Alone in the Crowd — Ronnie G. Anderson

Dean Jones was no stranger to the insane asylum where he resided from time to time. Dean Jones was dying. He had known about this upcoming event since he was a teenager. Dean's brain would not stop growing and it crowded out other parts of his skull with its mass. Perhaps that was why he had a photographic memory and could create and interact with the different imaginary women in the novels that he wrote. Dean Jones was a writer of PMS fiction where, when a good cry was needed, one of his books came to the rescue. He lived alone in his sparsely furnished apartment filled with the items of twenty some odd images and characters from his books keeping him company. When in a bookstore he met an "elegant pixie blonde" that was the very image of one of his book characters. Joyce Nelson was her name. She was a special agent for the IRS. Dean and his brother hated the IRS and considered them to be legal thieves Joyce became interested in getting to know the man after reading some of his books. When her heart found out that he hated her job and probably her by default, she disappeared from his life. But Dean did not want to forget the woman that he had come to love also; so he created her in his mind while writing a book about her and thus added her image and being to his real life. Using her very image in a crime novel in which the agent captured a leading crime boss in a daring capture involving a daring night club act raid, he gained her a reputation that she had not earned. She became "The Dimpled Darling of the IRS" and a heroine of other law enforcement officers that knew her. When the real IRS could come up with no better scenario to use than the one straight out of Dean Jones' book, Special Agent Joyce Nelson recreated the same scenario as the book had and when the "Bossman" came to be arrested things just did not follow the script. Meanwhile Dean lived with his imaginary version of Joyce Nelson and loved her as much as he had loved the original. The real test of character came when the two Joyce Nelson's met face to face.