Free The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan Page A

couple of questions, and get a look at the shopkeeper’s copy of the receipt. Then she’s out again, raising the lapel on her stylish raincoat and talking on a cell phone. She smiles at it, as Thai women often do, but it seemsunlikely anyone is being amusing on the other end of the line.
    He buys two pairs of athletic socks he actually needs and accepts the cashier’s apology for giving him half a pound of change. This is the second shop to give him coins, and his pants are sagging. Wondering whether it’s some sort of plot to make it impossible for him to run away, he goes two more shops down to buy a can of eggshell-white flat enamel.
    Probably four people, he decides as he treks back home, tugging his pants up every few steps. Maybe five. Pretty expensive. And who has that kind of money? Old Uncle Sam, that’s who.
    He wants to hold his wife, he wants to see his daughter, he wishes all of this would go away, and he’s certain to the soles of his shoes that it won’t.
    When he opens the apartment door, the smell of the paint rolls out at him with an almost liquid impact. He stands there looking at his handiwork and sees where the coat is uneven, where the join with the ceiling is jagged, where he laid it on thick enough to carve graffiti into the paint.
    He discovers that he hates apricot.
    Breathing the fumes shallowly, he puts the can of white on the floor in the hallway and goes into his bedroom to drain his pockets of change before his jeans fall off.
    All year long he puts his coins into a couple of sixteen-ounce cans that originally held tomato sauce. He has no idea why he ever bought tomato sauce, but the cans work as piggy banks. The arrangement is that he empties all his loose change into the cans every night, and on Miaow’s birthday—which they celebrate on Rose’s, since no one knows what Miaow’s birthday actually is—he and she count it together, and the next day he totes it to the bank and gets the equivalent in paper currency and gives it to her.
    She hadn’t been particularly eager to count with him on her most recent birthday, but she’d still wanted the bills. He more or less coerced her to join him on the floor, sliding the coins around on the glass-topped table and making countable piles until he announced that she had four hundred thirty baht coming.
    Now he dumps handfuls of change on top of the dresser, and as he does it, the anxiety and frustration he feels abouthis present situation blends into his unhappiness about his relationship with Miaow, and it all becomes a single dark wind blowing on the back of his neck.
    Too many of the things he and Miaow used to share with joy are disappearing, being replaced by a kind of weary tolerance on her side and a baffled and apparently useless love on his. More and more it seems to him that she’s on the other side of a thick membrane, permeable to her, allowing her to come through for brief visits, but solid as glass to him. It even—it
especially
—repels his feelings.
    His pockets empty at last, he looks down at the mountain of coins. It’s a sad pile. He opens the drawer and stands there, stupefied.
    The tomato cans are empty.
    He’s almost meditatively thought-free for a long moment, just registering what he sees. One of the cans had been full and the other about one-third full. Now there are ten or fifteen coins in each can. He picks up the nearer can and rattles it, as though that will prove something.
    He turns slowly and surveys the room, as if he expects to see an untidy heap of coins glistening in the center of the bed or on the carpet. Or a path of dropped coins leading to the door.
    And then he has a truly terrible notion.
    He goes to the bed, slides aside the door in the headboard, and opens the safe. There it is, the oilcloth with the Glock wrapped in it. On the previous evening, he’d jabbed it with his finger, checking its weight.
    The moment he wraps his hand around it, his heart plummets.
    He pulls it out, takes a corner,