she was all right; he wanted to know what she was like, how she “turned out.” I told him about the night Eder died, and how Nova carried a Stone now, Unai’s Stone, which Sailor had thrown to her in the shadow of the “slabs” in Cornwall. I told him that Nova worried about him and added that I thought she missed him a great deal. I didn’t tell him Sailor had asked Geaxi and Opari to follow Nova’s progress and be patient. I didn’t mention her unique dress and heavy makeup, let alone her occasionally strange behavior.
    “That don’t sound right,” Ray said.
    “What do you mean?” I asked, knowing I’d been caught. I should have realized Ray was much too streetwise to ever swallow only half the truth.
    “It just don’t sound like Nova,” he said. “You sure you’re not leavin’ something out?”
    So I told him about the Egyptian mascara, the semitrances, and an attitude that I admitted I never quite understood.
    “Now that’s my Nova!” Ray almost shouted. He leaned over and tapped me lightly on the temple. “What’s the matter with you, Z? How long you think I been gone?”
    Then something happened that made me even more concerned about leaving St. Louis at that point in time. It took place not five minutes after we returned to Carolina’s and it involved Ray and the orphan boy. No one saw it coming. The boy was still healing from the traumatic events on the train and we should have seen the possibility, but as I said, it was unintentional. Nevertheless, because of it the boy confirmed a suspicion about Unai and Usoa’s killer that he could not have