"You need fixing, girl," he said.
"And you're the repairman. I know."
"Believe it."
"Oh, I do, I do, but we're wasting time. I'll be waiting out front for you."
He hung up, changed his shirt, put on his wind-breaker and left the house.
Outside, he breathed the early autumn air, the first hint of frost. It was invigorating, cleanly brisk. It filled him with a sense of being alive, of every pore of his body being ready for action. It reminded him of tropic nights in Suji Bay, where after a stinking day of one hundred thirty in the shade, the temperature would plunge down to sixty-five degrees, and you had to sleep in long underwear beneath blankets. You felt alive, when all the sluggishness of heat and humidity went out of you. On those jungle nights, though, there hadn't been any women
