The girl easily held her end of the conversation up although, at onepoint, Vernon got a bit expansive telling us about his financial riseand Emma gave...me a tolerant smile when Vern's attention was elsewhere.He said he had started with a partner but when the partner suddenly diedhe had taken the reins all by himself. He had made it into one of themost successful in the city, so he said.I had hoped to impress Emma too and it seemed to be working. "You saidyou were with a small new company, I. Already interest on loan almost as much as loan. I think you better pay now," the speaker said very firmly.He didn't even raise his voice. The four were obviously the local hard men and the other customers deliberately ignored them. I noticed that one couple who were about to take an empty table next to theirs moved away quickly when the speaker stared at them. I didn't have a good feeling about what was unfolding. Call it a premonition if you like.Vince sat silent and sweating. The speaker. I spent most of the week being fucked by battery-powered devices, dreaming back to the slow screwing up in the bed above the driver's seat in the van or the fast, frantic coupling when we first got here days ago. It was all I had and it had to do. Then, near the end of the week, Martin called me and told me that Adam had just gotten off the phone with Pam and that she had broken her ankle at school and it had been set and that she was now home and a fellow teacher was coming back to their house. But she made noises at everything that he did to her, at every motion Robert made. And soon those sounds reached a frantic peak.For the rest of that day she did anything that he asked of her, wildly and enthusiastically. At night he took her back to where he had found her; her blanket and umbrella were still there, but everything else had been long stolen. When he was a hundred feet away from her, she looked around in confusion and wondered at how it had gotten so late.The next day Robert saw.