Dan Simmons: Hard Freeze

"I just thought Joe would like to know if you happen to talk to him. Do you talk to him?"

"No. I have no idea where he is."

"Well, if he gets in touch, tell him that I'd like to talk to him sometime. We don't exactly have any unfinished business between us, but I might have some business opportunities for him."

"I'll tell Mr. Kurtz that you called."

That same afternoon, Arlene received a check for $35,000 from John Wellington Frears. The note on the check said only: "Wedding Bells.com." Arlene vaguely remembered discussing her idea with him the day they were together at her house. The news that evening reported that the violinist had checked himself into a hospital—not Erie County, but an expensive private hospital in the suburbs. A few days later, the newspaper said that Frears was on a respirator and in a coma.

Three and a half weeks after the Train Station Massacre, there was hardly anything about it in the papers except for the continuing string of city resignations and ongoing investigations and commissions. On that Wednesday in early March, Rachel came home to Gail's duplex on Colvin Avenue. Arlene visited them the next day and brought some homemade cake.

The next morning, early, Arlene's doorbell rang. She'd been sitting at the kitchen table, smoking her first cigarette of the day and sipping coffee, staring at the unopened paper, and the sound of the doorbell made her jump. She left her coffee but took her cigarette and the.357 Magnum she kept in the cupboard and peered out the side window before opening the door.

It was Kurtz. He looked like shit. His hair was rumpled, he hadn't shaved for days, his left arm was still in a sling, his right wrist was in a bulky cast, and he stood stiffly as if his taped ribs were still hurting him.

Arlene set the big pistol on her curio cabinet and opened the door. "How're they hanging, Joe?"

"Still low, wrinkled, and to the left."

She batted ashes out onto the stoop. "You came all the way over from whatever Dumpster you've been sleeping in to tell me that?"

"No." Kurtz peered up at the strange, glowing orb that had appeared in the sky over Buffalo that morning. "What the hell is that?"

"The sun," said Arlene.

"I just wondered," said Kurtz, "if you'd like to go out today to look for some office space."

Since his first published short story won the Rod Serling Memorial Award in the 1982 Twilight Zone Magazine Short Fiction contest, DAN SIMMONS has won some of the top awards for the science fiction, horror, fantasy, and thriller genres, as well as honors for his mainstream fiction. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado, where he is currently at work on a new Joe Kurtz novel.