pill: переводы

→On the way back to Kinko’s, she stopped in a hardware store and picked up a hammer-stapler and a box of staples. When she left Kinko’s, she had one hundred sheets with Davy’s picture and the words, “Have you seen this man?” the new cell phone number, and the place and date he had last been seen.

→Forty minutes later she had a local cell phone with several hundred pre-bought minutes. And, most important, a phone number.

→She rejected using her hotel room. The search might leave the area. She thought about putting the number of the NSA on there, but if they hadn’t found him yet, she wasn’t sure she trusted them to take the calls.

→She looked in her purse at the picture of Davy she’d taken from the Aerie. She went down the street to Kinko’s and had his half of the photo blown up, black and white, a little fuzzy at eight-and-a-half by eleven, but clearly recognizable.

→These people are nearly always on the street.

→She could tell that most of the blankets had been brightly colored but now they were muted, the barest hint of pastels where once primary colors ruled. The man with the blankets wore old Nikes, ripped, showing bare, dirty skin beneath. He turned his head as a brightly colored BMW went by.

→There was a group of four men talking at the mouth of the alleyway across the street, leaning against the wall. One of them had a ratty backpack, two carried bedrolls under their arms, and the fourth wore an indeterminate number of blankets, Indian style.

→How cold are they?

→She edged closer to the balustrade, using it to shield her from the mist. She felt cold, but it wasn’t from the weather.

→Hide? They’re not hiding. You were just looking at the normal people instead of them.

→Traffic, both wheeled and footed, lightened, and the number of homeless on the street seemed to increase, but she suspected there weren’t more of them than this morning—just fewer “normal” people on the street to hide behind.

→She kept wiping her glasses off with her handkerchief.

→The temperature dropped steadily through the morning and a thin gray fog drifted up the streets, dampening the sidewalks and the walls, and leaving drops of water hanging in her hair. She’d seen the forecast so she was wearing her powder blue raincoat. She pulled up the collar of the thick hand-knitted sweater she wore below the raincoat and sunk her neck into it, feeling like a timid turtle. She was grateful she’d chosen her Merrell Chameleon hiking boots—even though they make my feet look like boulders.