Lamb sits in the front of his police cruiser, slowly smoking the last cigarette in the pack. He knows he'll have to move eventually, if he wants to go on chain smoking his way in oblivion in the IHOP parking lot.
i Well why wouldn't she run away? You are possibly the biggest prick she knows, now that Echolls is dead. /i
As usual he makes a good point. He laughs to himself, thinking that if he wasn't so dead set on making up for past indiscretions to her, he probably wouldn't smoke. He should tell her that she owes him a lot of money for that particular habit.
He tosses the butt out the window of his cruiser, earning a glare from a waitress looking out the window. He thinks longingly of the full carton of Virginia Slims he has back at home. He sighs, resigned to finally leaving his spot.
As he drives down Dartmouth toward the liquor store he thinks about what a clusterfuck the day had been and it was only one o clock.
Veronica sat in her Advanced Photojournalism class, trying to pay attention. She'd run into Weevil on the way. He'd been bitching to her about the theft of something. Veronica had barely been able to listen to him, let alone look him in the face. After Logan died, she had slept with Weevil a few times, well more then just a few, for kicks, nothing serious. Most of the time it was the result of mutual drunkenness, the two of them ending up in the back of his car and Veronica sneaking away in the morning, guilty and quiet. Sometimes she definitely wondered why she always felt so guilty, but then she just stopped wondering. Alcohol could do that for her.
Weevil had, while complaining tried to pointedly suggest that she investigate it for him. She played dumb and pretended not to understand. She wasn't in that business anymore.
She must have looked bad while they were talking, because Weevil had kept asking her if she was okay. i And I lied to him. Like I lie to everyone. /i
She glances back at her professor, a small hippie-ish woman from Minnesota, who talks passionately about Jim Peck and other radical journalists from the 60s and 70s. Veronica sometimes wonders if she'll ever be like Professor Addy, an aging woman who represents a movement that at some point lost all meaning and became a joke. i At least she's happy, /i Veronica thinks sardonically.
She continues to push memories of the morning away, trying to focus on the injustice of Wolfe's New Journalism Declaration. She doesn't think of a man in uniform, she doesn't think about forgiveness or pancakes or anything else that will send her down the slippery slope. She's got a whole bottle of gin stashed back in her room. Mac hasn't found that one yet because she tucked it behind the books on her shelf.
The bell rings and Veronica jumps out of her seat, trying not to sprint back to her dorm.