A Wasteland of Strangers

Verne Erickson

It’s been a zoo around here all night. Just a damn zoo, ever since the Chief radioed in with the news about Mrs. Carey and John Faith. My wife and I have lived in Pomo eleven years and I can’t remember another time that even comes close to the past few hours. But then, there’s never been a homicide in Pomo County like this one — prominent citizen bludgeoned to death, chief of police beaten up in a fight with the alleged perpetrator, the suspect an outsider with a cloud over him anyway, shot trying to escape and either drowned or dead of hypothermia. Or maybe not dead, if Dick Novak’s right in what he thinks. Anyhow, no sign of Faith or his body has turned up so far, and it’s been more than six hours since he disappeared into the lake.

The whole town’s caught up in it, seems like. Word spread like wildfire, and for a couple of hours after midnight the streets were jammed with cars and people. Young punks in groups, swilling beer, and some no doubt using controlled substances; drunks emptying out of the bars; cars cruising, horns honking; a lot of yelling and wild talk and trespassing on private property. For a while there things got pretty dicey. Looked as though we might have rat-pack vandalizing and maybe some looting. But with the help of Sheriff Thayer and several of his deputies, we managed to defuse the situation, get the crowds dispersed and the traffic thinned away and a handful of toughs arrested or cited without any real trouble starting up.

The media made matters that much worse. Reporters from Ukiah and Santa Rosa and two or three other towns in Lake and other nearby counties, TV camera trucks, even a helicopter from one of the TV stations down in San Francisco that flew over Pomo and the lake and took live pictures and made too much noise and stirred things up again just as they were starting to settle down. We’ve had reporters and cameramen and photographers traipsing in and out of the station off and on all night, getting in the way and sticking microphones or flashing bulbs in everybody’s face. Mayor Seeley and Joe Proctor, the county D.A., talked to them; so did Thayer, who’s a blowhard and likes to be the center of attention. Around three or so the Chief came out briefly for a conference interview, not because he wanted to but because the media kept clamoring for him and the mayor figured he’d better oblige. Seeley’s big on maintaining friendly relations with the press and civic responsibility and all that. But Novak didn’t stick with it very long. Once the reporters got a look at the condition of his face, it was like a feeding frenzy: volleys of questions, Minicams and regular cameras grinding and popping as close as they could get. He cut off the interview after three or four minutes and shut himself inside his office and hasn’t done much talking to anybody since.

Fact is, the Chiefs in a bad way, physically and mentally both. It’s personal with him, and not just because Faith busted his nose. (Busted it bad. Paramedics couldn’t stop the bleeding out at the Carey house, but it was an hour before anybody could drag him off to Pomo General’s ER. Doctor there packed it and bandaged it and tried to convince him to spend the night or at least go straight home to bed, but he said no way; wouldn’t take anything for the pain, either, except some aspirin. Just went right back out on the job. A smashed nose causes swelling and discoloration around the eyes and across the cheekbones; that was what excited the reporters when he came out. By then he was already starting to look like a victim of Eastwood’s wrath in a Dirty Harry movie.) No, it’s not just the broken nose. Novak and Storm Carey had an affair a while back, and it’s plain enough he’s been carrying the torch. You can’t blame him, I guess. She was quite a looker. There’s no more happily married man in this county than me, but even I’d’ve been tempted under the right, or wrong circumstances. Promiscuous as hell, Mrs. Carey was — the media got wind of that in a hurry, and that’s another reason they’re so hot on the story — but she had class and she was always polite and friendly, even with the bluenoses who snubbed her on the street. She sure as hell didn’t deserve to die the way she did. Nobody deserves that kind of death, and when it’s a person you know well, maybe even loved... well, it’s no wonder the Chiefs in the state he’s in right now.

He won’t go home and he won’t let up, on himself or on the rest of us. He’s been back out to the Carey house twice to supervise the hunt for Faith’s body. And earlier, he had a shouting argument with Thayer that might’ve come to blows if Seeley hadn’t gotten between them. Novak wanted to put up roadblocks at both ends of town, in case Faith managed to survive the lake and elude the patrols and steal a car, and the sheriff kept insisting it wasn’t necessary because Faith was sure as hell dead and, besides, city and county combined didn’t have the manpower for it. That was while the young punks were congregating and it still looked as though we might have a near riot on our hands. It’s not often I agree with Leo Thayer, but in this case I did. It was more important to keep the peace than anything else right then, and roadblocks would only have complicated matters and provoked hostility. But even though Thayer wouldn’t provide even one deputy and we’re shorthanded, Novak wouldn’t back down on stationing a car at each of the three exits from town. The officers are still out there waiting and watching and not seeing a damn thing.

The Chief’s also got a search team continuing to work the shoreline north and south of the Carey property. Half an hour ago I took a short break to get some fresh air and have a smoke, and when I went across into Municipal Park I could see the searchlights on the curve of land up there, in the sloughs and tule marshes on the north shore. They made the lake seem even darker under the cloud-packed sky, thicker somehow, more like a vast sink of oil or tar. Made me cold, looking at it and thinking what it would be like to die under all that heavy black out there.

I agree with Thayer on that issue, too. John Faith’s dead. The Chief said to me when he first came into the station after his visit to the ER, “The son of bitch is still alive, Verne. I won’t feel any different until I see his corpse stretched out on a slab.” Obsession talking, not good sense. I understand how he feels, but I’ve always believed that obsession and police work don’t mix. You have to keep an open mind, be objective, or lose perspective and then you not only don’t get the job done, you wind up causing friction and making enemies.

Bottom line is that Lake Pomo is fed by volcanic springs and it’s butt-freezing cold at night this time of year. The odds of a man with a bullet in him and an open wound, even a big, strong type like Faith, surviving a lengthy swim in waterlogged clothing are pretty near zero. If he didn’t drown, hypothermia would’ve got him quick enough. And if he’d managed to crawl out somewhere, the search teams would’ve found him by now. There aren’t that many possible hiding places along that stretch of shoreline.

They hadn’t found his body yet because the lake is deep and the currents plenty strong and unpredictable. Floaters have been fished out a long way from where they went in, as far as ten miles, and more than one has drifted into the sloughs and gotten hung up in reeds or submerged obstructions — in the case of one bass fisherman, on a tangle of broken line and sinkers and hooks in Barrelhouse Slough. Chances are, though, Faith’s body is somewhere fairly close to shore near the Carey property, even up on the surface and hidden by the darkness. If so, it’ll be spotted as soon as it’s light enough. If not, well, it’ll turn up eventually. The lake has claimed eight victims in my time here, and it’s given every one of them up sooner or later. Fish-eaten and bloated and decomposing, maybe, but with still enough left for a positive ID.

Douglas Kent

Sometime in the night, in old F. Scott’s dark night of the soul, Kent dreamed he was driving on a pitch-black road without headlights. I couldn’t see a thing but I seemed to know where I was going, that there was something I had to do when I got there. Once, when I glanced over at the passenger seat, Pa Kent was squatting there and swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, his favorite tipple. He winked at me and said, “You’re a fool, boy, just like your old man.” A little while later, when I looked again, he was gone and Storm was sitting stiffly in his place. She didn’t wink. She hated me with her humid brown eyes. “You’re disgusting, Doug,” she said. “A disgusting, mean-spirited, irresponsible drunk, and I don’t want anything more to do with you.” Then she laughed, and I hated her, too, almost as much as I hated myself, and then I wasn’t in the car any longer, the car was gone and Storm was gone and I was walking somewhere in the dark and calling her name, only she didn’t answer. And a long time after that I heard a loud banging noise that went on and on, and somebody calling my name, saying, “Mr. Kent! Are you in there, Mr. Kent?” But I didn’t get up. I was too drunk and too tired to get up. My eyes wouldn’t open, or if they did open I couldn’t see anything except black, night, black. Where am I? I thought. Where am I going? And from somewhere Pa Kent, the old fook, said, “Straight to the bottom, boy, just like me. Straight to the bottom of the Pit.” I said, “No, no.” And he said, “Yes, yes. You’re already there, Dougie, right there at the gates. Go ahead, take a little peek at where you’ll be spending eternity.” But I kept my eyes tight shut and curled into a tiny ball and pulled the blackness close around me, cuddling it as if it were a woman.

An even longer time later, the blackness was gone and there was murky light and I was no longer in Fitzgerald country — I was awake, dream fragments clinging to my mind like cobwebs, but more or less lucid. Lucid enough to wish I wasn’t.

Morning. The light came through a crack in the Levolor blinds, falling across my eyes and hurting them when I pried the lids open. Another hangover, a ripsnorter this time. But the pain I felt wasn’t only booze-induced; I’d managed to bang up the Kent corpus somehow. I tried to remember. Too soon: The cobwebs clung stickily. Fah down, go boom? Oh yes, yes indeed. And not only that, I’d gone pukey-pukey all over somebody’s carpet before passing out. Mine? I rolled over, gingerly, and with an almost superhuman effort Kent sat up and focused on his surroundings. Mine, all right. My carpet, my apartment. Home sweet home. That was one thing about the Kents, pere et fils: No matter how wasted they got of a long, dark night, they generally managed to lurch homeward and somehow arrive more or less in one piece.

My left knee throbbed. Pants leg ripped, blood on the cloth and blood scabbed on the skin underneath. I hunted for other tears, other wounds, and found two — left elbow, right shin. Fah down, go boom all over the place. Hell of a night, eh, Dougie? The old bag of sticks was heavier than usual this A.M., and all thanks to dear Storm.

Where had I gone after she threw me out of her life? Gunderson’s, for a while, until the usually reliable Mike refused to serve me anymore. Then off to Mom and Pop’s Saloon down by the boatyard. Loud voices, shitkicker music (wail it, Waylon, you old sumbitch), watered-down gin served with a Spanish olive. Abomination! A frigging Spanish olive! Harsh words, a few choice obscenities, and somebody’s hands on my back and arse, hustling me out the door. And then... blank. The dream about driving somewhere? Alcoholic delusion. I seldom drove nowadays, and never when I was out gathering sticks and applying salve in preparation for another visit to Nightmareland.

This is your life, Douglas Kent. And a low one it is. Ten feet lower than a mole’s ass and still digging, as the pater used to say.

I needed a drink.

Bad.

I managed to stand up, stay up, and waddle into the kitchen without falling on my face again. Gin? No gin. The only hooch I had left in the place was vodka. Two long, bitter swallows — gurgle, gurgle. The salve stayed down as unsteadily as I stayed up. I leaned on the counter and waited for the shakes to abate. Took three minutes or so for the medicine to straighten me up, literally. I treated myself to another swallow and then floated into the bathroom and peed lustily, always a good sign. After which I shed my torn, reeking, and bloody rags and climbed under the shower and stood it icy for as long as I could, then lukewarm, then hot. By the time I’d toweled off I decided I would probably live through another day.

I doctored my battle scars, brushed my teeth, scraped off stubble (nicking myself only twice, I noted with some pride), donned clean clothes, and had another squint at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. Ah, but no bigger a pile than usual. And that, in the Kent household on any Saturday morning, let alone one after being Storm-lashed and cast away, was a major achievement.

Maybe not, though, I thought as I returned to the kitchen to drink the rest of my breakfast. Maybe shit, like water, simply seeks its own level. Interesting theory. I’d have to pursue it sometime when my head wasn’t quite so stuffed with spider silk.

I was in the living room, puffing on my first weed of the day and making a halfhearted attempt to clean my barf off the rug, when somebody clumped up onto the front stoop and pounded on the door and began calling my name, both much louder than was tolerable. The pounding and yelling were the same as in my dream, which I deduced meant I hadn’t dreamed them after all. I recognized the voice too: Jay Dietrich, the Advocate’s talentless cub and wanna-be.

I went and opened the door, reluctantly. Dietrich, with his horse face and walnut-sized Adam’s apple and Pollyannaish exuberance, is never a pleasant sight. On a morning when Kent was suffering more than usual, Jaydee was positively repellent.

“What’s the idea?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken to moonlighting as a town crier?”

“What? Oh. I’m sorry, Mr. Kent, but I didn’t know if you were here or not. Or if you were maybe... well, you know, sleeping. I didn’t get any answer when I was here before, and then I couldn’t find you anywhere else and things got so hectic—”

“Stop babbling. My head hurts enough as it is. When were you here before?”

“Around midnight. I came over as soon as I—”

“Midnight? Why in sweet Christ’s name were you banging on my door and crying my name at midnight?”

“I’d just heard the news and I didn’t know if you were—”

“News? What’re you talking about?”

“Mrs. Carey. Storm Carey.”

A sudden coldness formed in a knot under my sternum. A darkness, too, like an incipient black hole. “What about Mrs. Carey?”

“You don’t know, then,” Dietrich said, and his big Adam’s apple bobbed and bobbed again. “She’s dead. Murdered last night at her house. Bludgeoned with a paperweight, compound skull fracture.”

The black hole grew and spread; I could feel the chill pull of it, like a vortex. But that was all I felt. Numb. She’s dead. Murdered last night at her house. Just words — no reality to it yet. Cold and black and numb.

“That stranger,” Dietrich said, “the one you wrote the editorial about, he did it. Faith. Chief Novak caught him up there right afterward. He broke the Chief’s nose and then Mr. Novak shot him when he tried to escape and he jumped into the lake. Faith did. They think he’s dead, drowned, but they still haven’t found the body—”

“Where is she? Where’d they take her?”

“Mrs. Carey? Porno General. I talked to Dr. Johanssen—”

“Take me there. Right now.”

“Sure, Mr. Kent. But like I said, I already talked—”

“Now, damn you. Now!”

Audrey Sixkiller

When I first heard about it, from Joan Garcia, an Elem nurse at the hospital, I didn’t know what to do or think. My first impulse was to rush down there, but I didn’t give in to it. Dick wouldn’t want or need me, and there was nothing I could do for him anyway. Later, when feelings weren’t running quite so high and things were more settled — that was the time to make myself available to him.

I lay in bed with the lights on, prepared to endure another long, sleepless night. Instead, exhaustion dragged me under almost immediately. My dreams were unsettling. I dreamed of blood, which the old-time Indians believed was a sign of the devil: Blood spilled in a place poisoned it forever after. And I dreamed that I was one of the bear people, rushing through the night in my hides and feathers, and that I came upon Storm Carey and there was a terrible battle — two witches in a clash of magical powers that left her dead and me weeping as if my heart would break. Guilt, of course. I’d yearned for her to be gone from Dick’s life, but I had never once wished her dead.

In the morning I was still tired, and achy, as though I might be coming down with something. I put a kettle on the stove, and while the water was boiling I called the police station. Dick was there but not accepting personal calls. I spoke with Verne Erickson, and he said Dick had been holed up in his office most of the night. Hadn’t gone home, and as far as Verne knew, hadn’t eaten or slept either. He blamed himself for John Faith getting away from him. The fact that neither Faith nor his body had been found yet only made him feel worse.

But that wasn’t the only reason Dick was in such a state. I knew it, and I’m sure Verne did, too, even though neither of us mentioned it. Dick’s feelings for Storm. Whether or not he’d been seeing her again, she’d meant more to him once than just sexual gratification. It was painful to think that even he might not have realized how much he cared for her until she was dead.

Before we rang off I said, “I’ll stop by his house in an hour or so and take care of Mack. You might tell him when you get the chance.”

“I will. Thanks, Audrey. He’s probably forgotten all about the dog.”

And me, I thought. Mack and me both.

Tea and a Pop-Tart for breakfast. Ten minutes in the shower and another twenty to dress and put on my face. I was shrugging into my pea jacket when the telephone rang. I hurried to answer it, thinking that Verne had relayed my message and Dick had thought to call me after all.

“Hello? Dick?”

“Dick’s what you want, huh?” Thick, muffled man’s voice. “Well, dick’s what you’re gonna get, and plenty more besides. Gun of yours won’t stop me next time. You’re dead, bitch. Dead as Storm Carey — and soon, real soon.”

Trisha Marx

Saturday started out just as shitty as Friday ended. I didn’t get much sleep; at first I was too depressed and cried a lot, and then later there was all this noise, people driving around and yelling, a helicopter or something flying overhead in the middle of the night. I felt so down I didn’t even care what was going on. Then this morning I was sick to my stomach and spent five minutes in the John trying to hurl as quietly as I could so Daddy wouldn’t hear. Morning sickness again. Just freaking great. Then, after I got dressed and went downstairs, Daddy wanted to talk about Anthony. I told him we’d had a fight and it was all over between us, but I couldn’t tell him about the baby yet. No way. He asked me how I’d gotten home last night, and the way he asked it I knew he already knew and that somebody must’ve seen John Faith dropping me off and snitched about it. So I told him what’d happened, everything except that Anthony and I’d been smoking dope and how close I’d come — so close it scared me when I thought about it — to falling off the Bluffs into the lake.

And he said, real dark and grim, “You’re lucky, Trisha. You don’t know how lucky. After that Faith character brought you home, he went out to Mrs. Carey’s house and killed her. Bashed her head in.”

“What!” I stared at him with my mouth open. He wasn’t kidding. “John? It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t do anything like that...”

“Well, he did. Chief Novak caught him out there, and there was a fight and the Chief shot him.”

“Oh, God, he’s dead, too?”

“Looks like it. He went into the lake, probably drowned. They haven’t found the body yet.”

“All the noise last night — that’s what it was?”

“Yeah. Whole town was in an uproar. I stayed here — didn’t want to leave you alone again.” Daddy rubbed his right hand; the knuckles looked scratched, as if he’d been in a fight himself. “He got what was coming to him, by God. Just not soon enough. Started causing trouble the minute he showed up in Pomo.”

“He didn’t cause me any trouble,” I said.

“You’re lucky, like I told you. If it hadn’t been Storm Carey, it’d’ve been somebody else. Could’ve been you.”

I felt sick again, and this time it had nothing to do with being knocked up. Mrs. Carey killed — that was awful. I didn’t know her very well and people were always saying what a slut she was, the same people, I’ll bet, who were saying John Faith had killed her and who wanted him to be dead. I remembered last night on the Bluffs, how he’d dragged me away from the cliff edge and the stuff he’d said to me there and on the drive home, and I couldn’t believe he’d gone and bashed Mrs. Carey’s head in right afterward. No matter what Daddy said, what anybody said, I didn’t believe it.

Daddy tried to get me to eat some breakfast, but I couldn’t. I would’ve hurled again if I’d tried to swallow so much as a glass of milk. He had to work half a day at the lumberyard, he said, but he’d be home around one and he wanted to find me here when he got back. I said okay. The last thing he asked before he left was did I intend to see Anthony anymore. I didn’t lie to him. I said no way, José, and I meant it. Whatever I decided to do about the baby, Anthony wouldn’t be any part of it. Anthony was a big pile of dog crap I’d avoid from now on.

Selena called after Daddy left and wanted to talk about all the excitement last night; she sounded positively thrilled. I told her I couldn’t talk now, I’d call her later, but I knew I wouldn’t. The only person I could talk to today was Ms. Sixkiller.

Upstairs I put my makeup on, fixed my hair, and was ready to go at twenty of nine. Twenty minutes was about how long it’d take me to walk to Ms. Sixkiller’s house. I wished Daddy hadn’t had to work this morning, because then he might’ve let me have his pickup for a couple of hours. Man, how I’d love to have a car of my own. Selena’s folks bought her an old Volks bug for her seventeenth birthday, but Daddy says we can’t afford a second car, even a junker, thanks to the Bitch. That’s what he calls Mom; he won’t even say her name anymore, not that I blame him. Probably be years before I can afford to buy myself a car, even longer if I have the kid—

Shit! Cars, babies... I don’t know what I want or what I’m gonna do. I’m so screwed up. How’d I ever get this screwed up?

It was as cold this morning as last night. Sky all gray and twitchy, the way I felt inside. I walked fast over to Lakeshore Road. A car went by and honked, but I didn’t bother to look and see who it was. What was the word for when you felt this way? Apathy? Right, apathy. If apathy was gold, I’d be as rich as Mrs. Carey was—

But I didn’t want to think about Mrs. Carey.

When I got to where I could see along the north shore, there were a couple of big boats out and one of them looked to be the sheriff’s launch from down in Southlake. Still hunting for John Faith’s body. Everybody hurts, everybody wants to stop hurting. Well, he’d stopped hurting, all right. Poor John Faith.

Poor Trisha. When am I gonna stop hurting?

The more you hurt, the more you care. You’ll be all right if you don’t let yourself stop caring...

Ms. Sixkiller’s house was like a cottage, a real retro type with a tall brick chimney and shingles and stuff. Her father built it a long time ago, when Indians didn’t mix much with whites. He made some money hauling freight in wagons and boats and bought the land and built the house and pissed off all his white neighbors, but he wouldn’t move or sell and they couldn’t drive him out. Good for him. He must’ve been oneG141 tough old dude. His daughter’s pretty tough, too. Best teacher at Pomo High, and that’s not just my opinion. She’d listen, help me if she could. She had to help me because there just wasn’t anybody else.

I went in through her gate and rang the bell, but Ms. Sixkiller didn’t come to the door. Nothing but echoes inside when I rang again. I looked at my watch, and it was exactly nine o’clock. Oh, man, what if she forgot I was coming to see her and left early for her tribal council meeting? I went over to the garage and looked in through the side window. Her car wasn’t there.

Now what was I gonna do?

But maybe she hadn’t forgotten. Maybe she’d gone to the store or something and she’d be back any minute. I could sit on the porch and wait. Only I didn’t feel like sitting, so I went between the house and the garage and across the back lawn to her dock. It’s a long one, and about halfway out there’s a security gate, and beyond that, underneath, a board float and a shedlike thing open at both ends where she keeps her boat. She must really love that old boat; you’re always seeing her out in it, even in the winter. Once I saw her bouncing along when it was raining. Really raining, not, like, just a drizzle.

I walked out on the dock as far as the gate. When I pushed on the door set into the gate, not for any reason, just because it’s the kind of thing you do sometimes, it popped right open. Some security gate. I went on through, over to the edge of the dock where a ladder led down to the float. From there I could see into the shed. Ms. Sixkiller has one of those electronic hoists, and her boat was up out of the water on it, a tarpaulin roped across the stern half to keep out moisture.

It was sure a nice one, even if it was retro like her house. A boat’s something else I’d like to have someday, one of those sleek fiberglass jobs with gold glitter mixed into the paint. We owned a powerboat once, a fourteen-foot inboard, when the Bitch was still living with us. But we couldn’t afford to keep it after she ran off with that jerk from Kansas City. Daddy used to let me drive it sometimes. Driving a boat’s easier than driving a car. All you have to do is steer. Docking’s the hard part, especially when the water’s choppy like this morning—

What was that?

I was still standing by the ladder, looking now toward where the sheriff’s launch was making loops offshore near the Carey house. I cocked my head and listened. Lots of sounds — the boat engines, loons crying somewhere, a kind of creaking from the dock pilings or the hoist under the Chris-Craft’s weight — but not the one I thought I’d heard. I turned away and started back toward the gate. And then I heard it again. A funny kind of sound. I couldn’t quite identify it or tell where it was coming from.

For about a minute I stood quiet, listening. Then I went back to where the ladder was and climbed down to the float. I heard the sound again then, but I still couldn’t tell what was making it, and like a magnet or something, it drew me right in next to the boat. Pretty soon it came again, and this time it gave me goose bumps all over because I realized where it was coming from and what it was.

When I tugged at the heavy canvas, a flap of it lifted right up; it wasn’t really tied on the float side. And when I looked underneath, there was John Faith, lying in the bottom of the boat, on his back behind the driver’s seat. Clothes wet and all bloody on one side, his face twisted and his eyes shut tight, the sounds I’d heard — a kind of low moaning — coming from way down deep inside.

George Petrie

At first I didn’t know where I was. I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar room full of shadows and dark shapes, and panic surged and drove me out of bed, halfway across rough carpeting. I stood, trembling and disoriented, my heart raging against my ribs. It wasn’t until sounds penetrated from outside — traffic noise, distant voices, the slam of a car door — that the fog cleared away and I remembered.

Motel. Best Western just off Highway 80, outside Truckee.

On the run with a small fortune in stolen bank funds.

Sweet Christ, I really did do it, didn’t I?

I groped back to the bed, sank down on the rock-hard mattress. The sheets were sweat-sodden; so were my pajamas. How long had I slept? Digital clock on the TV, red numerals shining blurrily in the gloom. I rubbed grit out of my eyes. Nine-twenty. I’d pulled in here at what... close to midnight? Bed an hour and a half later. Nearly eight hours—

The money!

I lunged to my feet again, fumbled the nightstand light on. Breath hissed out between my teeth: The garbage bags, all six, were on the far side of the bed, where I’d put them last night. This was a ground-floor unit and I’d backed the car in close, unloaded the bags two at a time. Nobody saw me, I made sure of that. Triple-locked the door, tested the lock on the window, and then pulled the drapes tightly closed. Nobody could have gotten in. But I went around the bed anyway, felt each bag, opened each to make certain the packets of bills were still there.

$209,840.

I’d counted it before I’d crawled into bed. Every packet and loose bill, not once, but twice. $209,840. More than I’d expected — a small fortune even in this inflated economy. So many things it can buy me. Women... better-looking women than Storm, younger and kinder and even better in bed. Not that it’s possible for anybody to be much better in bed than Storm—

No, the hell with her. I won’t think about her anymore. She’s part of the past, the Pomo prison. Free of her, too, now. The money is the future, and the future is all that matters.

In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face. My pulse rate was back to normal, but I was still twitchy. I kept thinking about the money, only instead of soothing me, it produced a worm of anxiety. Six garbage bags full of cash. And every mile I drove, every time I stopped somewhere to eat or fill the gas tank or use a rest room, I ran the risk of something going wrong. Accident, car-jacking, traffic violation, other possibilities I couldn’t even imagine right now...

Cut it out, Petrie. Get a grip on yourself. Two more full days on the road, at least fifteen hundred miles between me and Pomo when the vault lock releases Monday morning, and I can’t do it wired the whole time, worrying about everything, feeling and probably looking like a fugitive. That’s how you make mistakes. Fatal mistakes. Tight control from now on. I’m finished otherwise. Remember that. Don’t forget it for a second.

I felt better after a long, hot shower. Clearheaded. One thing I could do about the money was to get it out of those garbage bags and into a couple of suitcases. Large, lightweight suitcases. Nobody at a motel would think twice about a man carrying luggage from and to his car. Just another anonymous business traveler. Buy the cases in Reno or Sparks, make the transfer out in the desert somewhere or maybe wait until I reached Ely tonight.

When I came out of the bathroom, the digital clock read five past ten. Overdue getting back on the highway. But hunger gnawed at me — I hadn’t eaten anything since noon yesterday, couldn’t have choked down food last night if my life depended on it. There was a Denny’s adjacent to the motel; I recalled seeing it when I drove in. Quick breakfast... no, better make it a large one, stoke up so I wouldn’t have to stop again for food this side of Ely. Okay. I zippered my overnight bag, unlocked the door, and started out.

A scowling gray-haired man was standing in front of my car, peering down at the license plate.

Surprise made me suck in my breath, loud enough for him to hear. His head came up. I jumped back inside, shut and locked the door, leaned hard against it. Sweat dribbled on my face and neck; for a few seconds I couldn’t seem to get enough air. I made myself breathe in shallow little pants, until the blood-pound in my ears diminished and the feeling of suffocation went away. Then I moved unsteadily to the window, eased aside a corner of the drape.

The gray-haired man was gone.

I fumbled the door open again, still clutching the overnight case, and stuck my head out. The parking lot seemed deserted. I ran to the Buick, dropped my keys twice before I got the trunk open. I threw the case inside, ran back into the room, caught up three of the garbage bags and hauled them out, stuffed them into the trunk, and then ran back for the others. Dripping sweat when I finished. Legs aching as if I’d run ten miles. I slammed the trunk lid, started around to the driver’s door.

Christ, there he was again, hurrying toward me from the motel office. Still scowling. Gesturing. Calling out, “Hey! You, Mr. Smith. You just wait a minute—”

I lunged in under the wheel, locked the door. It took three tries to slot the key into the ignition.

He was close now. I saw his mouth move again, but I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the engine. I jammed the gearshift lever into Drive, bore down too hard on the gas pedal, and almost lost control as the car surged ahead. At the exit then, out onto the business road paralleling Highway 80. The freeway entrance ramp was a short ways ahead; a red stoplight at the intersection turned green just in time. And I was on the ramp, on the highway, and in the mirror I could no longer see the motel lot or any sign of pursuit.

The words the gray-haired man had mouthed back there... something about signs, backing in? Can’t you read a sign? You’re not supposed to back in. Was that all it was about? Motel employee or self-righteous guest annoyed because of the way I’d parked my car?

I laughed. But it had a wild sound and I cut it off. I wasn’t certain that was what he’d been saying; I couldn’t be positive. It might’ve been something else. He might have been something else.

Suppose his car had been close by and he’d gotten to it in time to keep me in sight? Suppose he was back there right now, following me?

Eyes on the mirror again. Heavy traffic clogged all three lanes; too many other cars traveling at the same speed I was and none of them familiar. I goosed it up to seventy, seventy-five. Still couldn’t tell. Too dangerous to drive so fast; highway patrol kept a close watch for speeders along 80. I slowed down to the legal limit and held it there.

All the way into Nevada I kept watching the mirror. Watching and wondering and struggling to regain the feeling of tight control.

Richard Novak

Thayer waddled into my office trailing smoke from one of his fifty-cent panatelas. He didn’t stand or sit; instead he leaned his fat rump against the table under the window. “You look like hell, Novak,” he said. “Why don’t you go home, get some rest, before you fall apart?”

I knew how I looked. And I felt worse, but I wasn’t about to admit that to Thayer. “You find Faith yet?”

“No.”

“Then what’re you doing here?”

“Came to tell you I called off the boat search. Sent Abrams and the launch back to Southlake.”

“What!” Without thinking I jerked forward, slapped the desk with the flat of my hand. The sudden movement stoked the pain in my broken nose; it felt as though the middle of my face was on fire. “What’d you do that for?”

“Wasted effort, fuel, and manpower, that’s why. Abrams was up and down the shoreline half a dozen times, a mile in both directions. If the body was on the surface anywhere, he’d have spotted it.”

“What about Barrelhouse and the other sloughs?”

“What about them? Body couldn’t have drifted that far.”

“I’m not thinking about a dead body.”

“Faith couldn’t have swum that far either. Why the hell would he, even if he’d been able to?”

“You forget the Cutoff bridge?”

“No, I didn’t forget the bridge. Deputies up there all night, you know that. Deputies in boats in the sloughs at dawn, too. Nothing. He’s not in the marshes, dead or alive. Body’s snagged somewhere along the shore, or on the bottom, farther out, weighted down by what he was wearing. Either way it’ll come up sooner or later. There’s nothing more any of us can do right now. And that’s not just my opinion, it’s Burt Seeley’s, too.”

“Goddamn it, why do you and Seeley and everybody else automatically assume Faith’s dead?”

“You know better, huh?”

“I’ve got a feeling he’s still alive.”

“A feeling. That and a quarter’ll buy you a pack of gum.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Where’s this feeling tell you he is?” Thayer said. “No reports of stolen vehicles, so he’d have to be somewhere in the area.”

“Holed up.”

“Yeah, only there haven’t been any reports of sightings or break-ins either. And the shore search teams checked every possible hiding place.”

“You think so? There’s always one or two that get overlooked, no matter how fine an area is combed.”

Thayer made a derisive sound. “You say you put a bullet in him before he went into the lake. You sure about that?”

“I’m sure.” I’d replayed the fight and chase a dozen times in my memory; every time, I saw Faith stagger after I fired the second round. No mistake: That slug hadn’t missed. “Somewhere in the upper body. Too dark to tell just where.”

“Okay. So you add shock, an open wound, and loss of blood to the temperature of the water. Man, I’d be surprised if he lasted more than ten minutes out there. The odds of him getting far enough to find an overlooked hidey-hole must be, what, a few thousand to one?”

“I don’t care about the odds.”

“Right. You got a feeling.” Thayer sucked in smoke, blew it out in thin little spurts. He wasn’t quite smiling, but I could tell he was enjoying himself — almost as much as he had with the media earlier. He didn’t like me any more than I liked him. “Seasoned cop has a hunch biting his ass, he’s right and everybody else is wrong. Hunches never lie.”

“Up yours, Leo.”

That almost made him mad. He settled for nasty instead. “What’s the bottom line here, Novak? You want Faith to be alive so you can get your paws on him, pay him back personally for the busted nose and what he did to your bimbo?”

I pushed up out of my chair. The pain rush brought tears to my eyes. “Back off,” I said.

“Hell, everybody in the county knows you were screwing her—”

“I said, back off!”

“Or else what? You’re in no shape to get tough with me.”

“Keep baiting me and we’ll find out.”

He started to say something more, thought better of it, and fixed me with a glare that looked hot on the surface but was lukewarm underneath. He didn’t want any trouble with me, even as banged up as I was. There was no sand or steel in the man; just lard, bluster, and hot air. He was a piss-poor sheriff and a piss-poor excuse for a human being.

Say the same about yourself, Novak, after last night.

“You through talking, Leo? If so, get the hell out of my office.”

He said, “Faith’s dead. Rest of it is just bullshit,” and stomped out and slammed the door behind him.

My nose was bleeding again; I could feel the dribbles through the packing. I sat down, tilted my chair and my head back. Focused on the pain, wrapped myself in it. As bad as it was, it was more tolerable than the hurt I felt inside. Storm, John Faith, Dick Novak... all of us bound together in one poisonous sack of blame and guilt. But Faith, damn him, was the magnet of my hate. A malignant force, like a plague carrier, ever since his arrival in Pomo; if he hadn’t come here, none of it would have happened. And he was still out there somewhere, still alive, still malignant. I didn’t just feel it, I knew it, the way you know that if you survive the dark of night you’ll see daylight again. Until he was found there’d be no daylight for me — no ending, no closure, no new beginning. Faith dead or in custody wouldn’t bring Storm back or make last night any easier to live with, but at least then I could go on.

Another knock on the door. This time it was Della Feldman who stepped inside.

“Somebody else to see you, Chief.”

“If it’s the mayor again—”

“Audrey Sixkiller.”

“Audrey? Tell her I’m busy. I don’t need my hand held.”

“That’s not why she came. Something important to tell you, she says.”

“What is it?”

“Tell you, nobody else,” Della said.

“... All right. Send her in.”

I was back on my feet when Audrey entered. She winced when she saw the bandage, the swelling and discoloration, but all she said was, “Dick, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too. But the damage isn’t permanent.” Not on the outside, anyway.

She took a step toward me, as if she had it in her mind to touch or embrace me. It must’ve been my expression that stopped her, caused her to bite down on her lower lip. Poor Audrey. She was twice the woman Storm had been, probably twice the woman Eva was; but I didn’t want her close to me, not now. Empty inside, scooped out. Nothing left for her or anybody else.

I asked her if she wanted to sit down and she said no. Then she said, “Dick, how certain are you John Faith is guilty of Storm’s murder?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Something happened a while ago that makes me wonder. Is there any chance he’s innocent?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned. What happened?”

“A phone call. As I was leaving to feed Mack.”

“From?”

“The man who tried to break into my house.”

“The man who—!”

“He as much as said so.”

“... What else did he say?”

She took a breath. “That I’d be dead soon. That he’d make me as dead as Storm Carey. It didn’t sound like an idle threat.”

My face throbbed and burned. This, now, on top of everything else. “His voice... familiar?”

“No. Muffled, disguised.”

“Faith,” I said. “It could’ve been Faith.”

“But he’s dead, drowned...”

“Is he? I’m not so sure of that.”

“Even so, it couldn’t be him. Where would he go to make a phone call? Why would he?”

I shook my head. I wanted it to be Faith; simplify things, give me another reason to hate him. “Okay, maybe not. But it still could’ve been Faith in that ski mask the other night.”

“How could it be? The caller—”

“Sicko taking advantage of the situation, playing games to scare you.”

“No, Dick. The only people who know about the prowler are you and me and Verne. It’s the same man in both cases — I’m sure of it. On the phone... he said my gun wouldn’t stop him the next time. He couldn’t know I shot at the prowler unless—”

“All right,” I said. “Same man, and he’s not Faith.”

“His threat to make me as dead as Storm... couldn’t that mean he’s the one who killed her?”

“No. Her house wasn’t broken into and she wasn’t raped. She knew the man who did it. She let him in.”

“She knew John Faith?”

“Yeah. She invited him there last night.”

“Then... why would he kill her?”

“An argument, he lost his head and picked up that paperweight... Christ, Audrey, stop questioning me on this! Faith did it, nobody else. And the bastard who’s stalking you — I’ll find out who he is and I’ll get him, too. I promise you that. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I know you won’t.”

“I mean it. One woman dead—”

I couldn’t make myself say the rest of it. But Audrey understood. More than I’d thought she did. She said, “I’m sorry about Storm, Dick. I want you to know that. I really am sorry.”

The words, the sympathy and compassion in her eyes, built a sudden sharp impulse to pull her close after all, let her comfort me, find some strength in her strength. But I couldn’t do it. It was like there was a wall of glass between us. I kept my distance, hurting inside and out, feeding on the hurt. And all I could think to say was, “I’ll put an end to it, one way or another. I’ll get them — I’ll get them both.”

Trisha Marx

Ms. Sixkiller’s house was locked up tight. I hunted around in the backyard and found a rock and took it to the bathroom window on the north side. I kept thinking that this was crazy, that I was gonna get myself in some serious trouble here. But I couldn’t just leave John Faith lying there in the boat, cold and wet and wounded, after what he’d done for me on the Bluffs. Nobody’d help him if I didn’t. And suppose the wrong person found him next time, a cop or somebody who wanted to play Rambo?

The window breaking made a lot of noise, but there wasn’t anybody around to hear it; the houses on both sides were empty. I reached inside and flipped the catch and then shoved the sash up far enough so I could wiggle through. A sliver of glass pricked my finger as I swung down off the toilet, but I hardly even felt it. My heart was pounding worse than the first night the bunch of us broke into Nucooee Point Lodge to party.

First thing I did was open the medicine cabinet. There was a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, some adhesive tape, and gauze pads. I grabbed all of those and took them with me.

In our house there’s a linen closet that opens off the upstairs hall, but the hall here didn’t have one. So I had to look around for a couple of minutes before I found Ms. Sixkiller’s extra sheets and blankets in the closet in her bedroom. One blanket was heavy, made of wool; another was the all-weather thermal kind that keeps in heat and keeps out cold. I tucked both under my arm and then hurried through the kitchen to the back porch. I figured it’d be easier to go out that way, instead of back through the bathroom window, and it was. The screen door wasn’t hooked, and the lock on the outer door was the push-button kind.

The police launch was still way up shore; I made sure of that before I ran out onto the dock. I climbed down the ladder one-handed — lifted the tarp again and pushed the blankets and stuff inside the boat, then climbed the hoist frame and dropped down next to where John Faith was lying. The way he’d been shaking when I left him, I was afraid I’d find him dead. But he was still breathing, hard and raspy. I touched the side of his face. His skin was cold and hot at the same time, and all puckered and sort of gray. Was that how you looked and felt when you had pneumonia?

Fumble-fingered, I unfolded the wool blanket and shook it out. But then I thought: It won’t do him any good with those wet clothes plastered to his body. He wasn’t wearing much, just a shirt and a pair of Levi’s and socks, no shoes. The shirt had two bloody holes in it under the left shoulder, a small one in back and a bigger one in front. Two wounds. Shot twice, or maybe only once with the bullet going in one side and coming out the other.

The thing to do was to get everything off. Well? It wasn’t like I’d never undressed a guy before. I managed to unbutton the shirt, but parts of it were stuck to the wounds and I was afraid to pull the fabric loose. Instead, I undid his belt and the top button of his Levi’s. Unzipping the fly took longer on account of it stuck partway down. Then I took hold of the belt loops on either side, started to work the soaked pants down around his hips—

His eyes popped open.

I mean they just flew open, boing!, and all at once he was staring right at me — a wild and crazy stare, like Freddy Krueger before one of his slice-and-dice rampages.

It scared me so much I recoiled back against the gunwale and cracked my elbow. “Shit!” The boat wobbled a little, kept wobbling as he twisted over onto one hip and tried to sit up. He didn’t have enough strength; he made the groaning sound in his throat and sank back, supporting himself with one hand flat on the deck. When he looked at me again, the craziness was gone. His eyes were still glazed, but in a hurt and confused way.

He said “Trisha?” as if he didn’t believe it was me. His voice sounded like one of the frogs in the Budweiser commercials.

“Yeah.” I wasn’t afraid anymore. He wouldn’t hurt me. I don’t know how I could be so totally sure of that, but I was. I straightened up on my knees, rubbing my elbow. “I was trying to get those wet clothes off, you know? You were shivering so hard...”

“Cold,” he said. He blinked a few times, ran his other hand over the dark stubble on his cheeks. “Where are we?”

“Boat shed.”

“Whose?”

“Ms. Sixkiller’s. This is her boat.”

“Sixkiller... Audrey?”

“Yeah. You know her?”

“Met her. How’d you find me?”

“I was up on the dock and I heard you moaning.”

“Just you? Alone?”

“Just me.”

He tried to sit up again, but something hurt him this time; he grimaced and sucked in his breath. I could see part of the wound in front where the open shirt pulled away. Black and red-brown and scabby. It was bleeding again, too — little pimples of bright red.

I said, “I never saw bullet wounds before,” because it was what I was thinking.

“Better hope they’re the last you ever see.”

“That one looks... man!”

“Feels that way, too.” He was probing at it with two fingers, unsticking the rest of his shirt and wincing when it tore away a scab of blood. “Could’ve been worse. Bullet went straight through, didn’t hit bone or bust me up inside.”

“Lucky.”

“Oh yeah. Mr. Lucky.”

“I brought some peroxide,” I said. I leaned over for the bottle and showed it to him. “I got it from Ms. Sixkiller’s bathroom. It’ll help, won’t it?”

“Help a lot. Thanks.”

“I also got some blankets.”

“Help me sit up. Don’t think I can manage by myself.”

I scooted over, got behind him on my knees, and lifted on his good side until he was sitting up. Then between us we were able to drag the shirt back down over his arms and all the way off. He poured peroxide on and it, like, actually hissed on the open wounds, bubbled up white and frothy in a way that nearly made me gag. The pain must’ve been terrific; he jerked and twisted and tears leaked out of his eyes and he half-strangled on a yell to keep it from coming out loud.

I took some of the gauze pads out of their wrappings and he used half to clean the wounds and then we taped on the rest. He had a little trouble breathing when we were done, so I helped him lie back flat. Then, with him raising his butt and pushing with his hands and me tugging, we managed to get the Levi’s off. He said, “You can leave my shorts on,” but I said, “They’re wet, and I’ve seen guys naked before,” and I worked those off, too. I couldn’t help sneaking a look at him down there. Oh, boy. Even shriveled up from the cold, his dick made Anthony’s look like an Oscar Mayer reject.

When he was wrapped in the blankets, the thermal one underneath against his bare skin, he asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and told him, “Quarter to ten.”

“That late? A wonder I lasted long enough for you to find me.”

“How long’ve you been here?”

“Most of the night.”

“It must be more than a mile from here to Mrs. Carey’s. You couldn’t have swum all that way.”

“No. I wasn’t in the lake more than ten minutes the first time, maybe twenty altogether. Walked and crawled, mostly.”

“How’d you keep them from seeing you?”

“Dark took care of that. Dark and blind luck. Couple of them got close enough to touch me, but I was hiding under a dock on a crosspiece where their lights didn’t reach.”

“Everybody thinks you drowned. Or else the cold got you.”

“They were almost right. I couldn’t’ve gotten any farther than here. Passed out as soon as I climbed in under the tarp.” He looked at me for a few seconds, and then he said, “I didn’t kill her, Trisha. Mrs. Carey.”

“I know it. I wouldn’t’ve helped you if I thought you did.”

“I hope you don’t regret it. If they find you here with me—”

“They won’t. They’re not looking down this far.”

“But they are still looking.”

“For your body, not for you.”

“Audrey Sixkiller... where’s she?”

“Probably down at the Elem rancheria by now. She has a tribal council meeting at eleven. I was supposed to meet her here at nine, but she must’ve forgot.”

“Better beat it while you can.”

“Don’t worry, she won’t be back until after one—”

I stopped because the wind slackened just then and I heard rumbling noises out on the lake. John heard them, too. He said, “What’s that?”

“Boat engine. Sounds like the sheriff’s launch.”

“Coming this way?”

“Yeah, but they can’t see us if we stay down.”

I stretched out flat alongside him. The engine sounds got louder, closer. John was breathing fast and raspy again; I could feel him all tense inside the blankets. I felt bad for him. And mad, too, on account of what’d happened to him and how wrong everybody was about him. Why couldn’t they see him the way I did — a good guy, not a bad one?

The launch glided past at least a hundred yards offshore without slowing any. I waited a couple of minutes more, until the engine sounds began to fade, then rose up and looked and couldn’t see anything except gray water. I climbed out and went to the end of the float for a quick look. When I came back I said to John, “They’re gone. On their way back to Southlake, looks like. That might mean they’ve called off the search.”

“Might.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

“You want to sit up now?”

He said he did and I helped him. He huddled against the gunwale, not saying anything. He was still shaking but in little spasms, not hard like before. His skin color didn’t seem as gray anymore.

“You look better,” I said.

“Feel better. Warmer. I’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. You get going. The longer you hang around here, the more risk of you being caught with me.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I do. Go on, beat it.”

“If I beat it, then what? What’ll you do?”

“Sit here until I feel stronger.”

“Then what?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

“Yes I do. Tell me, John.”

“I don’t know. See if I can hot-wire the ignition, maybe.”

“That’s good, getting away in the boat. But where to?”

“Somewhere on the other side of the lake. My problem, for Chrissake, not yours—”

“Big problem,” I said, “if anybody sees you driving Ms. Sixkiller’s boat. Everybody around here knows it’s hers. And even if you do make it all the way across, what’ll you do then? You’re hurt too bad to do much except hide for a while, but you don’t know the area well enough to find a safe place. And you’d have to leave the boat and they’d find it and then they’d know where you went. Right?”

He was quiet again, watching me.

“I do know a safe place,” I said. “I can take you straight to it and get you inside.”

“... What place?”

“You’ll see. It’s safe, believe me. Nobody goes there. Nobody has any reason to anymore.”

“Get there by boat?”

“Right to it. You won’t need to try hot-wiring the ignition, either. I know where Ms. Sixkiller keeps the key.” On a hook next to the fridge in her kitchen; I’d seen it and some others hanging there on my way out with the blankets and other stuff. “It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to get it.”

“You know how to drive a boat like this?”

“Sure. It’s not hard. From a distance, with my scarf over my head, I’ll pass for Ms. Sixkiller and you’ll be hidden back here under the tarp. After you’re safe, I’ll bring the boat back and she’ll never even know it was out.”

“Unless she comes home meanwhile.”

“It won’t take more than an hour and a half, round trip. That’s more than enough time.”

“She could still come back early. What if she’s here when you bring the boat in?”

“I’d tell her I went for a ride. She wouldn’t turn me in to the cops or anything. Just yell at me a little. She’s cool.”

“The things you took from her house — she’s bound to miss them.”

“No, she won’t.” She would, once she saw the broken bathroom window, but I didn’t care about that right now and I didn’t want John to worry about it. I was so torqued up over helping him escape that nothing else seemed to matter, including the fetus growing inside me. It was dangerous, yeah, but it was also, like, major exciting. And I was doing it for all the right reasons, wasn’t I? Besides, my life was so totally screwed up now, what difference did it make if it got even more screwed up later on?

John said, “I don’t like it.”

“But you know it’s the only way. Neither of us wants you to go to prison or the gas chamber for something you didn’t do.”

“Yeah.” He said it hard and angry, but it wasn’t me he was pissed at. I knew that. “But you be careful. And you promise me something before we go. Promise me if we get caught together, you tell the law I forced you to help me. Threatened you, and you were too scared not to do what I told you.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. Promise me, Trisha.”

“I promise. So let’s stop talking and just do it, okay?”

“Okay,” he said in that same angry voice. “We’ll do it.”

Anthony Munoz

The first thing Mateo says when I walked into his pad was, “Where were you last night, little brother? You know what went down? You hear what a wild-ass scene it was?”

“I heard. The old man was yapping about it when I got up.”

“Cracked her skull, man. Cracked it wide open.”

“Yeah. Leaves a bad taste, man. That Mrs. Carey was a fox.”

“Lagarta’s more like it. Jode y una mamada, that’s all she was good for. Well, she picked the wrong dude this time.”

“Yeah. But she didn’t deserve no cracked skull.”

“You don’t think so? I think so.”

“Why? Because she dissed you that time you tried to hit on her?”

“She was a bitch, man.”

“I don’t know, man. Dyin’ like that...”

“Ain’t no good way to die, is there?”

“Got that right. Old man says Faith drowned in the lake.”

“Maybe the dude did, maybe he didn’t.”

“Or he iced out there. The old man says—”

“The old man don’t know his dick from a paint scraper.” Mateo laughed. “I’d love it if the dude’s still alive, gets away with it. I’d love it, man.”

“Why?”

“Told you, bro. She was a bitch and she had it comin’.”

“I don’t know, man.”

“What do you know, man? Sometimes I wonder about you.”

“Wonder what?”

“Just wonder. So where were you, Anthony? Man, we had a bigger street party than ten freakin’ Fourth of Julys. Dudes cruisin’, dudes doin’ crank and blow and weed right in front of the heat, TV trucks, even a freakin’ TV helicopter. A freakin’ circus, man. And you missed the whole show.”

“Yeah.”

“Out balling Trisha, huh? Don’t you ever get enough pussy?”

“Too much pussy, that’s what I been getting.”

“No such thing, man.”

“She’s knocked up.”

“No shit? Trisha?”

“Who else.”

“You go divin’ without a wet suit?”

“One time. One freakin’ time.”

“That’s all it takes, bro. Sure it’s yours?”

“Yeah, it’s mine. She don’t lie, man.”

“So what, then? She wants you to marry her?”

“What the hell else.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I told her no way, man.”

“That’s my man. Marriage sucks.”

“Big time. Yeah.”

“It’s for jerks and squares, man.”

“Yeah.”

“Look at the old man and old lady. Him so wore out from paintin’ houses all day, he can’t do nothing at night except yell and swill down cheap wine. She ain’t no better. Don’t give a shit about me and you, each other, nothing but TV and Carlo Rossi.”

“Yeah.”

“Dudes like us, we got to be free. Free and easy, man. Go places, do things, see the fuckin’ world, get ourselves a piece of the good life. No wives, no babies, no tied-down bullshit for Anthony and Mateo. Right?”

“Right.”

“So how’d she take it? Trisha.”

“Went ballistic, man. Jumped out of the car, ran off and hid in the freakin’ trees. I couldn’t find her.”

“Where was this, man?”

“The Bluffs.”

“So what’d you do?”

“Drove off and left her.”

“Yeah, man.” He put his hand out and I slapped it. “So then what’d you do?”

“I was pissed, you know? Wild. Drove around lookin’ for you, Petey, somebody to hang with. Nobody around.”

“We was partyin’, man. Leon’s homestead.”

“Never thought to check Leon’s. Shit.”

“So then what’d you do?”

“Drove down to Southlake.”

“Lookin’ to score?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you get? Crank? Blow?”

“No man. Ecstasy.”

“Cool. How was it?”

“Lame, man. I still don’t feel right.”

“How about some grass, pick you right up.”

“Nah. I don’t wanna get high.”

“Half quarts of Green Death in the fridge.”

“Not that neither. Too early, man.”

“Never too early. Come on, let’s pop one.”

“Yeah, okay. What the hell.”

Mateo went out to the kitchen to get the brews. I didn’t want one, but I felt wrong for sure and I needed a lift. Wrong about leaving Trisha up there on the Bluffs even if she did go hag-crazy on me, all that cagueta about the baby and then running off and wouldn’t come out of the freakin’ trees. Wrong about that Mrs. Carey, too. Murder, man... it ain’t right to kill somebody unless he’s tryin’ to ice you. It ain’t right to hurt a chick that way, no matter who she is.

Mateo’s pad is cool, man. Real dank. Old building down by the boatyard, second-floor pad with a little balcony so you can sit and check out the lake when the weather’s right... suck down a brew or smoke a joint, whatever. Nobody lives here gives a Frenchman’s fuck. He’s got it fixed up with NASCAR posters, blowup color pix from Laguna Seca and Sears Point and Indy races. Not much furniture, none of the crap most people have. He’s got the front seat out of a ’52 Olds for a couch and buckets from a ’Vette and a TransAm for chairs. Can’t get much more dank than that.

I got up from the tuck-and-roll ’Vette bucket and went to look at the biggest blowup. Real fiery Indy crash, one driver spinning out and hitting a wall, another car sliding into the flames. Cool. But I couldn’t get my head into it. I kept flashing on Trisha and that goddamn baby, her going hag-crazy and me leaving her up there. Wasn’t right, man. No matter what Mateo said, I shouldn’t’ve done it.

Well, she’d got home okay. That was one thing I didn’t have to sweat about. No answer when I buzzed her homestead this morning, so I took the wheels over there. Wasn’t nobody home, but one of the neighbors says she seen Trisha walking off somewheres about a half hour before. So that was like a major relief, man. Didn’t want nothing to do with me or she’d’ve tried to get in touch. Then why’d it keep bugging me like this? I didn’t want a kid, and she wouldn’t either when she thought it over hard enough. Her old man sure as hell wouldn’t, not that dude. He’d tell her to lose it same as I did and she would and that’d be the end of it, right? She’d never have nothing more to do with me, but what the hell, I didn’t love her or anything, right?

“What’s the sad eye for?” Mateo was back with a couple of half quarts of Green Death. “Trisha?”

“Yeah.” I popped the tab on my can and sucked down half the ale before I came up for air. “Trisha, that Mrs. Carey, the lame stuff I scored in Southlake... everything, man. Nothing feels right today.”

“Most days, man.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s this town, bro. Town, lake, county, the whole fuckin’ sack.”

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking maybe I oughta go find Trisha, talk to her. Yeah. Talk some sense into her. I didn’t want a kid, didn’t love her, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have no feelings for her.

“Boneyard’s what it is,” Mateo says. “Keep on hangin’ here, you end up hung dead and worm food. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Loud and clear, man.”

“So why don’t we get out, man?”

“Get out?”

“Split for a place that’s got life, action.”

“Like where?”

“Like L.A. You know that’s where I always wanted to be, man. I been thinkin’ about it a lot lately.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Plenty happening down there, man. Couple of young dudes like us, hot with engines and wheels, we grab us a piece of the good life in no time.” He winked. “Plenty of almeja down there, too, man.”

“You mean just pick up and split?”

“We got nothing keepin’ us here, right? Old man and old lady’d love it if you moved out, both of us outta their hair for good. And no more sweat about Trisha’s kid. I mean, suppose she tries to stick you for support? Can’t pry cash out of a dude if they can’t find him, right?”

“Yeah. But when would we go?”

“Sooner the better. Tomorrow.”

“Oh, man, that’s too fast...”

“Listen, Anthony, either we put this hole behind us, change our freakin’ lives, or we don’t.”

“I don’t know, man. I got to think about it...”

“Yeah, sure,” Mateo says. “Just don’t think too long. I made up my mind — I’m outta here. With or without you, little brother, real soon.”

Douglas Kent

They wouldn’t let me see her. I wasn’t a relative by blood or marriage, friends of the victim were not allowed viewing privileges, members of the media weren’t allowed viewing privileges, the autopsy had yet to be performed... a litany of official bullshit. The word “autopsy” funneled bile into my throat. Images of Storm with that beautiful head of hers shattered, lying cold and waxy and forever still on a metal table, was bad enough; images of her being drawn and quartered like a butchered heifer, her juices running in troughs or being sucked up through vacuum hoses, was intolerable.

I demanded an audience with the coroner, Johanssen. Pomo General’s head nurse didn’t want to let me see him, either. Head pounding, stomach churning, Kent pitched a small and voluble fit. When she saw I was perfectly willing to escalate into a large and disruptive fit, she went and fetched Johanssen.

Waste of time. Mine. He was harried and snippy and wouldn’t tell me much of anything. Had instructions not to release specific details gleaned from his preliminary examination of the deceased, he said. That was what he called her, “the deceased,” even though he’d known Storm well enough — they both belonged to the country club, attended the same charity fund-raisers.

No, Johanssen said, he couldn’t tell me whether or not she’d been raped. No, he couldn’t say if she had suffered any wounds or traumas other than the blows that had killed her. (But he insisted on providing me with a full medical description of the cause of death, as if he needed to prove his qualifications for the job of corpse handler. “Temporal skull fracture leading to subdural hematoma of mid brain. Death of brain due to necrosis or mass effect. Secondary edema causing herniation through foramen magnum, that is, the brain stem.” Jesus!) Had I spoken to Chief Novak or Mayor Seeley yet? No? Well, why didn’t I go and do that? Or perhaps I’d be better advised to go home and sleep it off.

“I’m not drunk,” I said. Yet.

“Your breath and your appearance contradict that statement.”

Kent stood in impotent rage as the pompous little prick walked off, his back straight and his bald pate gleaming in the hallway fluorescents.

A hand plucked at my sleeve. Dietrich, the overeager wanna-be; I’d forgotten he was there. “We’d better leave, Mr. Kent.”

“I wish it’d been that bald head of his.”

“... Mr. Kent?”

“The temporal skull fracture, the subdural hematoma of mid brain,” I said. “His head opened up like a melon, his glop that poured out. Him the corpse on the table instead of her.”

“Oh, wow,” Dietrich whispered.

“Yes. Exactly. All right, let’s get out of here.”

We went to the police station. Arrived just in time to catch Chief Novak exiting into the side parking lot, alone, hotfooting it for his cruiser as if he expected to be assailed by a mob of slavering Fourth Estaters at any second. The only Fourth Estaters in the vicinity, one slavering, the other wishing to Christ he had a drink, drew up alongside. He recognized us, but he went ahead and hopped into his cruiser anyway. No one wanted much to do with Kent today, it seemed. Including Dougie his own self.

I said, “Hold your horses, Chief. A few questions.”

“Not now. I don’t have time.”

“At least tell me about Faith. Found yet?”

“No.”

“Lakeshore still being searched?”

“Not the way I’d like it to be.”

“Explain that.”

“Talk to Sheriff Thayer. Or the mayor.”

“Dissension in the ranks, Chief?”

He didn’t answer that. His face, bruised, discolored, bandaged, resembled a Halloween fright mask; muscles wiggled under the skin surface like maggots on a chunk of spoiled meat. (Poor choice of simile, Kent. Summoned up fresh images of Storm on the autopsy table.) Novak’s eyes burned hot: pain, hate, determination. I knew exactly how he felt. My lust had been unrequited, his hadn’t; that was the only difference between us as torchbearers in the Storm Carey Olympics.

“Do you think he’s dead?” That from Dietrich, butting in.

“Faith?” The Chief’s mouth tightened; the muscle maggots seemed to scurry under his eyes and along his cheeks. “I can’t answer that.”

“Then there’s a chance he’s alive?”

“Without a body... yeah, there’s a chance.”

“What’s your best guess?” I asked him. “Dead or alive?”

Headshake. He started the engine.

“If he is alive, there’s no way he could escape, is there?” Dietrich again. “Find some way out of the area, evade capture altogether?”

“No,” Novak said flatly, “there’s no way.”

He jammed the cruiser into gear, zoomed off toward Main.

“What now, Mr. Kent?”

“I don’t suppose we can get onto the Carey property. Look around up there ourselves.”

“No, they’ve got the entire area cordoned off. I drove by before I went to your place.”

“All right, then it’s back to the Kent digs.” I needed salve. I needed to lie low for a while. So many sticks in the bag now, the combined weight was about to split me apart at the seams. Humpty-Dumpty Kent. “After you drop me off, come back here and hang around. If there are any new developments, I want to know about them right away.”

“You’ll be home all day?”

“No. At the office later on. One or the other.”

“Are you planning to write the story about the murder, Mr. Kent? I mean, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to take a shot at it myself.”

“Go ahead.” What did I care? I couldn’t write it — not this one. “Just make sure you do it on your laptop at the station, and don’t forget to let me know the minute there’s any word on Faith.”

“You can count on me,” Dietrich said. “I sure hope they find him soon.”

“They damn well better.”

And he damn well better be dead when they do. The thought of Bigfoot alive, somehow managing to cheat capital punishment altogether, was even more intolerable than the thought of the corpse processor carving up the deceased with his trusty saw and scalpel.

Trisha Marx

We didn’t have any trouble crossing the lake and I found Nucooee Point okay, but getting us into the rickety old dock was kind of hairy. The water was covered with whitecaps, even though the wind wasn’t strong over on the east shore, and Ms. Sixkiller’s boat was bigger and had more power than the one we used to own. The first time I tried it, I shut down to idle in plenty of time but the current dragged us over faster than I expected and I didn’t get the gear lever into reverse soon enough. The left side — port side — banged hard into the float edge and for a second after we bounced off I thought we might capsize. But I quick put the power on and the boat settled and then we were out away from the dock again, going backward. I slid into neutral and let us drift while I chilled enough to give it another try.

John had his head out from under the canvas. “Sorry about that,” I said to him. “I’ll do better next time.”

“Still nobody in sight?”

“Uh-uh. You can come out now if you want.”

He pushed the canvas all the way back and eased himself up against the port gunwale. He was still in a lot of pain, you could see that, but he’d gotten some of his strength back and he moved better than before. He took in the cottonwoods and willows that grew thick along the shoreline on down to the Bluffs half a mile away. The lodge buildings were scattered inland among oaks and pepperwood trees, all except for the old dance pavilion downshore, south of the dock.

He said, “Can’t see the highway from here.”

“No. It’s on the other side of that big building straight ahead. Nobody out there can see us, either. Perfect, huh?”

“Yeah.” He sat up a little more, onto one hip so he could lean out over the side. “Ready when you are.”

I was more careful this time and I took us in with just a little bump and scrape against the float. John caught onto one of the rusty iron rings and held us close so I could clamber out and tie the bow line, then the stern line. I felt sort of spacey when I was done, like I was on this natural high. It made me tingle all over; I could feel it like a hand stroking down between my legs.

“Here,” John said, “take my wallet.” He must’ve got it out of his Levi’s on the way over, before he tied up the rest of his stuff with some fishing line and a lead sinker from the storage locker and dropped the bundle overboard. “Give it back to me when we get where we’re going.”

I put the wallet into my pocket, along with what was left of the tape and gauze pads. The peroxide, and a quart of OJ and a couple of apples I’d lifted from Ms. Sixkiller’s fridge when I went back for the key, I tied inside my jacket. It all made me bulge like a klepto on a spree. I kept the flashlight from the storage locker in my hand; we were gonna need it pretty soon. Then I helped John get out onto the float. Even with me to hang on to, his legs were so wobbly I was afraid he’d fall down. He said, “Let me rest a minute,” and leaned against one of the pilings and sucked in a bunch of deep breaths, holding the blankets closed around him. We must’ve been some sight, me all bulgy and him like a monk or something in those blankets.

I said, “Think you can walk okay?”

“How far?”

“A ways. Maybe a couple of hundred yards?”

“I’ll manage. We’ll just have to take it slow.”

We took it slow, my arm around his waist and his arm across my shoulders. There wasn’t any ladder to climb; the float was hooked to a railed ramp and the ramp took us onto an overgrown path. When we got up there we stopped again to rest.

Real quiet here; the only sound was the wind swishing in the trees. Spooky place at night, but during the day it wasn’t anything but a bunch of old redwood log buildings and what was left of a terrace and a couple of weedy tennis courts. The open-sided pavilion was in the worst shape; its lakeside wall had cracks in it and pieces of concrete missing where the cracks were widest, and the roof sagged on one side like it was getting ready to collapse. The six boarded-up cabins, three on each side of the inlet, seemed to be sinking into the ground on account of all the weeds and tall grass and oleander shrubs that had grown up around them. The main lodge, two stories high, crowded by oaks on both sides, was in the best shape. At least it looked pretty solid from back here, even with all its windows and doors covered with shutters and sections of plywood. The terrace made you think of some kind of jungle ruins, with all the stuff growing up through the flagstones and hunks of the plaster statues that’d toppled over and big pieces of concrete busted off what’d once been a fancy waist-high wall.

John asked, “What is this place?”

“Nucooee Point Lodge. Nucooee’s an Indian word for some kind of fish. Shiner fish, I think.”

“Indian land?”

“Well, it was once, a long time ago.” We were walking again, following what was left of the path leading to the terrace. “The lodge was built sixty or seventy years ago. Rich people’s resort, you know?”

“Abandoned how long?”

“A year or so. Shut down for a long time in the eighties, then somebody bought it about five years ago and reopened it, but they couldn’t get enough business. It’s up for sale again. My daddy says if it sells, it’ll just be for the land.”

“Caretaker?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Special patrols of any kind?”

“No. You don’t have to worry, John. Nobody’ll find you here.”

“We going to the main lodge?”

“Yeah. There’s a way inside.”

“How do you know?”

“Been in there. Couple of times last summer, a bunch of us came over and snuck in and partied. And again on Halloween.”

“Some place for a party.”

“Pretty cool, actually. Except for the bats.” I shuddered, remembering how one of the things had brushed past my face the first night. It made a sound like a leather belt being snapped close to your ear. Ugh. “Bats don’t bother you, do they? Or rats or spiders?”

“Better company than most people. You don’t bother them, they don’t bother you.”

We rested again at the crumbling terrace wall, then picked our way across to the south corner of the lodge. I kept glancing back at the lake, just to make sure no other boats came along. It looked wide and wind-blown from here; the homes and town buildings along the west shore were like miniatures about two inches high. I tried not to think about the long trip back across, alone, in Ms. Sixkiller’s boat. Or of anything else that might happen later on. The major thing was getting John inside where it was safe.

The way in was on the south side — a service door that opened into a storeroom off the kitchen. The door was covered with plywood, but the first night, Anthony and Mateo had pried it off with a crowbar and then busted the door lock; afterward they’d put the plywood back up with the nails in their original holes, so unless you got up close and started messing around, you couldn’t tell the section was loose.

I showed John, and together we stripped off the plywood. “I’ll put it back up when I leave,” I said, and he nodded and we went inside.

Dark, musty, and dusty. Muggy hot in the summer, cold on Halloween night and almost as chilly now. I switched on the flashlight. Empty shelves and cobwebs jumped out and jumped back as I swung the beam around and we moved ahead into the kitchen. There wasn’t much left in there, just a couple of long metal tables and some old sinks and exposed piping. The door to the walk-in freezer was half open. Selena’s boyfriend, Petey Dexter, had locked her in there for about ten minutes on Halloween and she’d been so pissed when he let her out she’d tried to kick him in the balls. We all thought it was pretty funny at the time. Somehow it didn’t seem so funny now.

Across the kitchen was an archway that led into the dining room: more cobwebs and a bunch of stacked-up folding chairs. We’d taken some of the chairs into the big, wide lobby and arranged them in front of a fieldstone fireplace that must’ve been six feet across. The rest of the lobby was a mess. It was gloomy in there, but threads of daylight came through cracks in the plywood covering the tall front windows and let you see enough so you could move around without tripping over things. Candle stubs and beer cans and cigarette butts and bags from Mickey D’s and other crap that we should’ve taken with us was thrown around on the moldy carpet. Rats and mice had been at the bags; they were all torn up. They’d been at the two old leather couches that’d been left behind, too, pulling out stuffing to make nests with or something. The front desk and the cubbyhole thing for mail and keys that’d been behind it were just a lot of splintered boards; Mateo, wasted on crank and Green Death, had broken them up with the crowbar the first night. Made so much noise we were all afraid somebody driving by on the highway would hear. Anthony and Mateo — the Loser Brothers.

John was wobbly again after the long walk, sweating and breathing hard. He nearly collapsed onto one of the couches, dust puffing up around him like smoke in the flash beam. Some little pelletlike things that were probably turds bounced off onto the floor. I said, “Might be mice nesting inside there,” but he didn’t seem to care. He laid his head back and sat there with the blankets all tangled around him.

“You okay, John?”

“Weak. Wound’s bleeding again.”

“Want some more of the peroxide?”

“Yeah.”

He untangled himself, and I held the light so he could see to work off the bandages. Blood gleamed on them and on the wounds. He poured peroxide on and it frothed and hissed the way it had on the boat, only it didn’t seem to hurt him so much this time. He taped on more of the gauze pads, and when he was done his face was white and dripping sweat.

“All you’ve done for me, Trisha,” he said then, “I hate to ask for more. But it’s either that or my chances aren’t much better than they were before you found me.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Peroxide and plain pads won’t be enough to keep the wounds from infecting. I’ll need other stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Not sure. I’ve never been shot before.”

“I’ll get whatever you need. Maybe I can look it up in a book or something...”

“Might be a better way.”

“Like what?”

“One that gets you out of it and puts somebody else at risk. I hate the idea, but I’d also hate sitting here and rotting.”

“What’re you talking about, John? What somebody else?”

“You know the blond waitress works nights at the Northlake Cafe? Lori?”

“Lori Banner? Sure, I know her. But—”

“She had some nurse’s training. She’d know what you need to treat gunshot wounds and where to get it.”

“What makes you think she’d help?”

“Just a feeling. If there’s anybody else in Pomo besides you who thinks I’m innocent, it’s Lori.”

“You want me to talk to her?”

“If you’re willing to take the chance.”

“Like, just come right out and tell her you’re alive and wounded and where you are?”

“No. Go slow, feel her out... no details until you’re sure you can trust her. And don’t say anything about helping me get over here. You happened to be snooping around and you found me by accident.”

“Okay. If it’s what you want.”

“It’s not what I want. It’s what I’ve got to have to survive.”

“More food, too, right? And some clothes?”

“Right. Lori can bring them if she agrees to come.”

“Don’t you want me to come back?”

“No. Not unless Lori refuses.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“Don’t keep telling me how much trouble I can get into, all right? I’m already in trouble, man. Seventeen and knocked up, remember?”

Even in the poor light I could see he really hated all this, really did care about me not getting in trouble on account of him. It made me even more sure I was doing the right thing. Not many people cared what happened to me. Not Anthony, for instance. A stranger like John was a better friend than my own freaking boyfriend.

I gave him back his wallet. The flashlight, too; I didn’t need it and he might. “You just rest easy, John,” I said then. “Everything’s gonna be okay. No kidding. It’s gonna be okay.”

He didn’t say anything. He sat there staring at nothing, staring at shadows, while I made my way out.

Harry Richmond

One good thing about Storm Carey getting herself killed — it’s been a boon to business. I didn’t even mind losing most of a night’s sleep, what with cops and reporters and rubberneckers showing up in a steady stream until well past two A.M. and that TV helicopter making an ungodly racket and the police search teams with their bright lights along the northwest shore and in the sloughs above the Carey place. Why, I felt like a celebrity there for a while. First time in my life, and I don’t mind saying I liked it just fine.

Novak and Sheriff Thayer came out first, asked questions, and then hunted through what Faith left behind in cabin six. I could’ve told them before I let them in with my passkey that they wouldn’t find a thing, but of course I didn’t. Nobody’s business but mine that I’d been in there hunting myself on Friday, after Novak left. Pathetic, what that mean, snotty bastard carried in his only suitcase. Puzzling and annoying, too. Couple of shirts, one pair of slacks, one pair of jeans, some underwear and socks. Nothing else except for a tangle of dirty laundry. No personal items. No valuables. Yet he’d had that big wad of money in his wallet. What’d he spend it on, if not clothes or men’s jewelry or electronic gadgets or a decent car? That’s what I’d like to know.

It’s what I asked the reporters that followed Novak and Thayer out, too. Asked the question on camera, in an interview with a Santa Rosa TV newswoman. Also told all about how Storm Carey came out yesterday afternoon and visited Faith in cabin six, and what a hot number she was and what a cold one he’d been. I came off pretty good — and that’s not just me blowing my horn, it’s what the newswoman told me afterward. Interview’s supposed to be on sometime today. I watched the early news, but it wasn’t on then. Noon, maybe. Or seven o’clock. They’d better use it sometime; it’s sure to mean even more business, people showing up to get a look at the cabin where Storm Carey’s murderer stayed and then likely staying on themselves, at least for one night.

Two of the reporters took cabins last night, one from the San Francisco Chronicle. He said he’d use my name and mention Lakeside Resort in his story — more free publicity. I had two other cabins rented before that, by weekenders up from the Bay Area to gamble at the Brush Creek casino, and the last two went after all the excitement died down to a couple from Ukiah who didn’t want to drive back so late and to another couple, young and sure not married, that I figured were out for an all-night sex binge. I told the boy the rate was seventy-five and he paid it without an argument. None of my business what people do inside one of my cabins, long as they don’t trash the place or steal sheets or towels or the TV.

I didn’t have much time to myself this morning, either. Folks checking out, a few more rubberneckers, arguing on the phone with Maria Lorenzo because she wouldn’t come in early like I asked her to. Had to go to a christening, she said. Her and her religion. One of the worst things the white man ever did, you ask me, was to convert the heathens to Christianity. She finally showed up at eleven-thirty, half an hour later than she’d promised, with a lame excuse about the start of the christening being delayed. I told her she’d better have all the cabins done by two and then went in to eat my lunch a little early. There’s nothing like making money for a change to give a man an appetite.

Fixing lunch made me realize I was low on items like milk and bread and cold meat. I could’ve sent Maria out to buy my groceries when she was finished with her cleaning — I’d done it before — but then I’d have to pay her a couple of bucks extra. And it was a nice day, sunny, and I felt like getting out in the car for a while. I waited until the noon news came on the Santa Rosa channel, to see if they’d show my interview. They didn’t. Long story about the murder, interviews with three other locals but not mine. A little miffed, I went out and yelled at Maria to keep an eye on the office. Then I got the car out and drove south to Brush Creek.

The grocery store there is the only shop in the village still open on Sundays. One of the few stores still open for business, period. The place looks like a ghost town with all the empty and boarded-up buildings. If Miller’s Grocery dies, what’s left of Brush Creek will die along with it and then it’ll be a ghost town.

On the way back, on the stretch of road that runs close to the lake just north of the village, I noticed a boat heading shoreward on this side. It was well beyond the Bluffs, several hundred yards offshore. Looked like Audrey Sixkiller’s old Chris-Craft. In fact, I was sure it was. There’s no other like it on this part of the lake, and even at a distance you can’t mistake those boxy lines and dark, burnished hull. Besides, this time of year she’s about the only one you’re likely to see out on the water. Crazy damn Indians’ll do things a white man wouldn’t if you paid him.

I drove on up and over the high ground, down past Nucooee Point, and it wasn’t until I neared my resort that I had a wide view of the lake again. And there wasn’t any sign of Audrey’s boat anywhere. Not then and still not when I pulled into the Lakeside and took another look from there. Puzzled me. The shoreline above and below the Bluffs is too rocky and overgrown for even a fisherman’s skiff to put in. There’s only one spot you can dock along the two-mile wooded stretch where she’d been heading, and that had to be where she’d gone. The question was why.

Why in hell would Audrey Sixkiller want to put in at the ruins of Nucooee Point Lodge?

Zenna Wilson

Howard and Stephanie came into the kitchen just as I hung up the phone. They both had their jackets on. And Steffie was wearing that dreadful Hootie and the Blowfish sweatshirt she’s so fond of. Howard should never have bought it for her. That singing group may not be as bad as most nowadays, the ones with their filthy language and suggestive lyrics, but it’s still not the proper music for an impressionable nine-year-old to be listening to and admiring.

“Well,” I said, “where are you two off to?”

She said, “The park.”

“Not Municipal, I hope. It’s still a madhouse downtown, and the police station’s right across the street. You know what I mean, Howard.”

“Highland Park,” Steffie said before he could answer.

“Oh, well, that’s all right. But why don’t you change first, sweetie? Put on a sweater and skirt.”

She wrinkled her mouth in that pouty way she has lately. Lord knows which of her schoolmates she learned that little trick from. “We’re gonna play Frisbee. You can’t play Frisbee in a sweater and skirt.”

“At least put on a different top.”

“I like this one. Dad, what’s wrong with this one?”

“Nothing, baby.” Taking her side, naturally, the way he always does. “You look fine. Go on out to the car. I’ll be along in a minute or two.”

“Okay. ’Bye, Mom.”

She skipped off and banged the door behind her. I swear she does it on purpose sometimes because she knows it annoys me.

Howard said, “I don’t suppose you want to come with us.”

“No, you go ahead. I have some things to do here.”

“More phone calls?”

“Howard, please don’t start. Lunch will be ready at twelve-thirty, so be sure you and Steffie—”

“You’re glad Storm Carey’s dead, aren’t you? I mean, really happy about it.”

“... That’s ridiculous. What on earth makes you say such a thing?”

“You sounded happy on the phone a minute ago.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “A shocking murder not two miles from our home — that’s hardly cause for rejoicing.”

“I heard what you said to Helen Carter. ‘The Jezebel got exactly what she deserved. We’re all better off rid of the likes of her.’”

“Well? Aren’t we better off?”

“No. She wasn’t a whore, Zenna.”

“Of course she was. How can you defend her?”

“I’m not defending her. I’m saying she wasn’t a whore or an evil person just because she slept around. She had problems—”

“Problems!”

“Yes, problems. Losing her husband the way she did, for one. And she did plenty of good for this community.”

“Fornicating with every man she could lay hands on, married as well as unmarried, flaunting her drunken ways in public... I don’t see any good in any of that, Howard. You can’t mock the Lord and His teachings without suffering the consequences.”

“So you are glad she’s dead. A woman who never did anything to you, never harmed anyone except herself — brutally murdered — and you’re downright ecstatic.”

“I am not ecstatic!” He was making me very angry.

“Yes, you are. Ecstatic she’d dead, ecstatic it was that stranger who killed her because it vindicates your judgment of him, too.”

“My judgment? He was a degenerate, for heaven’s sake! Anyone with half a mind could tell that.”

“Cause for rejoicing, after all. Not one but two of Satan’s minions destroyed in one night.”

“All right! Yes, I’m glad they’re dead, both of them, glad they’re suffering in the Pit where they belong! Why shouldn’t I be? Any good Christian should shout hallelujah and fall on his knees with joy when the Almighty cleanses away evil, and a good Christian woman is what I am and I won’t apologize for it to you or anyone else.”

The way he was staring at me stirred a coldness into my anger. “My God,” he said in a tone I’d never heard from him before. And then again, before he went out, “My God.”

I don’t understand that man sometimes. I swear I don’t. Even after more than ten years together under the same roof, there are moments when he’s a complete stranger to me.

Audrey Sixkiller

When I found the bathroom window broken, my first thought was that it must’ve been done by the stalker — that he might still be inside the house. Irrational, because I’d been home from the rancheria three or four minutes by then and nothing had happened, but that didn’t prevent me from rushing to my purse and taking out the Ruger automatic. I’d put the gun in there this morning, after the phone call; it was illegal for me to carry it without a permit, but under the circumstances I didn’t much care about technicalities and Dick hadn’t either when I told him. With the Ruger in hand, I checked through the house room by room.

No one there but me.

But someone had been inside. I could feel it by then, the faint aura of intrusion, even though at first I didn’t notice anything disturbed or missing. That came on closer inspection, on my second pass through.

A few items gone from the bathroom cabinet. Peroxide... gauze pads... adhesive tape. Anything missing from the bedroom? Yes. Empty space on the closet shelf where I’d kept my extra blankets. The living room? No. The kitchen? Yes. Orange juice and two apples from the fridge. My office? No. The back porch? No.

Medical supplies, blankets, food.

It didn’t make sense. Or did it?

It could be the stalker, in an attempt to devil me — but I doubted he was that subtle. A man who tries to break into a woman’s home in the dead of night wearing a ski mask, who makes the kind of phone threat he’d made to me, wouldn’t break a window for any reason except to get in and at his victim. He wouldn’t bother to steal a few inconsequential items, either.

Neither would a burglar; there were too many items of value, like my Apple PC, that hadn’t been touched.

Neither would kids playing games. For the same reason, and because there was no sign of vandalism, nothing out of place.

It had to be someone who needed exactly what was stolen. Medical supplies, blankets, food. Someone hurt. And hungry. And cold and perhaps wet.

John Faith?

Not possible, I told myself. John Faith is dead, drowned in the lake. But of course it was possible. Dick believed the man was still alive, and his professional instincts were trustworthy. The prospect chilled me. John Faith in my house, a murderer in my home—

And then out of it again. Where would he go from here, with the things he’d taken?

The boat!

I threw my jacket on and ran out to the dock. The Chris-Craft was still there inside the shed, on the hoist and wearing its tarpaulin cover. But I went out on the dock anyway. The security door was unlatched, not that that meant anything because I wasn’t always as careful as I should be about making sure it was closed tight. On an impulse I climbed down the ladder, went in along the float.

Even in the shadows I could see that the hoist frame was wet, and the long, fresh scrape on the port side of the hull above the waterline.

I stepped up on the frame, untied the tarp and folded it over, and climbed aboard. When I raised the engine housing, heat and the smell of warm oil radiated out at me. The deck had been washed down hastily, I thought, and not very carefully. On the rear of the pilot’s seat was a stain of something crusty that looked like dried blood. Wool fibers, blanket fibers, were caught where the seat was bolted to the deck. I checked the storage locker. A spool of fishing line, a lead sinker, and my flashlight were gone.

Someone had had the boat out in my absence, and brought it back no more than an hour ago — someone who’d been careless docking it here or elsewhere. That much was clear. What wasn’t clear was why the boat was here now. If it’d been John Faith, there was no earthly reason for him to bring it back...

I climbed out, and when I finished retying the tarp I had the answer. Not one person — two. John Faith and an accomplice who’d taken him to an unknown destination and then returned alone, hoping I wouldn’t notice immediately that the boat had been used. That person was the one who’d broken into the house. Blood here but none inside.

It seemed fantastic, yet it was the only explanation that fit the facts. But who in Pomo would help a stranger like John Faith, a suspected murderer?

I was on my way back to the house when I remembered what I’d forgotten in all the chaotic events of last night and this morning. The appointment I’d made for nine o’clock, here, with Trisha Marx.

Lori Banner

I was pretty surprised when I opened the door and saw Trisha Marx standing on the porch. I knew her from the cafe; she’d been in dozens of times on my shift, usually with that good-looking Mexican boyfriend of hers and the rest of the semi-tough crowd she hangs out with. But she’d never been particularly friendly to me. And she’d sure never come to the house before, or even said two words to me anywhere outside the Northlake.

“Can I talk to you, Mrs. Banner?” Mrs. Banner, not Lori like in the cafe. “It’s really important.”

“Well...”

“Really important.”

“If it’s about the fight last night—”

“Fight? What fight?”

“Your dad didn’t tell you about it?”

“No. He had a fight with somebody? Who?”

“John Faith.” Saying his name brought back the down feeling I’d had when I first heard about him and Storm Carey. It was so hard to believe they were both dead. “At the Northlake, around ten-thirty.”

“Oh, God. Was it about John giving me a ride home?”

“Yeah. Your dad accused him of trying to molest you and then took a sock at him. Knocked him down.”

“What’d john do?”

“Nothing. Walked away.”

She had an odd look on her face. “He never said a word. Not one word.”

“Well, if that’s not why you’re here...”

“Can we talk in private? Just the two of us?”

“There’s nobody home but me.” Earle had gone out about ten. He hadn’t said where and I didn’t care anyway. I touched my mouth where he’d hit me yesterday; the upper lip was still sore, but the swelling was gone. One of my teeth was loose, too. He’d been all sorry and lovey-dovey last night, but that was because he wanted to get laid. I wouldn’t let him. I’d had about all I was going to take of his abuse and I’d told him so. He said he’d never hit me again, swore up and down. Well, he’d better keep his promise this time. It’s his last chance.

Trisha came in and we sat in the living room and the first thing she said was, “Isn’t it awful, what happened to Mrs. Carey?”

“Worst thing in Pomo since I’ve lived here.”

“You think he did it? John Faith?”

“Everybody says he did.”

“But do you think so?”

I’d worried that around most of the morning. Sure, he’d looked capable of killing somebody, with his size and that craggy, scarred face and his silver eyes. But I kept remembering the deep-down gentleness in those eyes, and the little-boy-lost sadness in him, and what he’d said about the world being a better place if people quit hurting other people and left each other alone. His last words to me, too, after the trouble with Brian Marx, “See? Not in this lifetime.” He could’ve taken Brian apart real easy, but he hadn’t done anything except stand his ground. He may’ve looked violent, but inside, where it counts, he wasn’t. Just the opposite of Earle. And we were supposed to believe he went out right afterward and beat Storm Carey’s head in?

“No,” I said.

“You mean that?”

“You bet I mean it.”

“I don’t think he did it either. I know he didn’t.”

“How could you know it?”

“I just do. He wouldn’t hurt anybody unless they hurt him first. He’s not what people say he is.”

“No, not at all.”

“I’d help him in a minute if I could,” she said.

“Help him how?”

“You know, stay out of jail. Get away.”

“Well, nobody can help him now.”

“They could if he wasn’t dead.”

“You don’t think he drowned in the lake?”

“Maybe not.” She wet her lips. She looked intense, her blue eyes bright and shiny. “What if he’s still alive? What if he’s hurt and hiding somewhere?”

“Trisha, what’re you trying to say?”

“Would you help him if you could? If you were the only person who could do what had to be done?”

A peculiar fluttery sensation had started under my breastbone. And all of a sudden my mouth was dry. I said, “How badly hurt?”

“Bad enough. Say, a couple of bullet wounds.”

“In a vital spot?”

“No. Like under the shoulder.”

“Bullet still inside?”

“Uh-uh. A couple of wounds.”

“Entrance and exit. That’s better, cleaner. Still, wounds like that can infect pretty easily.”

“Yeah. He’d need antibiotics and other stuff, right? And somebody who’d had medical training to get it for him and then fix him up.”

“Where is he, Trisha?”

“How should I know? At the bottom of the lake, maybe. We’re just talking here.”

“We’re not just talking. You know where he is, don’t you?”

“What if I do?”

“Is it someplace where he’s safe?”

“Safe enough. You think I should tell the cops?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“They’d just put him in jail, maybe the gas chamber. For something he didn’t do.”

“I know.”

“Should I just let him die?”

“No.”

“So what would you do? If you knew for sure he was alive and wounded and where he was hiding.”

“He asked you to talk to me, didn’t he? Last night... I mentioned my nurse’s training and he remembered.”

“You didn’t answer my question, Mrs. Banner.”

“Lori,” I said. Then I said, “I’d help him.”

“No shit? Even though it’d be breaking the law?”

“Aiding and abetting a fugitive, it’s called.”

“Whatever. You wouldn’t call the cops?”

“No, I wouldn’t call the cops. I won’t call them.”

“Swear to God?”

“Swear to God. Where is he? How’d you find him?”

“I won’t tell you that. Not yet.”

“But you’d take me to him.”

“If you had the stuff he needs.”

“I can get it. All except a tetanus shot — there’s no way I can manage that.”

“Where’ll you have to go?”

“Rexall Pharmacy.”

“They won’t get suspicious or anything?”

“No.” I was breathing hard. Scared and hyped up both, the same as she was. Jeez-us!

“He’ll have to have some food,” Trisha said. “And clothes. All he’s got to wear now are a couple of blankets.”

“That’s no problem. Plenty of food here. And Earle, my husband, is nearly the same size. Money, though... I don’t have much.”

“He doesn’t need money. He’s got his wallet.”

“What about transportation? Do you have a car?”

“No. We’ll have to go in yours.”

“That’s no problem. But I meant a way for him to travel when he’s well enough... Oh, God, worry about that later. First things first. And we’d better hurry.” Before I had time to think too much about what I was getting myself into. Before I could change my mind. And before Earle decided to come home. “Kitchen’s through the doorway over there. You gather up some food — there’re paper bags under the sink. I’ll get the clothes.”

We were both on our feet, and for about five seconds we stood with our eyes locked. Thinking the same thing, probably. When she’d arrived, less than twenty minutes ago, we’d been more or less strangers, a generation apart and barely civil to each other whenever we met. Now, thanks to John Faith, a kind of serious bonding thing had happened. Well, that was the sort he was, and I guess I knew it the first time I laid eyes on him in the Northlake. You were either for him or against him, no matter what he said or did. All the way, either way.

George Petrie

i am being followed.

By a dark-green van, one of the small, newer ones with the slanted front end. I can’t tell if the driver is the gray-haired man from the Truckee motel or somebody else; can’t even be sure of how many people are inside. The van’s windshield is tinted and splinters of sunlight off glass and metal make it even more difficult to see.

I first spotted the van outside Sparks, when I pulled back onto the highway after buying a pair of canvas suitcases to keep the money in. It stayed behind me when I took the Highway 50 cutoff, and it’s been there ever since through Fallon and across the open desert past Sand Mountain. Every time I speed up or slow down or pass another car, it does the same.

It has to be the gray-haired man. No one from Pomo could’ve tracked me; no other stranger could possibly know about the garbage bags or suspect what’s in them. I don’t remember a dark-green van in the motel parking lot, but it could’ve been parked behind one of the units. Must’ve followed me all the way from Truckee. Too much traffic for me to pick it out until the flow thinned coming through Reno.

I don’t know what to do.

Keep on going to Ely as planned? Another two hundred miles of empty desert and barren mountains, sun glare and heat shimmers off the highway, even at this time of year, that have my eyes burning, my head aching? No. Couldn’t take the tension. And some of the country ahead is even more desolate. He could overtake me without much effort; this old Buick can’t outrun a van like that. Force me off the road when there’s no one around. He’s bound to have a weapon, and there’s nothing I can use to defend myself. Easy for him to kill me, bury my body where no one would ever find it—

Road sign. Junction with State Highway 361 six miles ahead.

There’ll be a rest stop; usually is at a desert crossroads. Service station, convenience store, maybe a restaurant. People. If I pull in there he’ll follow me and then... what? Confront him? He wouldn’t dare try anything with people around. But confronting him won’t accomplish anything. Let me get a good look at him, that’s all. He’d deny following me. Brazen it out. Then sit back in his van and wait for me to drive out onto the highway again.

Three miles to the junction. And he’s even closer behind me now, crowding up, the sun like fire on that tinted windshield.

Christ Jesus, what am I going to do!

Earle Banner

Saturday’s my day off, but I went down to the shop anyway since I didn’t have nothing else to do. Stan was there and we shot the bull for a while, mostly about what a piece Storm Carey was and how that bugger Faith got off too easy, sucking lake water. “Should’ve had his nuts put in a vise,” Stan said, and I said, “Yeah, that’s for sure,” but I was thinking, Yeah, it’s too bad about Storm, she was a sweet lay, some of the best I ever had, but that didn’t change the fact she was a bitch and she’d been asking for what Faith give her for a long time. Same as Lori kept asking for it. Bet she didn’t think Faith got off too easy. Bet she was sorry he was dead meat, even if she hadn’t been letting him boink her and he’d had to go after Storm instead.

After a while a couple of the other guys showed up, and then somebody said why didn’t we go over to Pandora’s and get us a few cold ones? So we did that. Regulation pool table in Pandora’s, better balanced than most you find in bars, and we started playing eight ball, loser buys a round. Before you knew it it was past noon and I’d had seven or eight Buds and was about half in the bag. Feeling good, yeah, and horny, too. Beer always does that to me, fires up the blood, puts lead in the old pencil. The guys wanted to shoot another game, but I said no, I was gonna go home and eat my old lady for lunch. They all laughed, and I walked out and headed for my Ford.

And who did I see across the street, leaving the Rexall Pharmacy with a big sack in her hot little hands? Yeah. Lori. My sweet, lying wife, supposed to be home, says to me this morning she was just gonna putter around the house all day.

She wasn’t alone, neither. Had a passenger, somebody waiting for her in that little Jap car of hers. I couldn’t see who it was, wrong angle and the windshield being dirty, but I figured it must be some lousy son of a bitch she’d picked up somewhere and I was about ready to charge over there and drag both their asses out into the street. But then she was inside and putting the car in gear and coming my way, so I ducked down behind a parked car. When I looked up again as they were passing I seen her passenger was a woman. No, not even that — a teenage kid. Brian Marx’s kid, Trisha.

What the hell?

I ran around the corner to the Ford and made a fast U-turn and swung out onto Main. The Jap car was stopped at the light two blocks north. She could’ve been on her way to do more shopping, or going to Brian’s house to drop the kid off, or going home — only she wasn’t, none of those things. She stayed right on Main, and once she was clear of the business district she goosed it up to forty-five. Usually she don’t drive no more than the speed limit, scared to death of getting a ticket. Heading for the Northlake Cutoff, on her way to someplace she had no business being, by God, her and that tight-assed little Trisha Marx.

Wherever she was going, she was gonna have company she didn’t expect. Yeah, and if she was looking to let some other guy eat her for lunch, she’d be one sorry babe. I didn’t feel horny no more. I felt mean as a snake with a gopher’s balls stuck in its throat.

Trisha Marx

I didn’t tell Lori where we were going until we were almost there. It wasn’t a trust thing; I’d been pretty sure back there at her homestead and she hadn’t done or said anything to make me change my mind: She wouldn’t give John away to the cops. I guess what it was was that John and I had this secret together, a really special secret, the kind you’d be reluctant to let your best friend in on, and now I had to share it with somebody who was practically a stranger. You want to keep a secret like that all to yourself as long as you can, sort of savor it, because when you finally do share it it’s never quite so special anymore.

When I finally told Lori it was Nucooee Point Lodge she said, “How’d he get all the way over here?”

“I took him.”

“You took him? How?”

So I had to tell her about that, too. And afterward I felt kind of let down, not nearly so torqued as before. Right. Share a secret and it’s never quite the same.

“A good thing you know how to drive a boat,” she said. “If it’d been me, I don’t think I could’ve done it.”

That picked me up again, a little. “I didn’t have any trouble.”

“Must’ve been scary, though. All the way across the lake in a borrowed boat.”

“No,” I lied. “I wasn’t scared a bit.”

The turn for the lodge was just ahead. Once, the driveway was wide enough for a semi, but grass and oleanders had grown in on both sides and choked it down to one narrow lane. There was a chain across it, and a No Trespassing sign, but you could squeeze around the chain through high grass on the south side; that’s how the bunch of us got in the three times we’d been over to party. I pointed out the way to Lori and we bounced over behind a screen of trees, onto what used to be a packed-dirt parking lot. The earth was all chewed up now, and tangled with blackberry bushes, and you had to go slow. But once you were at the back end, there was no way anybody could see in from the road.

We unloaded the food and clothes and medical stuff, took them around to the service door. As soon as we were inside I called out to John, so he’d know right away who was coming. When we got to the lobby he was sitting up on the couch, the blankets pulled around him to his chin.

“Any trouble?”

I said, “No. We’ve got all the stuff.”

Lori said, “Let’s have some light.” I found the flashlight and switched it on. “Hold it steady, Trisha.” I did that while she knelt beside the couch, laid her hand on his forehead. “How you doing?” she asked him.

“Holding my own.”

“Well, you’re not feverish. That’s a good sign.”

“Lori, I’m sorry to drag you into this...”

“Nobody dragged me here. I came because I wanted to. Are you in much pain?”

“Not as long as I stay still.”

“Bleeding?”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

She unwrapped the blankets and then took off the tape and pads. I saw the way she looked at the wounds and at him and I thought: She really cares about him. I felt this little pang of jealousy. Stupid, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t like sharing John any more than I liked sharing his rescue.

“How bad?” he asked.

“Could be worse. Good thing Trisha found the peroxide. Holes look clean — no inflammation.”

Well, okay. John probably wouldn’t even be alive right now if I hadn’t heard him moaning and did what I did to help him. That was something I’d never have to share.

“So I’ll live.”

“Chances are. When’d you last have a tetanus shot?”

“... Can’t remember.”

“Within the past five years?”

“No, longer ago than that.”

“Within the last ten?”

“Seven or eight, about.”

“Should be okay, then. I wish I had a way to give you one, to be safe, but I don’t.” She was opening up one of the sacks, taking out stuff she’d bought at the pharmacy. Thin rubber gloves. Bottled water. A package of sponges. A thermometer. Lots of gauze and tape. Some tubes of Neosporin. A big bottle of aspirin. “I’ll clean the wounds, put antibiotic ointment on, and pack them tight. That should do it for now. You’ll have to change the dressing, put on more ointment, at least once a day. More often if there’s any bleeding. Watch me and you’ll know how to do it.”

“Will I be okay to travel?”

“I’d say no if we were someplace else. You should rest a couple of days, minimum. But this place, all the dirt and dust and rodent crap... you’d be better off in a clean bed.”

“A clean bed far away from Pomo County. Question is, how do I get there?”

Lori didn’t answer. She had the gloves on and was sponging the wounds with bottled water. It was yucky to watch and I looked away. Nothing else to look at in the lobby except shapes and shadows. Something creaked upstairs. Back in the summer, some of the guys had climbed up there to explore; but not me, not after that bat flew so close to my head. Old hotels are weird places, all right. That one in the Stephen King flick, where Jack Nicholson goes around grinning and waving an ax... wow.

It took Lori a long time to finish treating John’s wounds. What seemed like a long time, anyway. I got tired standing up and holding the flashlight at arm’s length, so I sat cross-legged on the grungy floor and propped my elbows on my knees and held it that way. Once I heard a skittering at the big open fireplace and swung the beam over there, and Lori said real sharp, “For God’s sake, put that light back here.” I didn’t blame her for yelling. She couldn’t see in the dark.

While she was taking John’s temperature I went and picked up a couple of the candles that were on the fireplace hearth. I’d forgotten about them until I flashed the light over that way. I lit the wicks with some matches from my purse and set the candles on folding chairs, one at either end of the couch. The flames gave off plenty of light. Softer, too; the flash glare had started to hurt my eyes.

John’s temperature was one degree above normal. Lori said that wasn’t bad, after him being in the lake and in wet clothes all night. She gave him some aspirins and told him to take more every few hours. Then she unwrapped a nutrition bar she’d bought, made him eat it and drink more water. Then she laid out her husband’s clothes and said, “You can get into these when we’re gone. There’s an extra shirt in case one gets bloody.”

“I owe you,” John said. “Both of you.”

“You don’t owe me a thing.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Yeah I do, and I can’t repay you. And I still have to ask one more favor, Lori.”

“I know. Transportation.”

“I can’t walk away from here.”

“You can’t drive, either. I’m not about to steal a car for you. That leaves me and my Toyota.”

“I wish it could be some other way.”

“So do I. I’ll do it, but not right away. For one thing, I have to take Trisha home—”

“I can get home on my own,” I said.

“No, not from way over here. And if I don’t go home myself pretty soon, he’ll figure something’s up. My husband, I mean. The last thing we need is for him to come looking.”

John said, “If he lays a hand on you again—”

“Never mind that. Thing is, I won’t be able to get back out again today without making him suspicious. Besides, you need to rest, build up strength. One night in this dump ought to be okay.”

“How soon tomorrow?”

“Before noon sometime.”

“You sure you can get out in the morning?”

“Pretty sure. I’ll think up some kind of excuse.”

I asked John, “Where’ll you go that’s safe?”

“As far from here as possible.”

“And then what? After you’re healed, I mean.”

“You don’t want to know. Neither of you.”

“But—”

“No buts. Once I’m gone I’m out of your lives for good.”

“We’re supposed to just forget you?”

“That’s right. Forget you ever met me.”

“I’ll never forget you, John. Never.”

He was quiet while Lori and I got ready to leave. Then he said a funny thing, like we were already gone and he was talking to himself. He said, “The only ones who care... they’re the ones you can hurt the most.”

Earle Banner

Nucooee point lodge.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

I was about three hundred yards back, just coming through a curve, when the little Jap car turned off. I braked and geared down, so when I rolled past the overgrown driveway I was doing less than twenty-five and I could see her plowing through grass and weeds to get around the chain barrier. I didn’t see no other car, but you could’ve hidden a fuckin’ house trailer back there behind the trees.

I drove on a ways until I found a spot where I could turn around. Then I come back and pulled off onto the verge just down from the driveway. Her and Brian’s kid, nobody else? Couldn’t get enough dick, so now she’s after pussy too, teenage pussy? But I didn’t think that was it. Not Lori, she was no AC-DC. Had to be they were meeting somebody at the lodge. One guy, maybe more — a goddamn orgy. Just thinking about it, the top of my head felt like it was gonna come off.

What I ached to do was go over there, catch them at it, beat the crap out of her and anybody else got in my way. If I’d had my .38 with me I might’ve done it. But I didn’t have no idea how many guys was over there, who they were, how tough they were. Those two bitches might be taking on half a dozen, for all I knew. Without an equalizer, maybe I’d be the one to get stomped and wouldn’t she love to see that?

Maybe I oughta go home, get the piece, and come back.

No. Take too long. And I still wouldn’t know how many there was until I got in there and I didn’t like the idea of using the gun unless I had to, not on anybody except Lori. Shit, it wasn’t the guy’s fault. Tail gets waved in a man’s face, he grabs for it — you can’t expect no different from a guy. Wasn’t even the kid’s fault. Teenager looking for kicks... all them teenage kids fuck like bunnies nowadays, the more the merrier. Lori’d set the whole thing up, most likely. Yeah. Set up an orgy, more the merrier for her, too. Kicks galore.

I’ll give her kicks. Give her some kicks she’ll never forget.

I sat there a while longer, steaming. A couple of cars whooshed by, and it come to me that one of ’em could’ve been a sheriff’s deputy or highway patrolman. Better get out of here before a cop did come along and stop and ask what I was doing. I jammed her into gear, rolled out past the lodge entrance. Couldn’t see nothing at all back there. Hid the Jap car and got inside somehow... humping in there on the floor with rats and spiders for an audience. Pictures that put in my head made me want to puke. I couldn’t remember ever being this crazy mad before.

By the time I got back to Pomo I needed a shot real bad. I stopped at Luccetti’s and a good thing wasn’t nobody I knew in there, because I was in no mood for talk. I knocked back three straight shots of Bushmills, but they didn’t do nothin’ except sharpen the edge. Hell with sitting here paying tavern prices when I had a jug of the same at home. I slammed out of there, drove to the house, and put the Ford away inside the garage. If she saw I was home she might not come in right away, and I wanted her to walk right in. Oh, yeah, walk right in, baby, see what Earle’s got waiting for you.

In the house I dragged the jug out and poured some into a glass and knocked it back. I started to pour another, then I thought, What the hell I need a glass for? I threw it against a wall and took the next one straight from the neck. Like a man. Like a husband with a lying, cheating mare in heat for a wife.

I carried the bottle into the front room, sat in my chair, and worked on it. Lot of time passed and I got drunk, all right, but not too drunk because I didn’t want to pass out.

Clock on the mantel bonged out four times. Four o’clock. Out there couple of hours now, fuck and suck and Christ knew what else. I got up and staggered over and grabbed the clock. Lori’s clock, bought it at some garage sale, never liked that pissant clock. I threw it down and stomped on it. Stomped it flat. Felt good, real good, so I went back to the bedroom and stomped her clock radio, stomped her jewelry case, stomped her music box, stomped some other crap of hers, and all of it felt fine because the whole time it was her getting stomped, her face, her body, bust her up into little pieces scattered all over the floor.

Breathing hard when I was done. Yeah, and ready for another shot. Went out front again and picked up the bottle and knocked back a double. I was wiping my mouth when I heard the Jap car come whining into the driveway.

Well, well. Well, well.

Walk right in, baby, see what Earle’s got for you.

And she walked in and there I was, waiting. She took one look at me and her face turned white as paper and she tried to go back out again. I cut her off. Didn’t touch her, not yet, just cut her off and then grinned at her real big, like a junkyard dog grins at a piece of raw meat.

“Nucooee Point Lodge,” I said.

She sucked in her breath. Look on her face made me happier and crazier than I’d been all afternoon.

Richard Novak

By four o’clock I was dead on my ass, the pain in my broken nose so bad I couldn’t see straight. And that made driving around the way I’d been — Storm’s house, slough roads, possible hiding places along the shoreline that might’ve been overlooked, back and forth aimlessly and unproductively — made me a safety hazard to pedestrians and other drivers. I needed food, sleep. And I couldn’t rest at the station; too much activity, too much noise. Like it or not, I’d have to take myself out of action for a while.

I radioed Della Feldman and told her I was going home. She made approving noises. “Best thing for you, Chief,” she said. Wrong. The best thing for me was finding Faith, dead or alive. It was the only way to close the books, all the books, on Storm’s death, the only way for me to start putting my life back together again.

Mack was all over me when I let myself in the house. Jumping and wagging and nuzzling, as if I’d been away a week instead of twenty-four hours. “Hey, boy. Good old Mack.” He needed to go out, but the shape I was in, I couldn’t walk him half a block. I let him into the backyard instead.

In the kitchen I swallowed a couple of the codeine capsules they’d given me at the hospital. My stomach had been burning off and on all day: bile and emptiness. The burning started in again now. The thought of food was nauseating, but if I didn’t eat something pretty quick I knew I’d puke up the painkillers. I made a sandwich, poured half a glass of milk. Let Mack back in and took the food into the living room and flopped on the couch.

It took ten minutes of little bites and sips to get the sandwich and milk down. It was like eating paste, but once it was into me it stayed there. I thought I ought to go in and lie on the bed, but I couldn’t seem to move; my whole body felt heavy, as if all the bones and muscles and sinews were petrifying, turning me to stone. I couldn’t even make myself lean over and untie my shoes. But that was all right. Better to keep all my clothes on, so I could respond immediately if any word came through on Faith.

I lay sprawled in the cold room, watching night close down outside the windows. The codeine started to work, easing some of the throbbing in my face. But whenever I closed my eyes, they wouldn’t stay shut; I couldn’t sleep yet. For a while my head was a vacuum, no thoughts of any kind, but then Storm was there again and pretty soon my skull seemed to swell with memories and images of her alive and dead. I must’ve made a sound, because Mack stirred at my feet, then jumped up beside me. I reached out to him, pulled him close, buried my face in the soft fur of his neck.

“Oh God, Mack. Oh God, Mack.”

He whined and licked my hand, as if somehow he understood.

Audrey Sixkiller

I probably should have told Dick about my suspicions right away, but I didn’t because suspicions is all they were. I had no proof John Faith was alive or that Trisha Marx had used my boat to help him get away. No proof, even, that either of them had been anywhere near my property this morning. Plus, there was the question of why. Why would she give aid and comfort to an accused murderer? Some sort of quixotic teenage impulse, perhaps; girls could be highly romantic and foolish at that age, as I had reason to remember. But even so, there must be something more to it than that and I had no idea what it might be. Rumors fly wildly in a small town; once a person comes under a cloud of suspicion, people are quick to convict and shun without benefit of evidence or trial. I didn’t care to be responsible for branding anyone.

The thing to do before anything else, I decided, was to have a private talk with Trisha. I drove to her house on Redbud Street, and her father was home but she wasn’t. He was angry because she was supposed to have been there when he returned from work at one o’clock. I asked him to let me know as soon as she came home. A school matter, I said, not serious but still rather important. Mr. Marx looked skeptical; I think he was afraid she might be in some kind of trouble. But he didn’t question me further and he said he’d call when she showed up.

Back at my house, I taped a piece of cardboard across the broken bathroom window and cleaned up the glass shards. Then I microwaved a Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. Brian Marx hadn’t called by the time I finished my belated lunch. I put the answering machine on and walked out to the dock for another look at the Chris-Craft.

Clouds, thick and dark-veined, had begun to gather to the north. There was the faint smell of ozone in the air. Rain sometime tonight, I thought. Gulls wheeled over the lake, more than a few of them — another sign of coming weather. Watching the gulls, I found myself thinking of the legend of the Huk, the mythical bird old-time Pomos believed had evil supernatural powers.

The Huk was said to be the size of a turkey buzzard, dark red in color, with long, fine feathers. A reddish liquid, like blood, filled the gills and would flow from end to end if the feathers were turned up and back down. The creature had hairy legs, an enormous head, a bill curved like that of a parrot. Its power lay in the fact that it brought death wherever it went. If it appeared and you heard its cry of “huk, huk,” you or someone close to you was sure to die, immediately or within a few days.

I’m not superstitious; I believe in the old legends only as legends, campfire stories for adults and children. But I shivered just the same as I watched the gulls wheeling against the clouds, their wind-carried cries sounding more than a little like “huk, huk” in the quiet afternoon.

George Petrie

I sat in the car, staring out over the desert. I’d been there a long time now, on the side of Highway 50 a couple of miles east of the 361 junction. It was as far as I’d gotten after leaving the crossroads rest area. It was as far as I was going.

Over. Finished.

Beaten.

The dark-green van with the tinted windshield was long gone, miles and miles down 361 by now — the van that hadn’t been driven by the gray-haired man from the Truckee motel, or by anybody else bent on stealing my stolen money, but by a fat young fellow traveling with his equally puddinglike wife and their two chubby daughters. Tourists who hadn’t even glanced at me when they drove into the rest area, who didn’t know or care that I existed, whose only interest was in food and toilet facilities. Long gone, but the fear hadn’t gone with them. Nor had the core of paranoia. With sudden, sickening clarity I’d seen both for exactly what they were and would be if I continued on the course I’d set for myself — constant companions no matter where I went or what I did, partners in crime that would destroy me as surely as a fast-growing cancer.

It was stifling in the car. Almost December and the Nevada desert was still a furnace; I felt as though I were melting inside my clothes. Pretty soon I would have to start the engine, put on the air conditioner. But when I did that I’d have to start driving again, too, and I wasn’t ready to drive yet. I sat and smoked another cigarette without inhaling and squinted out over the sun-blasted flats, the low, barren hills hazy and shimmering in the distance. Broken earth, clumps of sage and greasewood. Dry salt sink to the north, its floor as seamed and cracked as an old man’s skin. Jagged splinters of rock along the bank of an empty wash, bleached white by the sun, like crushed and discarded bones. A wasteland.

As dead as all my big plans.

As barren as my future.

I couldn’t go on, because I didn’t have the guts to go on. A man like John Faith could steal $209,840 without a single qualm or backward glance, but George Petrie is too anxiety-riddled, too paranoid to be a successful thief. All I’d ever had was a meager supply of courage, and now the supply had been used up. From the first I’d built this mad scheme of mine on a foundation of lies, false bravado, self-deception. It was amazing I’d gotten this far before the flimsy foundation collapsed.

The only thing I could do now was to give it all up, slink back home to Pomo. Time enough left to do that and return the money to the bank vault before Fred and Arlene show up on Monday morning. Time enough to pick up where I’d left off, go begging to Charley Horne or Burt Seeley if I can’t cover the $7,000 shortage any other way. Time enough to save my sorry ass, so I can start dying again, slowly, by inches.

The heat in the car was so intense now I was having trouble breathing. I threw the half-smoked cigarette out the window, rolled up the glass, started the engine, and put on the air conditioner. And then I made a careful turn across the empty highway and headed back the way I’d come.

Douglas Kent

The ancestral Kent roscoe was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38. After I lurched home from the Advocate offices, full of grief and Doc Beefeater’s Magic Cure-all, bent and bowed under the weight of my bag of sticks, I rummaged in the closet and there it was, packed in an old shoe box. Carefully wrapped in chamois cloth (the old man’s work, not mine), clean and well-oiled (not unlike its present owner), all six chambers bristling with shiny circles of oblivion. I carried it into the kitchen and laid it gently on the table. After which I poured another dose of salve and plunked myself down to contemplate the thing.

Pa Kent’s piece, of course. If there is one thing Kent Junior has never been, it is a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association. Wrote impassioned gun-control and anti-NRA articles, once upon a time. Thought about writing another when I first arrived in Pomo, but for a change prudency prevailed. There are gaggles of guns in Pomo County; half the adults and a third of the kids — or possibly, it’s the other way around — have at least one tucked away within easy reach. If I had written the article for the Advocate, I would probably have been blown away at sunrise by an irate ninth-grader whose old man kept a collection of automatic weapons in the toolshed.

Still, even I had to admit that Pa Kent’s rod had a certain deadly magnificence. Short and squat and ugly and cold, which, come to think of it, was an apt capsule description of the pater himself. He’d never fired it except on a pistol range, so far as I knew, but he’d always had it close at hand in case of burglars, bill collectors, and/or overly aggressive pink snakes or other figments of his pickled brain. It was one of the few, the very few, of his personal possessions that I’d appropriated after his fatal midnight plunge into the Monongahela. Wasn’t sure why at the time, or why I continued to cart it with me on my various peripatetic wanderings—

Liar.

Bullshitter.

You know very well why you appropriated and kept it, Kent, my lad. Same reason you dragged it out of its nest this evening. Same reason Richard Cory kept a bang stick hidden away in his digs. Ah, Cory, that “gentleman from sole to crown, clean favored, and imperially slim,” loved by one and all in his little New England town. Kent is a far seedier specimen, loved by no one, but underneath he and Mr. Cory are soul brothers.

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Yes, indeedy, Edwin A. Robinson understood the private demons that lurk behind the public facade. Likely owned a few himself, being one of that breed held in even greater contempt than whores and newspaper hacks, poets. But failure wasn’t one of them. Nor, I’ll wager, was he plagued with unrequited love for a woman as stormy as the late Storm.

Storm, Storm. Gone and no longer blowing — metaphorically or otherwise. “Temporal skull fracture leading to subdural hematoma of mid brain.” Ding dong, the wench is dead. “Death of brain due to necrosis or mass effect.” Ding dong, the wench is dead, the wicked wench is dead.

And I wish, I wish, I wish Kent was, too.

And Douglas Kent, one dark Stormless night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Or did he? Is he as willful as Richard Cory, as ready to plunge into the abyss? In the last analysis, are they soul brothers or simply two sides of the same tarnished coin?

I poured more salve.

The gun and I watched each other, like old enemies or new friends.

Lori Banner

“I told you, Earle!” I screamed at him. “I told you there wasn’t anybody but you, I never once slept with anybody else the whole time we’ve been married! I told you not to hit me anymore! I told you, I told you, how many times did I tell you? Why didn’t you listen? Why didn’t you believe me?”

I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up. I didn’t sit in my chair, I fell into it. My mouth was bleeding where he’d punched me and opened up the cut he put there yesterday. Bleeding all over my sweater and jacket and dripping onto my pants. It hurt a lot and the blood tasted salty. My jaw hurt and my ear felt all swollen and my eye hurt, too. The eye was going to be black and yellow and purple, worse than the other times because it was already so puffy I couldn’t see out of it. He always hit me in the face. Never cared how I looked the next day, that I had to go to work with my face all bruised and swollen, that I had to lie to people and see the pity in their faces and listen to Darlene and I don’t know how many others tell me what an idiot I was for staying with a man who kept beating me up.

“You never cared, you son of a bitch! How I looked or what I had to put up with! ‘Poor Lori, why does she let him get away with it,’ why why why! That’s what I had to listen to, that’s what you made me put up with, you dirty son of a bitch bastard Earle, you.”

I am an idiot. I must be. I quit loving you long ago, just like you quit loving me, and now I hate you the same way you hate me. Oh Jesus, I hate you so much, Earle. You know the one thing I regret most? That I didn’t cheat on you not only once or twice but a hundred times, a thousand, that I didn’t have men lined up around the block waiting to screw me the way Storm Carey did instead of hanging on to the stupid idea that a woman ought to be faithful to her husband, stick by him even if he beats the crap out of her for no damn reason. For better or worse, what a joke. My word was never good enough for you, oh no. You and your jealousy, you and your drinking, you and your hitting.

“You and your hitting, Earle. Didn’t I tell you the hitting had to stop?”

He sat in his chair over there, staring at me.

“And then you had to go and follow me today. Why’d you do that, huh? Why couldn’t you leave me alone today of all days, let me do something worthwhile for a change, let me care for somebody and have him treat me like a human being instead of a piece of ass and a punching bag? If I’d told you about John Faith, you’d have kept on hitting me anyway and then you’d have called the cops and turned him in and tried to get some kind of reward out of it. I know you, Earle, I know you like a book. I couldn’t let you do it. John Faith’s everything I wish to God you were and he’s had a rough time of it and he deserves a break and I couldn’t let you turn him in. Or keep on hitting me after I told you the hitting had to stop.”

His third eye, the red one in the middle of his forehead, was staring at me, too. I didn’t mind that eye. After all, I’d put it there.

“Well, how do you like it, huh? How do you like being the one who got hurt for a change?”

I wasn’t shaking so much now. In fact, I was hardly shaking at all. I felt numb, numb all over. Just had to go and get your gun, didn’t you, Earle? Just had to start waving it around and threaten to shoot me like a horse. Hit me and kept hitting me, made me all bloody, and then on top of that ranting about shooting me like a horse. A horse, for God’s sake! Didn’t expect me to knock it out of your hand, did you? Didn’t expect to trip over your big feet so I got to it first. And then you had to laugh and call me a bitch and a mare in heat and say I wouldn’t shoot you like a horse. Wrong, Earle, wrong again. Just never got tired of being wrong, did you? Ran at me, grabbed for the gun, and bang! Wrong Earle, dead Earle, three-eyed Earle. Just like that.

I was still holding the stupid gun in my hand. The three eyes, two blue and one red, watched me put it down on the end table.

“How do you like being dead, huh?”

He didn’t like it, but I did. I liked it so much I laughed out loud. But my mouth hurt, so I stopped laughing and sat there trying to think what to do.

I ought to call the cops and tell them I’d shot Earle like a horse. But if I did that, then how would John Faith get away? But if I didn’t call them, I’d have to stay here all night with Earle sitting dead in his chair, and I didn’t think I could do that. I really didn’t think I could do that.

I couldn’t make up my mind. I was so tired and numb I couldn’t even get up out of my chair and go pee, which I had to do very badly now. I just sat there. And looked at Earle’s third eye and wondered how long it would be before it stopped dripping.

Richard Novak

The doorbell jarred me awake. I’d been half out on the couch, caught on the rim of sleep and cringing from a nightmare that I couldn’t remember except for some of the things in it: blood, water, lightning, a huge phallus with an opening that kept winking like an obscene eye. I heaved to my feet, fuzzy-headed, sweaty and cold at the same time. Mack was there, up and alert; I almost tripped over him as I stumbled across to open the door.

“Audrey. What’re you — Something happen?”

She shook her head. Her face seemed blurred, out of shape at the edges. Damn eyes wouldn’t focus right.

“Then why’d you come?” I asked her.

“To see if you were home, feed Mack if not. The lights are on and I thought you... but you were asleep, weren’t you?”

“On the couch.”

She wanted to come in and I let her do it. She said as I shut the door, “Your face... is it any better?”

“Mostly numb now. Painkillers — codeine. Must be why I’m so groggy.”

“You should be in bed.”

“Didn’t want to get undressed...”

“Dick, you’re trembling.”

“Cold in here. Forgot to turn the heat on, I guess.”

“I’ll do it.”

She went away. When she came back I was leaning on the couch arm, massaging my eyes; they wouldn’t clear and neither would my head. Mack was butted up against me. Audrey said something that didn’t register, came over close on the other side. Warm fingers, soft and gentle, touched my cheek and made little scraping sounds on the beard stubble. I could smell her perfume, something like jasmine. Eva’s favorite scent, jasmine. I pulled back from her.

“Dick, come and get into bed.”

“No...”

“You’ll be sick if you don’t. You’re chilled already.”

No argument left in me; I was too groggy, too cold. I let her ease me to my feet, guide me into the bedroom on legs like heavy, dragging stumps. I couldn’t seem to stand when she let go of me, and then I was lying sprawled on the bed. She didn’t put the light on. In the dark I felt her hands on me again, taking off shoes, unbuttoning and unzipping clothing; I neither helped nor hindered her. Strong... she hauled everything off except my shorts, lifted and pushed to get the bedclothes around me.

I lay on my back, shivering, starting to drift. Weight on the bed then and Audrey was crawling in beside me, fitting her body along my right side. Naked, too, except for panties; I was aware of the hard points of her breasts pressing my arm and chest. No, I thought, and tried to roll away. The strong arms held me tight.

“Audrey, I can’t...”

“I don’t want you to. Just hold you, that’s all. Make you warm, help you sleep.”

“... Too good...”

“What, Dick?”

“Too good for me.”

“Sshh. Sleep.”

I slept. Deeply this time, without any nightmare — suspension in a black void.

A long time later there was a ringing, distant, then louder, closer... phone... and I struggled up out of the black, untangling myself from Audrey’s embrace and the damp bedclothes. I reached out blindly, almost knocked the telephone off the nightstand. Eyelids came unstuck as I fumbled up the receiver; the numerals on the alarm clock swam into focus: 10:45. It didn’t seem possible, but I’d been out more than five hours.

Verne Erickson’s voice penetrated. “... something you’d better know about, Chief.”

“Faith?”

“No. Another homicide, evidently unrelated.”

“Homicide, you said?”

“Yeah. Shooting death, this time.”

I was mostly alert now. Aware that the codeine had worn off and my nose was throbbing again, dully. Aware of Audrey sitting up behind me, her hand warm on my shoulder. I didn’t look at her.

“Who? What happened?”

“Earle Banner finally got what was coming to him. His wife shot him with his own gun. Just now reported it.”

“Just now? When’d it happen?”

“Around five,” Verne said. “She’s been sitting with the corpse ever since.”

Audrey Sixkiller

After Dick left I sat propped up against his pillows, holding on to a last few minutes of the warmth and scent of his body. He’d said I was welcome to stay the night, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d avoided my eyes as he spoke. Plain enough that when he came back home — if he came home again tonight — he’d be relieved to find me gone.

I glanced down at my bare breasts. Brazen Audrey and her pair of meager offerings. Sad, rejected Audrey and her white-acting ways. William Sixkiller would hide his head in shame if he could see his little papoose tonight.

But that was foolish self-pity; I stopped indulging in it. Dick was the one who deserved compassion, not me. He’d looked so worn out when I’d arrived, I couldn’t bring myself to confide my suspicions about Trisha Marx and John Faith; sleep was what he’d needed tonight, not guesswork and more upheaval. Upheaval had come anyway — another killing — but at least he’d had a few hours’ rest first. And why should I feel rejected anyway? I hadn’t really offered him my body; couldn’t expect to be anything more to him right now than another burden, another source of worry.

I got up finally, straightened the bed, put my clothes on in the bathroom. The face in the mirror looked puffy and unappealing in its frame of tangled hair. Comb out the tangle? Why bother? And the puffy face could wait for a good washing until I was home. I made sure Mack had enough food and water, patted him, collected my purse, and went out to my car.

A mixture of heavy mist and light drizzle had laid a sheen of glistening wetness on the streets, blurred house lights and the car’s headlamps. The low-hanging clouds were thick and restless; a soaking rain would fall before dawn. I drove slowly, with the radio on for comfort. And to keep from fretting about Dick, I let my thoughts center on Lori Banner.

I hardly knew her and I didn’t know her husband at all, but even I had heard she was a battered wife. I hoped she’d shot him in self-defense and that she could prove it. Otherwise, she’d keep right on being a victim. That was one of the things that infuriated me about domestic violence, the no-win position the abused usually found herself in. I’d seen so much of it on the rancherias and at Indian Health in Santa Rosa. Spousal and child abuse, often alcohol-triggered, was among the worst of the many problems Native Americans had to struggle with on a daily basis. I’d never counseled violence as a way of ending violence; it was a poor choice of solution to any problem. Yet sometimes, in certain situations, people were pushed and prodded into corners where violence became the only possible alternative. I had learned that hard lesson myself the past couple of days. The Ruger automatic in my purse was bitter proof that I’d learned it well.

The drizzle had thickened by the time I turned into my driveway. It took four tries before the garage-door opener decided to cooperate; there was something wrong with the remote that a fresh battery hadn’t fixed. The lightbulb on the inside frame had burned out again, too. I would have to make an appointment with the dealer south of town and then arrange to be here when a repairman came out. Maybe I could do it at the same time the glazier came to replace the broken bathroom window. One or two more time-consumers to overload my already groaning weekday schedule.

I sighed and shut off the lights, leaving the garage door up for the moment. I’d close it with the push button next to the side door. When I latched the car door and the dome light winked off, I was in heavy darkness except for the misty gray square behind me. I made my way along the side of the car, feeling for the wall and the doorknob.

I smelled him before I heard him, a rank, sweetish odor like a sweating animal that had been sprinkled with something like Old Spice cologne. Foot scrape, grunting exhalation, and then his hands were on me. He dragged my body back tight against his, pinning my arms before I could get the gun out of my purse. Rough cloth chafed at my cheek and jaw: ski mask. His breath was hot and beer-sour; spittle sprayed my neck when he spoke.

“About time you decided to come home, bitch.”

Same raspy voice as on the phone. For the first time I felt fear, a quick rush that drove away surprise and fired rage. I squirmed, couldn’t get loose, and tried to kick back at him; but he had his legs spread and his body braced against the wall. He rasped something else that was lost in the rising pound of blood and adrenaline. I gave up trying to kick him and stomped down hard with the heel of my shoe, three times before I connected with an instep. He yelled and for an instant his grip loosened, just long enough for me to wrench free and twist sideways. I yanked my purse open, fumbled inside for the automatic—

One thick arm looped around my waist, jerked me back against the thrust of his hip; his other hand flailed, struck the purse, and tore it from my grasp. I heard it bang into the side of the car. Then his forearm was up and under my chin, snapping my head back, bruising my throat. The sudden pressure choked off breath. I ripped at the arm but couldn’t break the hold. The darkness seemed to churn and bulge.

“Bitch!”

The pressure increased. And the darkness flowed behind my eyes, congealing—

“Bitch!”

— and I was caught in it and swept away...