The Lesbian Pulp MEGAPACK ™: Three Complete Novels. Fletcher Flora

five precisely the voice announced that the bus was loading. She listened carefully to the dock number and then got up and lifted her small bag from the floor at her feet and walked out into the great concrete annex where the bus waited. Several other people who were also waiting for the bus went out ahead of her or behind her, and one of those behind her was the policeman who had followed her from the apartment, and just when she was about to hand her ticket to the driver standing beside this open door of the bus, the policeman took hold of her arm and said gently, “Going someplace, sister?”

      She knew immediately what he was and why he was there, but for some reason, now that it was apparent that she was going no place she had ever wanted to go, it made no particular difference. She turned to face him, a very ordinary-looking man to be even a minor agent of destruction, and she said quietly, “I was going on the bus. I was going home.”

      He noted the tense, the quiet capitulation, and he felt for her a passing pity. But he only said, “I got a better idea. I got the idea we’d better go down to Headquarters.”

      Submitting to the pressure of his fingers, she went with him back into the station and waited by the open door of a telephone booth while he called Headquarters for transportation. From where she stood, she could see outside into the street. As she watched, the pale vestigial tubes and bulbs of the night winked out and were dead. Soiled gray light was a thin smear on concrete and glass.

      It was the morning of the last day.