Gerry felt the ghost of memory step slowly up the stairs from the main floor to the loft. It was a quiet, confident, and insistent rise, but so damn slow that in his drunken state it drove Gerry crazy. Reason tried to argue that one couldn’t get mad with one’s own imagination—that if you didn’t want to hear invented sounds, you should just focus on reality. So he lifted the bottle of vodka to his lips, closed his eyes, and tried to clear his mind of everything but the acidic wash of straight booze.
To his right, Charlie Decker waited between the pages of a novel to get pushed over the edge of insanity. To his left, a fat house fly sat on the rim of his abandoned glass and tasted traces of vodka with its feet. How in the hell one got a fly in the house in mid-November was anybody’s guess.
