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Chapter Twenty

Angel shifted uncomfortably and punched his pillow into a little ball, then shoved it behind his head Above hiles

He reached for the reh the channels One of those tabloid pseudo-news programs splashed his picture across the screen The picture switched i moreabout how Angel never dusted behind his bed and soot to leave a check for her services Then the bleach-blond reporter returned to the scene, offering a plastic sel DeMarco is currently in a hospital somewhere in the Pacific Northwest There’s been no confirmation of his illness but the word AIDS has been whispered at more than one Hollywood party in recent days Sources close to the bad-boy star say—”

In a burst of irritation, he jabbed the Off button and threw the remote control across the roo clatter and crashed to the linoleum floor

He crossed his arhed heavily

He couldn’t stop thinking about yesterday No matter how hard he tried to push Madelaine’s words away, they kept coain as he lay in this lonely room

Her name is Lina

Finally he gave up and lay back down Wishboning his arms behind his head, he stared up at the white acoustical tile ceiling

A daughter

He tried to i a kid He’d never spentIn fact, the only tiht about children was just before sex—it was the thing that made him reach for the rubbers in his pocket

He wanted to push the whole discussion aside as irrelevant and ridiculous And he was certain that before the surgery, he could have done just that He could have met Madelaine at a concert or a ly wonderful child she’d given birth to sixteen years ago, and felt nothing Less than nothing

He would have offered her a straight shot of tequila and drunk a toast to the kid he’d fathered But that would have been the extent of it After he drank the tequila, he’d have exited stage right

But he was beginning to understand that running didn’t always get you anywhere, that soht where you’d started

He didn’t think of hier’s heart pulsing in his chest and the bright red Frankenstein scar in his flesh? Every tiot a shot or took a pill, he was reift of a stranger It was the sort of thing that made a man think about his life—even if he didn’t want to

Even before the surgery, he’d been tired of running and getting nowhere, tired of parties omen he couldn’t remember and friends who disappeared when the ca else