So, several hours later, Christy and I were sitting on a coffee table, which was the only item of furniture in the living room of the empty house across the street from the Jinx headquarters. We had long since exhausted our supply of small talk, and we were quietly sharing a thermos of coffee when she suddenly said, "Look."
The street was dark, and the light in the infirmary had been out for a while, but we could see the window being raised slowly. I quickly closed the thermos and stuck it into my knapsack.
A foot in a sandal appeared in the window, and then a pale, slender leg came slowly over the sill, followed by another, and then the pale globes of Åsa's posterior as she lowered herself carefully to the sidewalk. For a second, as her back came into view, I was afraid that we really would be following a naked woman around, but then, as the rest of her came out of the window, a dark and billowy garment appeared on her shoulders and fell around her body as she straightened up. She reached out and pulled the window most of the way down.
"Is she going to go somewhere," Christy whispered, "or is she going to climb up the building to Lloyd's window?"
I had been wondering about that, since I had been looking at that wall for a couple of hours, and I was not sure that it would be possible to climb from the street up to a window on the third floor. The wall was nearly smooth, all concrete. There were little areas above and below each window where the wall stuck out a little, shaped to look like a row of bricks, presumably for decoration, but I couldn't see how it could be done.
I was not about to find out right then, though, since Åsa immediately walked away down the block. We slipped out of the empty house and followed her.
It was a chilly, drizzly night, and the streets were nearly deserted. I wore a dark coat and slacks, and Christy wore a black trench coat and jeans, with a dark baseball cap pulled down over her full red hair. She'd explained that, since members of the Jinx wore their leather jackets all the time, they were often not recognized if they wore something else.
Then she'd looked somewhat sheepish, as if she'd revealed a state secret.
We made an effort to be inconspicuous as we followed Åsa, but it didn't seem to matter. She never looked around, though a couple of times she slowed and seemed to waver, and one time she put out a hand as she turned a corner, leaning against a building for a moment. She kept the coat (or whatever it was) wrapped around her, so it wasn't possible for the few people she passed to see that was naked under it.
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