You should be in the office, you dumb son of a buck, get back there.
But he isn’t in the office, and he isn’t going back. Not yet. He knows that much about himself. The reason is: it just doesn’t last anymore. Not at all. It used to keep him for months. After a work, he was good for a season. Then it had reduced to months, then weeks. And it was down to days now and he didn’t know where it would go from here. He was getting like one of those science experiment chickens in a cage, heedlessly pecking the button for cocaine instead of corn and starving itself to death.
He is trolling for a new project now, as he has been for the last few days. Thus far he’s seen nothing. But sometimes you went out with your rod and your bait and came back with just your rod and your bait. And sometimes you came back with no bait at all and nothing to show for it.
He keeps driving the streets of Fall Creek Place. He just has a feeling. The red light changes to green and he makes a left onto 24th, and that is when his luck changes. He sees her running along the side of the road, a jogger in her early thirties, tall and strong, in a purple long-sleeve top, black tights, and white sneakers, her blond ponytail bouncing like a sunbeam, and he knows he has to have her. He will have her.
He follows along at a respectful distance, watching her run for a long time, a good three-quarters of a mile, cataloging her route and mentally predicting her weight, her scent, the coarseness of her pubic hair, the density of her flesh. She could go to a café, to a store, or her car or office, or to meet a friend, but that’s when he knows powerful forces are smiling upon him, because instead, he is right there when she slows to a cool-down walk for a last block and enters a small house on North Talbot.
He sits there in his car a few doors down and lets some relief settle on him. He can go back to work, for the time being, because Sunbeam is in his life now, he has her address, and he has a new center to his universe.