Page 30 (1/2)
Two columns over, he saw this:
JUST PLAIN KLASSICS
Satisfaction Guaranteed
jpktoxicwastecom
Keller stared at the ad He blinked several tiain It was i, the ad was really there, and it couldn’t be, because it was impossible
There had been ti, realized it was a dream, and willed hih he thought he’d returned to waking consciousness Was this like that? He got up, walked around, and sat down again, wondering whether he was really walking around or had just incorporated the walking into his dream He picked up the paper, and he read so or the sort of gibberish dreams were apt to produce
As far as he could tell, they were okay And the ad from Just Plain Klassics was still there, and still impossible
Because the only person who could possibly have placed that ad was dead, shot twice in the head and burned up in a fire in White Plains
31
It took hiazine Street to get a look at the stamp shop He spotted it, but only because he knehere to look for it The signage was minimal, and that explained why he’d never noticed it before
He thought of stopping in, to see if they had any other issues of Linn’s around That way he could find out if the ad had run before, but why bother? What difference did it make?
Ten minutes later he was parked across the street from an Internet café, where a kid who looked eek pointed him to a co for staht to Iowa His laptop had been gone by the time he returned to his New York apart it What for?
Julia, who’d sold her own coetting another, but with about the sa out the attic It ht happen, possibly even in their lifetih-priority item
Even if she’d had a computer, he wouldn’t have used it for this A public hborhood, hat the situation called for
He settled in, booted up Explorer, and typed in jpktoxicwastecom And clicked on Go
The headline could have been a coincidence A dealer specializing in the classic issues froht chance upon Just Plain Classics as a naht decide to distort the spelling as an hoed to hit on a name that resonated with Keller Not so much because those were the stamps Keller collected, since he was hardly unique in this respect, but because the initials were his JPK = John Paul Keller -- or, as Dot was apt to point out, Just Plain Keller
The owner of Just Plain Klassics hadn’t troubled to include his name, but he wasn’t unique in that respect He hadn’t included a postal address, either, or a phone or fax number, but limited himself to the URL of his website A lot of philatelic business was conducted on the Web these days, and plenty of classified ads limited their contact information to an email address, but this was unusual in a display ad
But what nailed it was the URL itself jpktoxicwastecos, he and Dot had been troubled by the fact that their boss was turning down job after job for no apparent reason Accordingly they went proactive before either of them had become familiar with the term, and Dot placed an ad in a Soldier of Fortune imitator called Mercenary Ti those lines, with the firiven as Toxic Waste, and a post office box in Hastings or Yonkers, someplace like that
JPK Toxic Waste
Coincidence? It had about ascoincidental as his trip to Des Moines But if it wasn’t a coincidence, then it was a visitation from the dead, because no one but Dot could possibly have placed that ad
The website, when the coh the ether, was anticlimactic Just the initials at the top, JPK in plain boldface capitals Nothing about sta, in fact, but a very brief notice announcing that the site was under construction, along with a mathematical formula that made no sense to hile, tried various per If you were going to replace the first c in classics with a k, why not do the same with the last one? He tried JPK klassiks, and JPK classics, and got nowhere Google returned no end of hits for toxic waste, none of which he found hier to pursue, and when he tried to type in the forure out how to reproduce sole was quick to tell hiave up and went back to the original URL, jpktoxicwasteco him oncehim with the same formula This tile and pasted it in, and didn’t get any hits
Do the math, Keller