The afternoon gave way to evening. Mrs. Crabapple left for the night after ranting at Melvin, calling him names until she was red in the face, grabbing the new financial graphs for their biggest client out of his hands, and demanding that he start from scratch tomorrow. Melvin knew that she was merely going to take the graphs and claim them as her own, taking more credit for his work during her meeting with the Board of Directors. To hell with it. He didn't care.

He turned off his computer and stared at the blank screen for a few moments. At times like this, depression threatened to swell upon him and crush him with one devastating blow to the skull. BAM! And that would be the end of it. He almost wished it would come. He listened to the seconds ticking away on his Rolex. How many seconds of his life had been wasted away at times like this, sitting and feeling sorry for himself, for his sorry state of affairs, and doing nothing about it?

Too much.

He decided it was time to go book hunting. As a hobby, he liked to search for rare or unique books; they didn't even have to be worth anything as long as they offered some kind of interesting jewel for him to unearth in the pages between their worn and dusty covers. The last book he'd found was a diary of a man who claimed to be a werewolf, and that had proved to be some interesting reading, especially as the man went into graphic detail of his animalistic sexual encounters. He recalled his eyes burning through the words, flipping from one page to the next, a pleasurable throbbing coming from the crotch of his pants as his arousal became evident, and then disgust at the accounts of the man's eating of his victims, sometimes right after he'd coupled with them. Melvin doubted he'd find anything as page-turning as that, but half the fun was searching for the books anyway.

Someone had told him of a rare book store, tucked away and relatively unknown by even the city's most ardent rare book seekers, and this is where Melvin headed in his BMW, aware that he'd be driving in a part of the city where a BMW would stick out like a sore thumb. He figured he wouldn't be there long enough to get it stolen. Anyway, no time like now to start working up that courage he so desperately needed.