The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

One

As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good: lavender, sage, and a hint of clove. There were seven Shaker chairs hung on pegs on the walls of the Leanders’ dining room. The eighth was overturned under Bess, who hung from the peg by a calico cloth rope around her neck. Dried flowers, baskets of various shapes and sizes, and bundles of dried herbs hung from the open ceiling beams.

Theophilus Crowe knew he should be doing cop stuff, but he just stood there with two emergency medical technicians from the Pine Cove Fire Department, staring up at Bess as if they were inspecting the newly installed angel on a Christmas tree. Theo thought the pastel blue of Bess’s skin went nicely with her cornflower-blue dress and the patterns of the English china displayed on simple wooden shelves at the end of the room. It was 7 A.M. and Theo, as usual, was a little stoned.

Theo could hear sobs coming from upstairs, where Joseph Leander held his two daughters, who were still in their nightgowns. There was no evidence of a masculine presence anywhere in the house. It was Country Cute: bare pine floors and bent willow baskets, flowers and rag dolls and herb-flavored vinegars in blown-glass bottles; Shaker antiques, copper kettles, embroidery samplers, spinning wheels, lace doilies, and porcelain placards with prayers from the Dutch. Not a sports page or remote control in sight. Not a thing out of place or a speck of dust anywhere. Joseph Leander must have walked very light to live in this house without leaving tracks. A man less sensitive than Theo might have called him whipped.

“That guy’s whipped,” one of the EMTs said. His name was Vance McNally. He was fifty-one, short and muscular, and wore his hair slicked back with oil, just as he had in high school. Occasionally, in his capacity as an EMT, he saved lives, which was his rationalization for being a dolt the rest of the time.

“He just found his wife hanging in the dining room, Vance,” Theo pronounced over the heads of the EMTs. He was six-foot-six, and even in his flannel shirt and sneakers he could loom large when he needed to assert some authority.

“She looks like Raggedy Ann,” said Mike, the other EMT, who was in his early twenties and excited to be on his first suicide call.

“I heard she was Amish,” Vance said.

“She’s not Amish,” Theo said.

“I didn’t say she was Amish, I just said I heard that. I figured she wasn’t Amish when I saw the blender in the kitchen. Amish don’t believe in blenders, do they?”

“Mennonite,” Mike said with as much authority as his junior status would afford.

“What’s a Mennonite?” Vance asked.

“Amish with blenders.”

“She wasn’t Amish,” Theo said.

“She looks Amish,” Vance said.

“Well, her husband’s not Amish,” Mike said.

“How can you tell?” Vance said. “He has a beard.”

“Zipper on his jacket,” Mike said. “Amish don’t have zippers.”

Vance shook his head. “Mixed marriages. They never work.”

“She wasn’t Amish!” Theo shouted.

“Think what you want, Theo, there’s a butter churn in the living room. I think that says it all.”

Mike rubbed at a mark on the wall beneath Bess’s feet where her black buckled shoes had scraped as she convulsed.

“Don’t touch anything,” Theo said.

“Why? She can’t yell at us, she’s dead. We wiped our feet on the way in,” Vance said.

Mike stepped away from the wall. “Maybe she couldn’t stand anything touching her floors. Hanging was the only way.”

Not to be outdone by the detective work of his protégé, Vance said, “You know, the sphincters usually open up on a hanging victim—leave an awful mess. I’m wondering if she actually hanged herself.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Mike said.

“I am the police,” Theo said. He was Pine Cove’s only constable, duly elected eight years ago and reelected every other year thereafter.

“No, I mean the real police,” Mike said.

“I’ll radio the sheriff,” Theo said. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do here, guys. Would you mind calling Pastor Williams from the Presbyterian church to come over? I need to talk to Joseph and I need someone to stay with the girls.”

“They were Presbyterians?” Vance seemed shocked. He had really put his heart into the Amish theory.

“Please call,” Theo said. He left the EMTs and went out through the kitchen to his Volvo, where he switched the radio over to the frequency used by the San Junipero Sheriff’s Department, then sat there staring at the mike. He was going to catch hell from Sheriff Burton for this.

“North Coast is yours, Theo. All yours,” the sheriff had said. My deputies will pick up suspects, answer robbery calls, and let the Highway Patrol investigate traffic accidents on Highway 1, that’s it. Otherwise, you keep them out of Pine Cove and your little secret stays secret.“ Theo was forty-one years old and he still felt as if he was hiding from the junior high vice principal, laying low. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen in Pine Cove. Nothing happened in Pine Cove.

He took a quick hit from his Sneaky Pete smokeless pot pipe before keying the mike and calling in the deputies.

Joseph Leander sat on the edge of the bed. He’d changed out of his pajamas into a blue business suit, but his thinning hair was still sticking out in sleep horns on the side. He was thirty-five, sandy-haired, thin but working on a paunch that strained the buttons of his vest. Theo sat across from him on a chair, holding a notepad. They could hear the sheriff’s deputies moving around downstairs.

“I can’t believe she’d do this,” Joseph said.

Theo reached over and squeezed the grieving husband’s bicep. “I’m really sorry, Joe. She didn’t say anything that would indicate she was thinking about doing something like this?”

Joseph shook his head without looking up. “She was getting better. Val had given her some pills and she seemed to be getting better.”

“She was seeing Valerie Riordan?” Theo asked. Valerie was Pine Cove’s only clinical psychiatrist. “Do you know what kind of pills?”

“Zoloft,” Joseph said. “I think it’s an antidepressant.”

Theo wrote down the name of the drug on his notepad. “Then Bess was depressed?”

“No, she just had this cleaning thing. Everything had to be cleaned every day. She’d clean something, then go back five minutes later and clean it again. She was making life miserable for the girls and me. She’d make us take our shoes and socks off, then wash our feet in a basin before we came into the house. But she wasn’t depressed.”

Theo wrote down “crazy” on his notepad. “When was the last time Bess went to see Val?”

“Maybe six weeks ago. When she first got the pills. She really seemed to be doing better. She even left the dishes in the sink overnight once. I was proud of her.”

“Where are her pills, Joseph?”

“Medicine cabinet.” Joseph gestured to the bathroom.

Theo excused himself and went to the bathroom. The brown prescription bottle was the only thing in the medicine cabinet other than disinfectants and some Q-Tips. The bottle was about half-full. “I’m going to take these with me,” Theo said, pocketing the pills. “The sheriff’s deputies are going to ask you some of these same questions, Joseph. You just tell them what you told me, okay?

Joseph nodded. “I think I should be with the girls.”

“Just a bit longer, okay? I’ll send up the deputy in charge.”

Theo heard a car start outside and went to the window to see an ambulance pulling away, the lights and siren off. Bess Leander’s body riding off to the morgue. He turned back to Joseph. “Call me if you need anything. I’m going to go talk to Val Riordan.”

Joseph stood up. “Theo, don’t tell anyone that Bess was on antidepressants. She didn’t want anyone to know. She was ashamed.”

“I won’t. Call me if you need me.” Theo left the room. A sharply dressed plainclothes deputy met him at the bottom of the steps. Theo saw by the badge on his belt that he was a detective sergeant.

“You’re Crowe. John Voss.” He extended his hand and Theo shook it. “We’re supposed to take it from here,” Voss said. “What have you got?”

Theo was at once relieved and offended. Sheriff Burton was going to push him off the case without even talking to him. “No note,” Theo said. “I called you guys ten minutes after I got the call. Joseph said she wasn’t depressed, but she was on medication. He came downstairs to have breakfast and found her.”

“Did you look around?” Voss asked. “This place has been scoured. There isn’t a smudge or a spot anywhere. It’s like someone cleaned up the scene.”

“She did that,” Theo said. “She was a clean freak.”

Voss scoffed. “She cleaned the house, then hung herself? Please.”

Theo shrugged. He really didn’t like this cop stuff. “I’m going to go talk to her psychiatrist. I’ll let you know what she says.”

“Don’t talk to anybody, Crowe. This is my investigation.”

Theo smiled. “Okay. But she hung herself and that’s all there is. Don’t make it into anything it’s not. The family is in pretty bad shape.”

“I’m a professional,” Voss said, throwing it like an insult, implying that Theo was just dicking around in law enforcement, which, in a way, he was.

“Did you check out the Amish cult angle?” Theo asked, trying to keep a straight face. Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten high today.

“What?”

“Right, you’re the pro,” Theo said. “I forgot.” And he walked out of the house.

In the Volvo, Theo pulled the thin Pine Cove phone directory out of the glove compartment and was looking up Dr. Valerie Riordan’s number when a call came in on the radio. Fight at the Head of the Slug Saloon. It was 8:30 A.M.

It was rumored among the regulars at the Head of the Slug that under Mavis Sand’s slack, wrinkled, liver-spotted skin lay the gleaming metal skeleton of a Terminator. Mavis first began augmenting her parts in the fifties, first out of vanity: breasts, eyelashes, hair. Later, as she aged and the concept of maintenance eluded her, she began having parts replaced as they failed, until almost half of her body weight was composed of stainless steel (hips, elbows, shoulders, finger joints, rods fused to vertebrae five through twelve), silicon wafers (hearing aids, pacemaker, insulin pump), advanced polymer resins (cataract replacement lenses, dentures), Kevlar fabric (abdominal wall reinforcement), titanium (knees, ankles), and pork (ventricular heart valve). In fact, if not for the pig valve, Mavis would have jumped classes directly from animal to mineral, without the traditional stop at vegetable taken by most. The more inventive drunks at the Slug (little more than vegetables themselves) swore that sometimes, between songs on the jukebox, one could hear tiny but powerful servomotors whirring Mavis around behind the bar. Mavis was careful never to crush a beer can or move a full keg in plain sight of the customers lest she feed the rumors and ruin her image of girlish vulnerability.

When Theo entered the Head of the Slug, he saw ex-scream-queen Molly Michon on the floor with her teeth locked into the calf of a gray-haired man who was screeching like a mashed cat. Mavis stood over them both, brandishing her Louisville Slugger, ready to belt one of them out of the park.

“Theo,” Mavis shrilled, “you got ten seconds to get this wacko out of my bar before I brain her.”

“No, Mavis.” Theo raced forward and knocked Mavis’s bat aside while reaching into his back pocket for his handcuffs. He pried Molly’s hands from around the man’s ankle and shackled them behind her back. The gray-haired man’s screams hit a higher pitch.

Theo got down on the floor and spoke into Molly’s ear. “Let go, Molly. You’ve got to let go of the man’s leg.”

An animal sound emanated from Molly’s throat and bubbled out through blood and saliva.

Theo stroked her hair out of her face. “I can’t fix the problem if you don’t tell me what it is, Molly. I can’t understand you with that guy’s leg in your mouth.”

“Stand back, Theo,” Mavis said. “I’m going to brain her.”

Theo waved Mavis away. The gray-haired man screamed even louder.

“Hey!” Theo shouted. “Pipe down. I’m trying to have a conversation here.”

The gray-haired man lowered his volume.

“Molly, look at me.”

Theo saw a blue eye look away from the leg and the bloodlust faded from it. He had her back. “That’s right, Molly. It’s me, Theo. Now what’s the problem?”

She spit out the man’s leg and turned to look at Theo. Mavis helped the man to a bar stool. “Get her out of here,” Mavis said. “She’s eighty-sixed. This time forever.”

Theo kept his eyes locked on Molly’s. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. Bloody drool was running down her chin. Theo grabbed a bar napkin and wiped it away, careful to keep his fingers away from her mouth.

“I’m going to help you up now and we’re going to go outside and talk about this, okay?”

Molly nodded and Theo picked her up by the shoulders, set her on her feet, and steered her toward the door. He looked over his shoulder at the bitten man. “You okay? You need a doctor?”

“I didn’t do anything to her. I’ve never seen that woman before in my life. I just stopped in for a drink.”

Theo looked at Mavis for confirmation. “He hit on her,” Mavis said. “But that’s no excuse. A girl should appreciate the attention.” She turned and batted her spiderlike false eyelashes at the bitten man. “I could show you some appreciation, sweetie.”

The bitten man looked around in a panic. “No, I’m fine. No doctor. I’m just fine. My wife’s waiting for me.”

“As long as you’re okay,” Theo said. “And you don’t want to press charges or anything?”

“No, just a misunderstanding. Soon as you get her out of here, I’ll be heading out of town.”

There was a collective sigh of disappointment from the regulars who had been placing side bets on who Mavis would hit with her bat.

“Thanks,” Theo said. He shot Mavis a surreptitious wink and led Molly out to the street, excusing himself and his prisoner as they passed an old Black man who was coming through the door carrying a guitar case.

“I ‘spose a man run outta sweet talk and liquor, he gots to go to mo’ direct measures,” the old Black man said to the bar with a dazzling grin. “Someone here lookin fo‘ a Bluesman?”

Theo put Molly into the passenger side of the Volvo. She sat with her head down, her great mane of gray-streaked blonde hair hanging in her face. She wore an oversized green sweater, tights, and high-top sneakers, one red, one blue. She could have been thirty or fifty—and she told Theo a different age every time he picked her up.

Theo went around the car and climbed in. He said, “You know, Molly, when you bite a guy on the leg, you’re right on the edge of ‘a danger to others or yourself,’ you know that?”

She nodded and sniffled. A tear dropped out of the mass of hair and spotted her sweater.

“Before I start driving, I need to know that you’re calmed down. Do I need to put you in the backseat?”

“It wasn’t a fit,” Molly said. “I was defending myself. He wanted a piece of me.” She lifted her head and turned to Theo, but her hair still covered her face.

“Are you taking your drugs?”

“Meds, they call them meds.”

“Sorry,” Theo said. “Are you taking your meds?”

She nodded.

“Wipe your hair out of your face, Molly, I can barely understand you.”

“Handcuffs, whiz kid.”

Theo almost slapped his forehead: idiot! He really needed to stop getting stoned on the job. He reached up and carefully brushed her hair away from her face. The expression he found there was one of bemusement.

“You don’t have to be so careful. I don’t bite.”

Theo smiled. “Well, actually…”

“Oh fuck you. You going to take me to County?”

“Should I?”

“I’ll just be back in seventy-two and the milk in my refrigerator will be spoiled.”

“Then I’d better take you home.”

He started the car and circled the block to head back to the Fly Rod Trailer Court. He would have taken a back way if he could, to save Molly some embarrassment, but the Fly Rod was right off Cypress, Pine Cove’s main street. As they passed the bank, people getting out of their cars turned to stare. Molly made faces at them out the window.

“That doesn’t help, Molly.”

“Fuck ‘em. Fans just want a piece of me. I can give ’em that. I’ve got my soul.”

“Mighty generous of you.”

“If you weren’t a fan, I wouldn’t let you do this.”

“Well, I am. Huge fan.” Actually, he’d never heard of her until the first time he was called to take her away from H.P.‘s Cafe, where she had attacked the espresso machine because it wouldn’t quit staring at her.

“No one understands. Everyone takes a piece of you, then there’s nothing left for you. Even the meds take a piece of you. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about here?”

Theo looked at her. “I have such a mind-numbing fear of the future that the only way I can function at all is with equal amounts of denial and drugs.”

“Jeez, Theo, you’re really fucked up.”

“Thanks.”

“You can’t go around saying crazy shit like that.”

“I don’t normally. It’s been a tough day so far.”

He turned into the Fly Rod Trailer Court: twenty rundown trailers perched on the bank of Santa Rosa Creek, which carried only a trickle of water after the long, dry summer. A grove of cypress trees hid the trailer park from the main street and the view of passing tourists. The chamber of commerce had made the owner of the park take down the sign at the entrance. The Fly Rod was a dirty little secret for Pine Cove, and they kept it well.

Theo stopped in front of Molly’s trailer, a vintage fifties single-wide with small louvered windows and streaks of rust running from the roof. He got Molly out of the car and took off the handcuffs.

Theo said, “I’m going to see Val Riordan. You want me to have her call something in to the pharmacy for you?”

“No, I’ve got my meds. I don’t like ‘em, but I got ’em.” She rubbed her wrists. “Why you going to see Val? You going nuts?”

“Probably, but this is business. You going to be okay now?”

“I have to study my lines.”

“Right.” Theo started to go, then turned. “Molly, what were you doing at the Slug at eight in the morning?”

“How should I know?”

“If the guy at the Slug had been a local, I’d be taking you to County right now, you know that?”

“I wasn’t having a fit. He wanted a piece of me.”

“Stay out of the Slug for a while. Stay home. Just groceries, okay?”

“You won’t talk to the tabloids?”

He handed her a business card. “Next time someone tries to take a piece of you, call me. I always have the cell phone with me.”

She pulled up her sweater and tucked the card into the waistband of her tights, then, still holding up her sweater, she turned and walked to her trailer with a slow sway. Thirty or fifty, under the sweater she still had a figure. Theo watched her walk, forgetting for a minute who she was. Without looking back, she said, “What if it’s you, Theo? Who do I call then?”

Theo shook his head like a dog trying to clear water from its ears, then crawled into the Volvo and drove away. I’ve been alone too long, he thought.

Two

The cooling pipes at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant were all fashioned from the finest stainless steel. Before they were installed, they were x-rayed, ultrasounded, and pressure-tested to be sure that they could never break, and after being welded into place, the welds were also x-rayed and tested. The radioactive steam from the core left its heat in the pipes, which leached it off into a seawater cooling pond, where it was safely vented to the Pacific. But Diablo had been built on a breakneck schedule during the energy scare of the seventies. The welders worked double and triple shifts, driven by greed and cocaine, and the inspectors who ran the X-ray machines were on the same schedule. And they missed one. Not a major mistake. Just a tiny leak. Barely noticeable. A minuscule stream of harmless, low-level radiation wafted out with the tide and drifted over the continental shelf, dissipating as it went, until even the most sensitive instruments would have missed it. Yet the leak didn’t go totally undetected.

In the deep trench off California, near a submerged volcano where the waters ran to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a long slumber. Eyes the size of dinner platters winked out the sediment and sleep of years. It was instinct, sense, and memory: the Sea Beast’s brain. It remembered eating the remains of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine: beefy little sailors tenderized by the pressure of the depths and spiced with piquant radioactive marinade. Memory woke the beast, and like a child lured from under the covers on a snowy morning by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its great tail, broke free from the ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the current of tasty treats. A current that ran along the shore of Pine Cove.

Mavis tossed back a shot of Bushmills to take the edge off her frustration at not being able to whack anyone with her baseball bat. She wasn’t really angry that Molly had bitten a customer. After all, he was a tourist and rated above the mice in the walls only because he carried cash. Maybe the fact that something had actually happened in the Slug would bring in a little business. People would come in to hear the story, and Mavis could stretch, speculate, and dramatize most stories into at least three drinks a tell.

Business had been slowing over the last couple of years. People didn’t seem to want to bring their problems into a bar. Time was, on any given afternoon, you’d have three or four guys at the bar, pouring down beers as they poured out their hearts, so filled with self-loathing that they’d snap a vertebra to avoid catching their own reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. On a given evening, the stools would be full of people who whined and growled and bitched all night long, pausing only long enough to stagger to the bathroom or to sacrifice a quarter to the jukebox’s extensive self-pity selection. Sadness sold a lot of alcohol, and it had been in short supply these last few years. Mavis blamed the booming economy, Val Riordan, and vegetables in the diet for the sadness shortage, and she fought the insidious invaders by running two-for-one happy hours with fatty meat snacks (The whole point of happy hour was to purge happiness, wasn’t it?), but all her efforts only served to cut her profits in half. If Pine Cove could no longer produce sadness, she would import some, so she advertised for a Blues singer.

The old Black man wore sunglasses, a leather fedora, a tattered black wool suit that was too heavy for the weather, red suspenders over a Hawaiian shirt that sported topless hula girls, and creaky black-on-white wing tips. He set his guitar case on the bar and climbed onto a stool.

Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. She’d been taught as a girl not to trust Black people.

“Name your poison,” she said.

He took off his fedora, revealing a gleaming brown baldness that shone like polished walnut. “You gots some wine?”

“Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white?” Mavis cocked a hip, gears and machinery clicked.

“Them cheap-shit boys done expanded. Used to be jus’ one flavor.”

“Red or white?”

“Whatever sweetest, sweetness.”

Mavis slammed a tumbler onto the bar and filled it with yellow liquid from an icy jug in the well. “That’ll be three bucks.”

The Black man reached out—thick sharp nails skating the bar surface, long fingers waving like tentacles, searching, the hand like a sea creature caught in a tidal wash—and missed the glass by four inches.

Mavis pushed the glass into his hand. “You blind?”

“No, it be dark in here.”

“Take off your sunglasses, idjit.”

“I can’t do that, ma’am. Shades go with the trade.”

“What trade? Don’t you try to sell pencils in here. I don’t tolerate beggars.”

“I’m a Bluesman, ma’am. I hear ya’ll lookin for one.”

Mavis looked at the guitar case on the bar, at the Black man in shades, at the long fingernails of his right hand, the short nails and knobby gray calluses on the fingertips of his left, and she said, “I should have guessed. Do you have any experience?”

He laughed, a laugh that started deep down and shook his shoulders on the way up and chugged out of his throat like a steam engine leaving a tunnel. “Sweetness, I got me more experience than a busload o‘ hos. Ain’t no dust settled a day on Catfish Jefferson since God done first dropped him on this big ol’ ball o‘ dust. That’s me, call me Catfish.”

He shook hands like a sissy, Mavis thought, just let her have the tips of his fingers. She used to do that before she had her arthritic finger joints replaced. She didn’t want any arthritic old Blues singer. “I’m going to need someone through Christmas. Can you stay that long or would your dust settle?”

“I ‘spose I could slow down a bit. Too cold to go back East.” He looked around the bar, trying to take in the dinge and smoke through his dark glasses, then turned back to her. “Yeah, I might be able to clear my schedule if”—and here he grinned and Mavis could see a gold tooth there with a musical note cut in it—“if the money is right,” he said.

“You’ll get room and board and a percentage of the bar. You bring ‘em in, you’ll make money.”

He considered, scratched his cheek where white stubble sounded like a toothbrush against sandpaper, and said, “No, sweetness, you bring ‘em in. Once they hear Catfish play, they come back. Now what percentage did you have in mind?“

Mavis stroked her chin hair, pulled it straight to its full three inches. “I’ll need to hear you play.”

Catfish nodded. “I can play.” He flipped the latches on his guitar case and pulled out a gleaming National steel body guitar. From his pocket he pulled a cutoff bottleneck and with a twist it fell onto the little finger of his left hand. He played a chord to test tune, pulled the bottleneck from the fifth to the ninth and danced it there, high and wailing.

Mavis could smell something like mildew, moss maybe, a change in humidity. She sniffed and looked around. She hadn’t been able to smell anything for fifteen years.

Catfish grinned. “The Delta,” he said.

He launched into a twelve-bar Blues, playing the bass line with his thumb, squealing the high notes with the slide, rocking back and forth on the bar stool, the light of the neon Coors sign behind the bar playing colors in the reflection of sunglasses and his bald head.

The daytime regulars looked up from their drinks, stopped lying for a second, and Slick McCall missed a straight-in eight-ball shot on the quarter table, which he almost never did.

And Catfish sang, starting high and haunting, going low and gritty.

And then he stopped.

“You’re hired,” Mavis said. She pulled the jug of white cheap-shit out of the well and sloshed some into Catfish’s glass. “On the house.”

Just then the door opened and a blast of sunlight cut through the dinge and smoke and residual Blues and Vance McNally, the EMT, walked in and set his radio on the bar.

“Guess what?” he said to everyone and no one in particular. “That pilgrim woman hung herself.”

A low mumble passed through the regulars. Catfish put his guitar in its case and picked up his wine. “Sho‘ ’nuff a sad day startin early in this little town. Sho‘ ’nuff.”

“Sho‘ ’nuff,” said Mavis with a cackle like a stainless-steel hyena.

Depression has a mortality rate of fifteen percent. Fifteen percent of all patients with major depression will take their own lives. Statistics. Hard numbers in a very squishy science. Fifteen percent. Dead.

Val Riordan had been repeating the figures to herself since Theophilus Crowe had called, but it wasn’t helping her feel any better about what Bess Leander had done. Val had never lost a patient before. And Bess Leander hadn’t really been depressed, had she? Bess didn’t fit into the fifteen percent.

Val went to the office in the back of her house and pulled Bess Leander’s file, then went back to the living room to wait for Constable Crowe. At least it was the local guy, not the county sheriffs. And she could always fall back on patient confidentiality. Truth was, she had no idea why Bess Leander might have hung herself. She had only seen Bess once, and then for only half an hour. Val had made the diagnosis, written the scrip, and collected a check for the full hour session. Bess had called in twice, talked for a few minutes, and Val had sent her a bill for the time rounded to the next quarter hour.

Time was money. Val Riordan liked nice things.

The doorbell rang, Westminster chimes. Val crossed the living room to the marble foyer. A thin tall figure was refracted through the door’s beveled glass panels: Theophilus Crowe. Val had never met him, but she knew of him. Three of his ex-girlfriends were her patients. She opened the door.

He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a gray shirt with black epaulets that might have been part of a uniform at one time. He was clean-shaven, with long sandy hair tied neatly into a ponytail. A good-looking guy in an Ichabod Crane sort of way. Val guessed he was stoned. His girlfriends had talked about his habits.

“Dr.Riordan,” he said. “Theo Crowe.” He offered his hand.

She shook hands. “Everyone calls me Val,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Come in.” She pointed to the living room.

“Nice to meet you too,” Theo said, almost as an afterthought. “Sorry about the circumstances.” He stood at the edge of the marble foyer, as if afraid to step on the white carpet.

She walked past him and sat down on the couch. “Please,” she said, pointing to one of a set of Hepplewhite chairs. “Sit.”

He sat. “I’m not exactly sure why I’m here, except that Joseph Leander doesn’t seem to know why Bess did it.”

“No note?” Val asked.

“No. Nothing. Joseph went downstairs for breakfast this morning and found her hanging in the dining room.”

Val felt her stomach lurch. She had never really formed a mental picture of Bess Leander’s death. It had been words on the phone until now. She looked away from Theo, looked around the room for something that would erase the picture.

“I’m sorry,” Theo said. “This must be hard for you. I’m just wondering if there was anything that Bess might have said in therapy that would give a clue.”

Fifteen percent, Val thought. She said, “Most suicides don’t leave a note. By the time they have gone that far into depression, they aren’t interested in what happens after their death. They just want the pain to end.”

Theo nodded. “Then Bess was depressed? Joseph said that she appeared to be getting better.”

Val cast around her training for an answer. She hadn’t really diagnosed Bess Leander, she had just prescribed what she thought would make Bess feel better. She said, “Diagnosis in psychiatry isn’t always that exact, Theo. Bess Leander was a complex case. Without compromising doctor-patient confidentiality, I can tell you that Bess suffered from a borderline case of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. I was treating her for that.”

Theo pulled a prescription bottle out of his shirt pocket and looked at the label. “Zoloft. Isn’t that an antidepressant? I only know because I used to date a woman who was on it.”

Right, Val thought. Actually, you used to date at least three women who were on it. She said, “Zoloft is an SSRI like Prozac. It’s prescribed for a number of conditions. With OCD the dosage is higher.” That’s it, get clinical. Baffle him with clinical bullshit.

Theo shook the bottle. “Could someone O.D. on it or something? I heard somewhere that people do crazy things sometimes on these drugs.”

“That’s not necessarily true. SSRIs like Zoloft are often prescribed to people with major depression. Fifteen percent of all depressed patients commit suicide.” There, she said it. “Antidepressants are a tool, along with talk therapy, that psychiatrists use to help patients. Sometimes the tools don’t work. As with any therapy, a third get better, a third get worse, and a third stay the same. Antidepressants aren’t a panacea.” But you treat them like they are, don’t you, Val?

“But you said that Bess Leander had OCD, not depression.”

“Constable, have you ever had a stomachache and a runny nose at the same time?”

“So you’re saying she was depressed?”

“Yes, she was depressed, as well as having OCD.”

“And it couldn’t have been the drugs?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t even know if she was taking the drug. Have you counted them?”

“Uh, no.”

“Patients don’t always take their medicine. We don’t order blood level tests for SSRIs.”

“Right,” Theo said. “I guess we’ll know when they do the autopsy.”

Another horrendous picture flashed in Val’s mind: Bess Leander on an autopsy table. The viscera of medicine had always been too much for her. She stood.

“I wish I could help you more, but to be honest, Bess Leander never gave me any indication that she was suicidal.” At least that was true.

Theo took her cue and stood. “Well, thank you. I’m sorry to have bothered you. If you think of anything, you know, anything that I can tell Joseph that might make it easier on him…”

“I’m sorry. That’s all I know.” Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent.

She led him to the door.

He turned before leaving. “One more thing. Molly Michon is one of your patients, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Actually, she’s a county patient, but I agreed to treat her at a reduced rate because all the county facilities are so far away.”

“You might want to check on her. She attacked a guy at the Head of the Slug this morning.”

“Is she in County?”

“No, I took her home. She calmed down.”

“Thank you, Constable. I’ll call her.”

“Well, then. I’ll be going.”

“Constable,” she called after him. “Those pills you have—Zoloft isn’t a recreational drug.”

Theo stumbled on the steps, then composed himself. “Right, Doctor, I figured that out when I saw the body hanging in the dining room. I’ll try not to eat the evidence.”

“Good-bye,” Val said. She closed the door behind him and burst into tears. Fifteen percent. She had fifteen hundred patients in Pine Cove on some form of antidepressant or another. Fifteen percent would be more than two hundred people dead. She couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t let another of her patients die because of her noninvolvement. If antidepressants wouldn’t save them, then maybe she could.

Three

Theophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum while sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play sixteen chords on the guitar and knew five Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a bar chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove Little Theater’s revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all these endeavors, he had experienced a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artist’s soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create.

If there was any single thing at which Theo excelled, it was empathy. He always seemed to be able to understand someone’s point of view, no matter how singular or farfetched, and in turn could convey it to others with a succinctness and clarity that he seldom found in expressing his own thoughts. He was a born mediator, a peacemaker, and it was this talent, after breaking up numerous fights at the Head of the Slug Saloon, that got Theo elected constable. That and heavy-handed endorsement of Sheriff John Burton.

Burton was a hard-line right-wing politico who could spout law and order (accent on order) over brunch with the Rotarians, lunch with the NRA, and dinner with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and wolf down dry banquet chicken like it was manna from the gods every time. He wore expensive suits, a gold Rolex, and drove a pearl-black Eldorado that shone like a starry night on wheels (rapt attention and copious coats of carnuba from the grunts in the county motor pool). He had been sheriff of San Junipero County for sixteen years, and in that time the crime rate had dropped steadily until it was the lowest, per capita, of any county in California. His endorsement of Theophilus Crowe, someone with no law enforcement experience, had come as more than somewhat of a surprise to the people of Pine Cove, especially since Theo’s opponent was a retired Los Angeles policeman who’d put in a highly decorated five and twenty. What the people of Pine Cove did not know was that Sheriff Burton not only endorsed Theo, he had forced him to run in the first place.

Theophilus Crowe was a quiet man, and Sheriff John Burton had his reasons for not wanting to hear a peep out of the little North County burg of Pine Cove, so when Theo walked into his little two-room cabin, he wasn’t surprised to see a red seven blinking on his answering machine. He punched the button and listened to Burton‘s assistant insisting that he call right away—seven times. Burton never called the cell phone.

Theo had come home to shower and ponder his meeting with Val Riordan. The fact that she had treated at least three of his ex-girlfriends bothered him. He wanted to try and figure out what the women had told her. Obviously, they’d mention that he got high occasionally. Well, more than occasionally. But like any man, it worried him that they might have said something about his sexual performance. For some reason, it didn’t bother him nearly as much that Val Riordan think him a loser and a drug fiend as it did that she might think he was bad in the rack. He wanted to ponder the possibilities, think away the paranoia, but instead he dialed the sheriff’s private number and was put right through.

“What in the hell is the matter with you, Crowe? You stoned?”

“No more than usual,” Theo said. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is you removed evidence from a crime scene.”

“I did?” Talking to the sheriff could drain all of Theo’s energy instantly. He fell into a beanbag chair that expectorated Styrofoam beads from a failing seam with a sigh. “What evidence? What scene?”

“The pills, Crowe. The suicide’s husband said you took the pills with you. I want them back at the scene in ten minutes. I want my men out of there in half an hour. The M.E. will do the autopsy this afternoon and this case will close by dinnertime, got it? Run-of-the-mill suicide. Obit page only. No news. You understand?”

“I was just checking on her condition with her psychiatrist. See if there were any indications she might be suicidal.”

“Crowe, you must resist the urge to play investigator or pretend that you are a law enforcement officer. The woman hung herself. She was depressed and she ended it all. The husband wasn’t cheating, there was no money motive, and Mommy and Daddy weren’t fighting.”

“They talked to the kids?”

“Of course they talked to the kids. They’re detectives. They investigate things. Now get over there and get them out of North County. I’d send them over to get the pills from you, but I wouldn’t want them to find your little victory garden, would you?”

“I’m leaving now,” Theo said.

“This is the last I will hear of this,” Burton said. He hung up.

Theo hung up the phone, closed his eyes, and turned into a human puddle in the beanbag chair.

Forty-one years old and he still lived like a college student. His books were stacked between bricks and boards, his bed pulled out of a sofa, his refrigerator was empty but for a slice of pizza going green, and the grounds around his cabin were overgrown with weeds and brambles. Behind the cabin, in the middle of a nest of blackberry vines, stood his victory garden: ten bushy marijuana plants, sticky with buds that smelled of skunk and spice. Not a day passed that he didn’t want to plow them under and sterilize the ground they grew in. And not a day passed that he didn’t work his way through the brambles and lovingly harvest the sticky green that would sustain his habit through the day.

The researchers said that marijuana was only psychologically addictive. Theo had read all the papers. They only mentioned the night sweats and mental spiders of withdrawal in passing, as if they were no more unpleasant than a tetanus shot. But Theo had tried to quit. He’d wrung out three sets of sheets in one night and paced the cabin looking for distraction until he thought his head might explode, only to give up and suck the piquant smoke from his Sneaky Pete so he could find sleep. The researchers obviously didn’t get it, but Sheriff John Burton did. He understood Theo’s weakness and held it over him like the proverbial sword. That Burton had his own Achilles’ heel and more to lose from its discovery didn’t seem to matter. Logically, Theo had him in a standoff. But emotionally, Burton had the upper hand. Theo was always the one to blink.

He snatched Sneaky Pete off his orange crate coffee table and headed out the door to return Bess Leander’s pills to the scene of the crime.

Dr. Valerie Riordan sat at her desk, looking at the icons of her life: a tiny digital stock ticker that she would surreptitiously glance down at during appointments; a gold Mont Blanc desk set, the pens jutting from the jade base like the antennae of a goldbug; a set of bookends fashioned in the likenesses of Freud and Jung, bracing leather-bound copies of The Psychology of the Unconscious, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Physician’s Desk Reference; and a plaster-cast bust of Hippocrates that dispensed Post-it notes from the base. Hippocrates, that wily Greek who turned medicine from magic to science. The author of the famous oath that Val had uttered twenty years ago on that sunny summer day in Ann Arbor when she graduated from med school: “I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but I will never use it to injure or wrong them. I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan.”

The oath had seemed so silly, so antiquated then. What doctor, in their right mind, would give poison to a patient?

“But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art.”

It had seemed so obvious and easy then. Now she guarded her life and her art with a custom security system and a Glock 9 mm. stashed in the nightstand.

“I will not use the knife on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein.”

She’d never had a problem with that part of the oath. She was loathe to use the knife. She’d gone into psychiatry because she couldn’t handle the messy parts of medicine. Her father, a surgeon himself, had been only mildly disappointed. At least she was a doctor, of sorts. She’d done her internship and residency in a rehab center where movie stars and rock idols learned to be responsible by making their own beds, while Val distributed Valium like a flight attendant passing out peanuts. One wing of the Sunrise Center was druggies, the other eating disorders. She preferred the eating disorders. “You haven’t lived until you’ve force-fed minestrone to a supermodel through a tube,” she told her father.

“Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will do so to help the sick, keeping myself free from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from fornication with woman or man, bond or free.”

Well, abstinence from fornication hadn’t been a problem, had it? She hadn’t had sex since Richard left five years ago. Richard had given her the bust of Hippocrates as a joke, he said, but she’d put it on her desk just the same. She’d given him a statue of Blind Justice wearing a garter belt and fishnets the year before to display at his law office. He’d brought her here to this little village, passing up offers from corporate law firms to follow his dream of being a country lawyer whose daily docket would include disagreements over pig paternity or the odd pension dispute. He wanted to be Atticus Finch, Pudd’nhead Wilson, a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda character who was paid in fresh-baked bread and baskets of avocados. Well, he’d gotten that part; Val’s practice had supported them for most of their marriage. She’d be paying him alimony now if they’d actually divorced.

Country lawyer indeed. He left her to go to Sacramento to lobby the California Coastal Commission for a consortium of golf course developers. His job was to convince the commission that sea otters and elephant seals would enjoy nothing better than to watch Japanese businessmen slice Titleists into the Pacific and that what nature needed was one long fairway from Santa Barbara to San Francisco (maybe sand traps at the Pismo and Carmel dunes). He carried a pocket watch, for Christ’s sake, a gold chain with a jade fob carved into the shape of an endangered brown pelican. He played his front-porch, rocking-chair-wise, country lawyer against their Botany 500 sophistication and pulled down over two hundred grand a year in the bargain. He lived with one of his clerks, an earnest doe-eyed Stanfordite with surfer girl hair and a figure that mocked gravity. Richard had introduced Val to the girl (Ashley, or Brie, or Jordan) and it had been oh-so-adult and oh-so-gracious and later, when Val called Richard to clear up a tax matter, she asked, “So how’d you screen the candidates, Richard? First one to suck-start your Lexus?”

“Maybe we should start thinking about making our separation official,” Richard had said.

Val had hung up on him. If she couldn’t have a happy marriage, she’d have everything else. Everything. And so had begun her revolving door policy of hustling appointments, prescribing the appropriate meds, and shopping for clothes and antiques.

Hippocrates glowered at her from the desk.

“I didn’t intentionally do harm,” Val said. “Not intentionally, you old buggerer. Fifteen percent of all depressives commit suicide, treated or not.”

“Whatsoever in the course of practice I see or hear (or even outside my practice in social intercourse) that ought never to be published abroad, I will not divulge, but consider such things to be holy secrets.”

“Holy secrets or do no harm?” Val asked, envisioning the hanging body of Bess Leander with a shudder. “Which is it?” Hippocrates sat on his Post-its, saying nothing. Was Bess Leander’s death her fault? If she had talked to Bess instead of put her on antidepressants, would that have saved her? It was possible, and it was also possible that if she kept to her policy of a “pill for every problem,” someone else was going to die. She couldn’t risk it. If using talk therapy instead of drugs could save one life, it was worth a try.

Val grabbed the phone and hit the speed dial button that connected her to the town’s only pharmacy, Pine Cove Drug and Gift.

One of the clerks answered. Val asked to speak to Winston Krauss, the pharmacist. Winston was one of her patients. He was fifty-three, unmarried, and eighty pounds overweight. His holy secret, which he shared with Val during a session, was that he had an unnatural sexual fascination with marine mammals, dolphins in particular. He’d confessed that he’d never been able to watch “Flipper” without getting an erection and that he’d watched so many Jacques Cousteau specials that a French accent made him break into a sweat. He kept an anatomically correct inflatable porpoise, which he violated nightly in his bathtub. Val had cured him of wearing a scuba mask and snorkel around the house, so gradually the red gasket ring around his face had cleared up, but he still did the dolphin nightly and confessed it to her once a month.

“Winston, Val Riordan here. I need a favor.”

“Sure, Dr. Val, you need me to deliver something to Molly? I heard she went off in the Slug this morning.” Gossip surpassed the speed of light in Pine Cove.

“No, Winston, you know that company that carries all the look-alike placebos? We used them in college. I need you to order look-alikes for all the antidepressants I prescribe: Prozac, Zoloft, Serzone, Effexor, the whole bunch, all the dosages. Order in quantity.”

“I don’t get it, Val, what for?”

Val cleared her throat. “I want you to fill all of my prescriptions with the placebos.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding, Winston. As of today, I don’t want a single one of my patients getting the real thing. Not one.”

“Are you doing some sort of experiment? Control group or something?”

“Something like that.”

“And you want me to charge them the normal price?”

“Of course. Our usual arrangement.” Val got a twenty percent kickback from the pharmacy. She was going to be working a lot harder, she deserved to get paid.

Winston paused. She could hear him going through the glass door into the back of the pharmacy. Finally he said, “I can’t do that, Val. That’s unethical. I could lose my license, go to jail.”

Val had really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Winston, you’ll do it. You’ll do it or the Pine Cove Gazette will run a front-page story about you being a fish-fucker.”

“That’s illegal. You can’t divulge something I told you in therapy.”

“Quit telling me what’s illegal, Winston. I’m married to a lawyer.”

“I’d really rather not do this, Val. Can’t you send them down to the Thrifty Mart in San Junipero? I could say that I can’t get the pills anymore.”

“That wouldn’t work, would it, Winston? The people at the Thrifty Mart don’t have your little problem.”

“You’re going to have some withdrawal reactions. How are you going to explain that?”

“Let me worry about that. I’m quadrupling my sessions. I want to see these people get better, not mask their problems.”

“This is about Bess Leander’s suicide, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to lose another one, Winston.”

“Antidepressants don’t increase the incidence of suicide or violence. Eli Lilly proved that in court.”

“Yes and O.J. walked. Court is one thing, Winston, the reality of losing a patient is another. I’m taking charge of my practice. Now order the pills. I’m sure the profit margin is going to be quite a bit higher on sugar pills than it is on Prozac.”

“I could go to the Florida Keys. There’s a place down there where they let you swim with bottlenose dolphins.”

“You can’t go, Winston. You can’t miss your therapy sessions. I want to see you at least once a week.”

“You bitch.”

“I’m trying to do the right thing. What day is good for you?”

“I’ll call you back.”

“Don’t push me, Winston.”

“I have to make this order,” he said. Then, after a second, he said, “Dr. Val?”

“What?”

“Do I have to go off the Serzone?”

“We’ll talk about it in therapy.” She hung up and pulled a Post-it out of Hippocrates’ chest.

“Now if I keep this oath, and break it not, may I enjoy honor, in my life and art, among all men for all time; but if I transgress and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.”

Does that mean dishonor for all time? she wondered. I’m just trying to do the right thing here. Finally.

She made a note to call Winston back and schedule his appointments.

Four

As September’s promise wound down, a strange unrest came over the people of Pine Cove, due in no small part to the fact that many of them were going into withdrawal from their medications. It didn’t happen all at once—the streets were not full of middle-class junkies rocking and sweating and begging for a fix—but slowly as the autumn days became shorter. And as far as they knew (because Val Riordan had called every one of them), they were experiencing the onset of a mild seasonal syndrome, sort of like spring fever. Call it autumn malaise.

The nature of the medications kept the symptoms spread out over the next few weeks. Prozac and some of the older antidepressants took almost a month to leave the system, so those people slipped into the fray more slowly than those on Zoloft or Paxil or Wellbutrin, which was flushed from the system in only a day or two, leaving the deprived with symptoms resembling a low-grade flu, then a scattered disorientation akin to a temporary case of attention deficit disorder, and, in some, a rebound of depression that dropped on them like a smoky curtain.

One of the first to feel the effects was Estelle Boyet, a local artist, successful and semifamous for her seascapes and idealized paintings of Pine Cove shore life. Her prescription had run out a day before Dr. Val had replaced the supply with sugar pills, so she was already in the midst of withdrawal when she took the first dose of the placebo.

Estelle was sixty, a stout, vital woman who wore brightly colored caftans and let her long gray hair fly around her shoulders as she moved through life with an energy and determination that inspired envy from women half her age. For thirty years she had been a teacher in the decaying and increasingly dangerous Los Angeles Unified School District, teaching eighth graders the difference between acrylics and oils, a brush and a pallet knife, Dali and Degas, and using her job and her marriage as a justification for never producing any art herself.

She had married right out of art school: Joe Boyet, a promising young businessman, the only man she had ever loved and only the third she had ever slept with. When Joe had died eight years ago, she had nearly lost her mind. She tried to throw herself into her teaching, hoping that by inspiring the children she might find some reason to go on herself. In the face of the escalating violence in her school, she resigned herself to wearing a bullet-proof vest under her artist smocks and even brought in some paintball guns to try to gain the pupils’ interest, but the latter only backfired into several incidents of drive-by abstract expressionism, and soon she received death threats for not allowing students to fashion crack pipes in ceramics class. Her students—children living in a hyperadult world where playground disputes were settled with 9 mms—eventually drove her out of teaching. Estelle lost her last reason to go on. The school psychologist referred her to a psychiatrist, who put her on antidepressants and recommended immediate retirement and relocation.

Estelle moved to Pine Cove, where she began to paint and where she fell under the wing of Dr. Valerie Riordan. No wonder then that Estelle’s painting had taken a dark turn over the last few weeks. She painted the ocean. Every day. Waves and spray, rocks and serpentine strands of kelp on the beach, otters and seals and pelicans and gulls. Her canvases sold in the local galleries as fast as she could paint them. But lately the inner light at the heart of her waves, titanium white and aquamarine, had taken on a dark shadow. Every beach scene spoke of desolation and dead fish. She dreamed of leviathan shadows stalking her under the waves and she woke shivering and afraid. It was getting more difficult to get her paints and easel to the shore each day. The open ocean and the blank canvas were just too frightening.

Joe is gone, she thought. I have no career and no friends and I produce nothing but kitschy seascapes as flat and soulless as a velvet Elvis. I’m afraid of everything.

Val Riordan had called her, insisting that she come to a group therapy session for widows, but Estelle had said no. Instead, one evening, after finishing a tormented painting of a beached dolphin, she left her brushes to harden with acrylic and headed downtown—anywhere where she didn’t have to look at this shit she’d been calling art. She ended up at the Head of the Slug Saloon—the first bar she’d set foot in since college.

The Slug was full of Blues and smoke and people chasing shots and running from sadness. If they’d been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yak up whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased—all tails went unwagged. Oh, life is a fast cat, a short leash, a flea in that place where you just can’t scratch. It was dog sad in there, and Catfish Jefferson was the designated howler. The moon was in his eye and he was singing up the sum of human suffering in A-minor, while he worked that bottleneck slide on the National guitar until it sounded like a slow wind through heartstrings. He was grinning.

Of the hundred or so people in the Slug, half were experiencing some sort of withdrawal from their medications. There was a self-pity contingent at the bar, staring into their drinks and rocking back and forth to the Delta rhythms. At the tables, the more social of the depressed were whining and slurring their problems into each other’s ears and occasionally trading hugs or curses. Over by the pool table stood the agitated and the aggressive, the people looking for someone to blame. These were mostly men, and Theophilus Crowe was keeping an eye on them from his spot at the bar.

Since the death of Bess Leander, there had been a fight in the Slug almost every night. In addition, there were more pukers, more screamers, more criers, and more unwanted advances stifled with slaps. Theo had been very busy. So had Mavis Sand. Mavis was happy about it.

Estelle came through the doors in her paint-spattered overalls and Shetland sweater, her hair pulled back in a long gray braid. Just inside, she paused as the music and the smoke washed over her. Some Mexican laborers were standing there in a group, drinking Budweisers, and one of them whistled at her.

“I’m an old lady,” Estelle said. “Shame on you.” She pushed her way through the crowd to the bar and ordered a white wine. Mavis served it in a plastic beer cup. (She was serving everything in plastic lately. Evidently, the Blues made people want to break glass—on each other.)

“Busy?” Estelle said, although she had nothing to compare it to.

“The Blues sure packs ‘em in,” Mavis said.

“I don’t much care for the Blues,” said Estelle. “I enjoy Classical music.”

“Three bucks,” said Mavis. She took Estelle’s money and moved to the other end of the bar.

Estelle felt as if she’d been slapped in the face.

“Don’t mind Mavis,” a man’s voice said. “She’s always cranky.”

Estelle looked up, caught a shirt button, then looked up farther to find Theo’s smile. She had never met the constable, but she knew who he was.

“I don’t even know why I came in here. I’m not a drinker.”

“Something going around,” Theo said. “I think maybe we’re going to have a stormy winter or something. People are coming out of the woodwork.”

They exchanged introductions and Theo complimented Estelle on her paintings, which he’d seen in the local galleries. Estelle dismissed the compliment.

“This seems like a strange place to find the constable,” Estelle said.

Theo showed her the cell phone on his belt. “Base of operations,” he said. “Most of the trouble has been starting in here anyway. If I’m here already, I can stop it before it escalates.”

“Very conscientious of you.”

“No, I’m just lazy,” Theo said. “And tired. In the last three weeks I’ve been called to five domestic disputes, ten fights, two people who barricaded themselves in the bathroom and threatened suicide, a guy who was going house to house knocking the heads off garden gnomes with a sledgehammer, and a woman who tried to take her husband’s eye out with a spoon.”

“Oh my. Sounds like one day in the life of an L.A. cop.”

“This isn’t L.A.,” Theo said. “I don’t mean to complain, but I’m not really prepared for a crime wave.”

“And there’s nowhere left to run,” Estelle said.

“Pardon?”

“People come here to run away from conflict, don’t you think? Come to a small town to get out of the violence and the competition in the city. If you can’t handle it here, there’s nowhere else to go. You might as well give up.”

“Well, that’s a little cynical. I thought artists were supposed to be idealists.”

“Scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed romantic,” Estelle said.

“That’s you?” Theo asked. “A disappointed romantic?”

“The only man I ever loved died.”

“I’m sorry,” Theo said.

“Me too.” She drained her cup of wine.

“Easy on that, Estelle. It doesn’t help.”

“I’m not a drinker. I just had to get out of the house.”

There was some shouting over by the pool table. “My presence is required,” Theo said. “Excuse me.” He made his way through the crowd to where two men were squaring off to fight.

Estelle signaled Mavis for a refill and turned to watch Theo try to make peace. Catfish Jefferson sang a sad song about a mean old woman doing him wrong. That’s me, Estelle thought. A mean old worthless woman.

Self-medication was working by midnight. Most of the customers at the Slug had given in and started clapping and wailing along with Catfish’s Blues. Quite a few had given up and gone home. By closing time, there were only five people left in the Slug and Mavis was cackling over a drawer full of money. Catfish Jefferson put down his National steel guitar and picked up the two-gallon pickle jar that held his tips. Dollar bills spilled over the top, change skated in the bottom, and here and there in the middle fives and tens struggled for air. There was even a twenty down there, and Catfish dug in after it like a kid going for a Cracker Jack prize. He carried the jar to the bar and plopped down next to Estelle, who was gloriously, eloquently crocked.

“Hey, baby,” Catfish said. “You like the Blues?”

Estelle searched the air for the source of the question, as if it might have come from a moth spiraling around one of the lights behind the bar. Her gaze finally settled on the Bluesman and she said, “You’re very good. I was going to leave, but I liked the music.”

“Well, you done stayed now,” Catfish said. “Look at this.” He shook the money jar. “I got me upward o‘ two hundred dollar here, and that mean old woman owe me least that much too. What you say we take a pint and my guitar and go down to the beach, have us a party?”

“I’d better get home,” Estelle said. “I have to paint in the morning.”

“You a painter? I never knowed me a painter. What you say we go down to the beach and watch us a sunrise?”

“Wrong coast,” Estelle said. “The sun comes up over the mountains.”

Catfish laughed. “See, you done saved me a heap of waiting already. Let’s you and me go down to the beach.”

“No, I can’t.”

“It ‘cause I’m Black, ain’t it?”

“No.”

“‘Cause I’m old, right?”

“No.”

“‘Cause I’m bald. You don’t like old bald men, right?”

“No!” Estelle said.

“‘Cause I’m a musician. You heard we irresponsible?”

“No.”

“‘Cause I’m hung like a bull, right?”

“No!” Estelle said.

Catfish laughed again. “Well, you wouldn’t mind spreadin that one around town just the same, would you?”

“How would I know how you’re hung?”

“Well,” Catfish said, pausing and grinning, “you could go to the beach with me.”

“You are a nasty and persistent old man, aren’t you, Mr. Jefferson?” Estelle asked.

Catfish bowed his shining head, “I truly am, miss. I truly am nasty and persistent. And I am too old to be trouble. I admits it.” He held out a long, thin hand. “Let’s have us a party on the beach.”

Estelle felt like she’d just been bamboozled by the devil. Something smooth and vibrant under that gritty old down-home shuck. Was this the dark shadow her paintings kept finding in the surf?

She took his hand. “Let’s go to the beach.”

“Ha!” Catfish said.

Mavis pulled a Louisville Slugger from behind the bar and held it out to Estelle. “Here, you wanna borrow this?”

They found a niche in the rocks that sheltered them from the wind. Catfish dumped sand from his wing tips and shook his socks out before laying them out to dry.

“That was a sneaky old wave.”

“I told you to take off your shoes,” Estelle said. She was more amused than she felt she had a right to be. A few sips from Catfish’s pint had kept the cheap white wine from going sour in her stomach. She was warm, despite the chill wind. Catfish, on the other hand, looked miserable.

“Never did like the ocean much,” Catfish said. “Too many sneaky things down there. Give a man the creeps, that’s what it does.”

“If you don’t like the ocean, then why did you ask me to come to the beach?”

“The tall man said you like to paint pictures of the beach.”

“Lately, the ocean’s been giving me a bit of the creeps too. My paintings have gone dark.”

Catfish wiped sand from between his toes with a long finger. “You think you can paint the Blues?”

“You ever seen Van Gogh?”

Catfish looked out to sea. A three-quarter moon was pooling like mercury out there. “Van Gogh…Van Gogh…fiddle player outta St. Louis?”

“That’s him,” Estelle said.

Catfish snatched the pint out of her hand and grinned. “Girl, you drink a man’s liquor and lie to him too. I know who Vincent Van Gogh is.”

Estelle couldn’t remember the last time she’d been called a girl, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t liked hearing it as much as she did now. She said, “Who’s lying now? Girl?”

“You know, under that big sweater and them overalls, they might be a girl. Then again, I could be wrong.”

“You’ll never know.”

“I won’t? Now that is some sad stuff there.” He picked up his guitar, which had been leaning on a rock, and began playing softly, using the surf as a backbeat. He sang about wet shoes, running low on liquor, and a wind that chilled right to the bone. Estelle closed her eyes and swayed to the music. She realized that this was the first time she’d felt good in weeks.

He stopped abruptly. “I’ll be damned. Look at that.”

Estelle opened her eyes and looked toward the waterline where Catfish was pointing. Some fish had run up on the beach and were flopping around in the sand.

“You ever see anything like that?”

Estelle shook her head. More fish were coming out of the surf. Beyond the breakers, the water was boiling with fish jumping and thrashing. A wave rose up as if being pushed from underneath. “There’s something moving out there.”

Catfish picked up his shoes. “We gots to go.”

Estelle didn’t even think of protesting. “Yes. Now.”

She thought about the huge shadows that kept appearing under the waves in her paintings. She grabbed Catfish’s shoes, jumped off the rock, and started down the beach to the stairs that led up to a bluff where Catfish’s station wagon waited. “Come on.”

“I’m comin‘.” Catfish spidered down the rock and stepped after her.

At the car, both of them winded and leaning on the fenders, Catfish was digging in his pocket for the keys when they heard the roar. The roar of a thousand phlegmy lions—equal amounts of wetness, fury, and volume. Estelle felt her ribs vibrate with the noise.

“Jesus! What was that?”

“Get in the car, girl.”

Estelle climbed into the station wagon. Catfish was already fumbling the key into the ignition. The car fired up and he threw it into drive, kicking up gravel as he pulled away.

“Wait, your shoes are on the roof.”

“He can have them,” Catfish said. “They better than the ones he ate last time.”

“He? What the hell was that? You know what that was?”

“I’ll tell you soon as I’m done havin this heart attack.”

Five

The great Sea Beast paused in his pursuit of the delicious radioactive aroma and sent a subsonic message out to a gray whale passing several miles ahead of him. Roughly translated, it said, “Hey, baby, how’s about you and I eat a few plankton and do the wild thing.”

The gray whale continued her relentless swim south and replied with a subsonic thrum that translated, “I know who you are. Stay away from me.”

The Sea Beast swam on. During his journey he had eaten a basking shark, a few dolphins, and several hundred tuna. His focus had changed from food to sex. As he approached the California coast, the radioactive scent began to diminish to almost nothing. The leak at the power plant had been discovered and fixed. He found himself less than a mile offshore with a belly full of shark—and no memory of why he’d left his volcanic nest. But there was a buzz reaching his predator’s senses from shore, the listless resolve of prey that has given up: depression. Warm-blooded food, dolphins, and whales sent off the same signal sometimes. A large school of food was just asking to be eaten, right near the edge of the sea. He stopped out past the surf line and came to the surface in the middle of a kelp bed, his massive head breaking though strands of kelp like a zombie pickup truck breaking sod as it rises from the grave.

Then he heard it. A hated sound. The sound of an enemy. It had been half a century since the Sea Beast had left the water, and land was not his natural domain, but his instinct to attack overwhelmed his sense of self-preservation. He threw back his head, shaking the great purple gills that stood out on his neck like trees, and blew the water from his vestigial lungs. Breath burned down his cavernous throat for the first time in fifty years and came out in a horrendous roar of pain and anger. Three of the protective ocular membranes slid back from his eyes like electric car windows, allowing him to see in the bitter air. He thrashed his tail, pumped his great webbed feet, and torpedoed toward the shore.

It had been almost ten years since Gabe Fenton had dissected a dog, but now, at three o’clock in the morning, he was thinking seriously about taking a scalpel to Skinner, his three-year-old Labrador retriever, who was deep in the throes of a psychotic barking fit. Skinner had been banished to the porch that afternoon, after he had taken a roll in a dead seagull and refused to go into the surf or get near the hose to be washed off. To Skinner, dead bird was the smell of romance.

Gabe crawled out of bed and padded to the door in his boxers, scooping up a hiking boot along the way. He was a biologist, held a Ph.D. in animal behavior from Stanford, so it was with great academic credibility that he opened the door and winged the boot at his dog, following it with the behavior-reinforcing command of: “Skinner, shut the fuck up!”

Skinner paused in his barking fit long enough to duck under the flying L. L. Bean, then, true to his breeding, retrieved it from the washbasin that he used as a water dish and brought it back to the doorway where Gabe stood. Skinner set the soggy boot at the biologist’s feet. Gabe closed the door in Skinner’s face.

Jealous, Skinner thought. No wonder he can’t get any females, smelling like fabric softener and soap. The Food Guy wouldn’t be so cranky if he’d get out and sniff some butts. (Skinner always thought of Gabe as “the Food Guy.”) Then, after a quick sniff to confirm that he was, indeed, the Don Juan of all dogs, Skinner resumed his barking fit. Doesn’t he get it, Skinner thought, there’s something dangerous coming. Danger, Food Guy, danger!

Inside, Gabe Fenton glanced at the computer screen in his living room as he returned to bed. A thousand tiny green dots were working their way, en masse, across the map of the Pine Cove area. He stopped and rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t possible.

Gabe went to the computer and typed in a command. The map of the area reappeared in wider scale. Still, the dots were all moving in a line. He zoomed the map to only a few square miles, the dots were still on the move. Each green dot on the map represented a rat that Gabe had live-trapped, injected with a microchip, and released into the wild. Their location was tracked and plotted by satellite. Every rat in a ten-square-mile area was moving east, away from the coast. Rats did not behave that way.

Gabe ran the data backward, looking at the rodents’ movements over the last few hours. The exodus had started abruptly, only two hours ago, and already most of the rats had moved over a mile inland. They were running full-tilt and going far beyond their normal range. Rats are sprinters, not long-distance runners. Something was up.

Gabe hit a key and a tiny green number appeared next to each of the dots. Each chip was unique, and each rat could be identified like airplanes on the screen of an air traffic controller. Rat 363 hadn’t moved outside of a two-meter range for five days. Gabe had assumed that she had either given birth or was ill. Now 363 was half a mile from her normal territory.

Anomalies are both the bane and bread of researchers. Gabe was excited by the data, but at the same time it made him anxious. An anomaly like this could lead to a discovery, or make him look like a total fool. He cross-checked the data three different ways, then tapped into the weather station on the roof. Nothing was happening in the way of weather, all changes in barometric pressure, humidity, wind, and temperature were well within normal ranges. He looked out the window: a low fog was settling on the shore, totally normal. He could just make out the lighthouse a hundred yards away. It had been shut down for twenty years, used only as a weather station and as a base for biological research.

He grabbed a blanket off of his bed and wrapped it around his shoulders against the chill, then returned to his desk. The green dots were still moving. He dialed the number for JPL in Pasadena. Skinner was still barking outside.

“Skinner, shut the fuck up!” Gabe shouted just as the automated answering service put him through to the seismology lab. A woman answered. She sounded young, probably an intern. “Excuse me?” she said.

“Sorry, I was yelling at my dog. Yes, hello, this is Dr. Gabe Fenton at the research station in Pine Cove, just wondering if you have any seismic activity in my area.”

“Pine Cove? Can I get a longitude and latitude?”

Gabe gave it to her. “I think I’m looking for something offshore.”

“Nothing. Minor tremor centered at Parkfield yesterday at 9 A.M. Point zero-five-three. You wouldn’t even be able to feel it. Have you picked something up on your instruments?”

“I don’t have seismographic instruments. That’s why I called you. This is a biological research and weather station.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t know. I’m new here. Did you feel something?”

“No. My rats are moving.” As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t.

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind, I was just checking. I’m having some anomalous behavior in some specimens. If you pick up anything in the next few days, could you call me?” He gave her his number.

“You think your rats are predicting an earthquake, Doctor?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You should know that there’s no concrete data on animals predicting seismic activity.”

“I know that, but I’m trying to eliminate all the possibilities.”

“Did it occur to you that your dog might be scaring them?”

“I’ll factor that in,” Gabe said. “Thank you for your time.” He hung up, feeling stupid.

Nothing seismic or meteorological, and a call to the highway patrol confirmed that there were no chemical spills or fires. He had to confirm the data. Perhaps something was wrong with the satellite signal. The only way to find out was to take out his portable antenna and track the rats in the field. He dressed quickly and headed out to his truck.

“Skinner, you want to go for a ride?”

Skinner wagged his tail and made a beeline for the truck. About time, he thought. You need to get away from the shore, Food Guy, right now.

Inside the house, ten green dots were moving away from the others toward the shore.

The Sea Beast crawled up the beach, roaring as his legs took the full weight of his body and the undertow sucked at his haunches. The urgency of killing his enemy had diminished now and hunger was upon him in response to the effort of moving out of the ocean. An organ at the base of his brain that had disappeared from other species when man’s only living ancestors were tree shrews produced an electric signal to call food. There were many prey here, that same organ sensed.

The Sea Beast came to the fifty-foot cliff that bordered the beach, reared back on his tail, and pulled himself up with his forelegs. He was a hundred feet long, nose to tail, and stood twenty-five feet tall with his broad neck extended to its full height. His rear feet were wide and webbed, his front talonlike, with a thumb that opposed three curved claws for grasping and killing prey.

On the dry grass above the beach, some of the prey he had called already waited. Raccoons, ground squirrels, a few skunks, a fox, and two cats cavorted on the grass—some copulated, others dug at fleas with blissful abandon, others just rolled on their backs as if overcome by a fit of joy. The Sea Beast swept them into his great maw with a flick of his tongue, crunching a few bones on the way down, but swallowing most whole. He belched and savored the skunky bouquet, his jaws smacking together like two wet mattresses, and a flash of neon color ran across his flanks with the pleasure.

He moved over the bluff, across the Coast Highway, and into the sleeping town. The streets were deserted, lights off in all the businesses on Cypress Street. A low fog splashed against the pseudo-Tudor half-timbered buildings and formed green coronas around the streetlights. Above it all, the red Texaco sign shone like a beacon.

The Sea Beast changed the color of his skin to the same smoky gray as the fog and moved down the center of the street looking like a serpentine cloud. He followed a low rumbling sound coming from under the red beacon, broke out of the fog, and there he saw her.

She purred, taunting and teasing him from the front of the deserted Texaco station. That come-hither rumble. That low, sexy growl. Those silver flanks reflecting fog and the red Texaco sign called to him, begged him to mount her. The Sea Beast flashed a rainbow of color down his sides to display his magnificent maleness. He fanned the gill trees on his neck, sending bands of color and light into their branches.

The Sea Beast sent her a signal, which roughly translated into: “Hey, baby, haven’t seen you around before.” She sat there, purring, playing coy, but he knew she wanted him. She had short black legs, a stumpy tail, and smelled as if she may have recently eaten a trawler, but those magnificent silver flanks were too much to resist.

The Sea Beast turned himself silver as well, to make her feel a little more comfortable, then reared up on his hind legs and displayed his aroused member. No response, just that shy purring. He took it as an invitation and moved across the parking lot to mount the fuel truck.

Estelle placed a mug of tea in front of Catfish, then sat down across the table from him with her own. Catfish sipped the tea and grimaced, then pulled the pint from his back pocket and unscrewed the cap. Estelle caught his hand before he could pour.

“You have some explaining to do first, Mr. Bluesman.” Estelle was more than a little rattled. When they were only half a mile away from the beach, she had been overtaken by a sudden urge to return and had fought Catfish for control of the car. It was crazy behavior. It frightened her as much as the thing at the beach had, and when they got to her house she immediately took a Zoloft, even though she’d already had her dose for the day.

“Leave me be, woman. I said I’d tell you. I needs me some nerve medicine.”

Estelle released his hand. “What was that at the beach?”

Catfish splashed some whiskey into Estelle’s tea first, then into his own. He grinned, “You see my name wasn’t always Catfish. I was born with the name of Meriwether Jefferson. Catfish come on me sometime later.”

“Christ, Catfish, I’m sixty years old. Am I going to live long enough to hear the end of this story? What in the hell was out in the water tonight?” She was definitely not herself, swearing like this.

“You wanna know or not?”

Estelle sipped her tea. “Sorry, go ahead.”

Six

Was ‘bout fifty year ago. I was hoboing through the Delta, playin juke joints with my partner Smiley. He called Smiley cause he don’t never get the Blues. Boy could play the Blues, but he never got the Blues, not for a second. He be broke and hungover and he still always smilin. Make me crazy. I say, “Smiley, you ain’t never gone play no better’n Deaf Cotton, lessin you feels it.”

Deaf Cotton Dormeyer was this ol‘ boy we used to play with time to time. See, them days, bunch of Bluesmen was blind, so they be called Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Jackson—like that. And them boys could play them some Blues. But ol’ Cotton, he deaf as a stone, a little bit more of a burden than bein blind iffin you playing music. We be playing “Crossroads,” an‘ ol’ Deaf Cotton be over on the side playin‘ “Walkin Man’s Blues” and a-howlin like a ol’ dog, and we stop, go down to the store, have us a Nabs and a Co-Cola, and Deaf Cotton just keep right on playin. And he the lucky one, ‘cause he can’t hear how bad he is. And didn’t nobody have the heart to tell him.

So, anyway, I says, “You ain’t never gone play no better than ol‘ Deaf Cotton, lessin you get some Blues on you.”

And Smiley say, “You gots to help me.”

Now Smiley, he my friend from way back—my partner, see. So I says I will get the Blues to jump on him, but he got to promise not to get mad how I do it. So he say okay, and I say okay, and I sets to sic the Blues on him so we can go to Chicago and Dallas and makes us some records and get us some Cadillacs and so on like them boys Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and them.

Smiley, he had him a wife name of Ida May, sweet little thing. He keep her up there in Clarksville. And he always sayin how he don’t have to worry ‘bout Ida May when he on the road cause she love him true and only. So one day I tell Smiley they’s a man down Baton Rouge got him a prime Martin guitar he gonna sell for ten dollars, and would Smiley go get it for me cause I got me a case of the runs and can’t take the train ride.

So Smiley ain’t out of town half a day before I takes me some liquor and flowers and make my visit on little Ida May. She’s a young thing, ain’t much for drinkin liquor, but once I tells her that ol‘ Smiley done got hisself runned over by a train, she takes to drinkin like a natural (in between the screamin and cryin and all, and I had my own self some tears too, he being my partner and all, God rest his soul). And before you know it, I’m givin’ Ida May some good lovin to comfort her in her time of grief and all.

And you know when Smiley get back, he don’t say a word ‘bout my sleepin with Ida May. He say he sorry he can’t find the man with the guitar, gives me my ten dollars, an’ say he got to go home ‘cause Ida May so happy to see him she been doing him special all day. I say, “Well, she done me special too,” and he say that okay, her being sad and me being his best friend. That boy was greased to the Blues, and they just wouldn’t stick to him.

So I borrowed a Model T Ford, drove over to Smiley’s, and done run over his dog, who was tied up in the yard.

“That dog was old anyways,” he say. “I had him since I was a boy. Time I get Ida May a puppy anyways.“

“You ain’t sad?” I say.

“Naw,” he say. “That ol‘ dog had his time.”

“You hopeless, Smiley. I gots to do some ponderin.”

So I ponders. Takin me two days to come up with a way to put the Blues on ol‘ Smiley. But you know, even when that boy standing there over the smokin ashes of his house, Ida May in one arm and his guitar in the other, he don’t do nothin but thank God they had time to get out without gettin burnt up.

Preacher once told me that they is people who rises to tragedy. He says colored folk gots to rise to tragedy like ol‘ Job in the Bible, iffin they gonna get they propers. So I figures that Smiley is one of them who rises to tragedy, get stronger when bad things come on him. But they more than one way to get the Blues on you. Ain’t just bad things happening, sometime it good things not happenin—disappointment, iffin you know what I mean?

So I hears that down Biloxi way, round ‘bout one of them salt marshes on the Gulf, they is a catfish big as a rowboat, but nobody can catch him. Even a white man down there will give five hundred dollars to the man bring that big ol’ catfish in. Now you know people be trying to catch him, but they don’t have no luck. So I tells Smiley I got me a secret recipe, and we gonna go get that catfish, get that money, and go up to Chicago and make us a record.

Now I knows they ain’t no catfish big as a rowboat, and iffin there was, he’d be caught by now, but Smiley need him a disappointment iffin the Blues gonna jump on him. So I spends the whole ride down there buildin up that boy’s hopes. Cadillacs and big ol‘ houses ridin on the back of that catfish. We ridin in that ol’ dog-killin Model T Ford, two hundred feet a rope and some shark hooks in the back with my secret catfish recipe. I figure we get us some bait on the way, and sho‘ nuff, I accidentally run me over two chickens got too close to the road.

‘For dark we down on the bayou where that ol’ cat spose to live. Them days ‘bout half the counties in Mississippi got signs say: NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU IN THIS COUNTY, so we always plan to get where we goin’ ‘for dark.

My secret recipe a gallon jar of chicken guts I keep buried in the backyard for a year. I takes that jar and punches some holes in the lid and toss her out in the water. “A catfish smell them rotten guts, they be there lickety-split,” I tells Smiley. Then we hooks up one them chickens and throw it out there and we sits back and has us a drink or two, me all the time talkin trash ‘bout that five hundred dollar and Smiley grinnin like he does.

‘For long Smiley doze off on the bank. I lets him sleep, thinkin he be more disappointed if he wake up and we ain’t caught that catfish. Just to be sure, I starts to pull in the rope, and ’for I got it pulled in ten feet, somethin grab on. That ol‘ rope start burning through my hand like they’s a scared horse on’t’other end. I musta yelled, cause Smiley woke up and goes running off the other way. “Watch you doin?” I yells, and that old rope burnin through my hands like a snake on fire.

Well, that it, I think, and I lets go of the rope. (A Bluesman got to take care of his hands.) But when the rope come to the end, it tighten up like an E string and make a twang—throw moss and mud up into my face—and I looks round and see Smiley crankin up that Model T Ford. He done tied the rope on the bumper and now he drivin it back out the bayou, pullin whatever out there in the water as he go. And it ain’t comin easy, that ol‘ Ford screamin and slidin and sound like it like to blow up, but up on the bank come the biggest catfish I ever seen, and that fish ain’t happy. He floppin and thrashin and just bout buryin me in mud.

Smiley set the brake and look back at what we catch, when that ol‘ catfish make a noise I don’t know can come out a fish. Sound like woman screaming. Which scares me, but not as much as the noise that come back out the bayou, which sound like the devil done come home.

“You done it now, Smiley,” I says.

“Get in,” he say.

Don’t take more than that for me, cause somethin risin up out the bayou look like a locomotive with teeth, and it comin fast. I’m in that Model T Ford and we off, draggin that big catfish right with us and that monster thing coming behind.

‘For long we got us some distance, and I tells Smiley to stop. We gets out and looks at our five-hundred-dollar catfish. He dead now, dragged to death, and not lookin too good at that, but in a full moon we can see this ain’t no ordinary catfish. Sho, he got his fins and tail and all, but down on his belly he growin things look like legs.

Smiley say, “What that?”

And I say, “Don’t know.”

“What that back there?” he say.

“That his momma,” I say. “She ain’t happy one bit with us.”

Seven

It has the soul-sick wail of the Blues, the cowboy tragedy of Country Western. It goes like this:

You pay your dues, do your time behind the wheel, put in long hours on boring roads, your vertebrae compress and your stomach goes sour from too much strong coffee, and finally, just when you get a good-paying job with benefits and you’re seeing the light at the end of the retirement tunnel, just when you can hear the distant siren song of a bass boat and a case of Miller calling to you like a willing truck stop waitress named Darlin‘, a monster comes along and fucks your truck and you are plum blowed up. Al’s story.

Al was drowsing in the cab of his tank truck while unleaded liquid dinosaurs pulsed through the big black pipe into the underground tanks of the Pine Cove Texaco. The station was closed, there was no one at the counter to shoot the bull with, and this was the end of his run, but for a quick jog down the coast to a motel in San Junipero. On the radio, turned low, Reba sang of hard times with the full authority of a cross-eyed redheaded millionaire.

When the truck first moved, Al thought he might have been rear-ended by some drunk tourist, then the shaking started and Al was sure he was in the middle of the bull moose earthquake of the century—the big one—the one that twisted cities and snapped overpasses like dry twigs. You thought about those things when you towed around ten thousand gallons of explosive liquid.

Al could see the tall Texaco sign out of the windshield, and it occurred to him that it should be waving like a sapling in the wind, but it wasn’t. Only the truck was moving. He had to get out and stop the pump.

The truck thumped and rocked as if rammed by a rhino. He pulled the door handle and pushed. It didn’t budge. Something blocked it, blocked the whole window. A tree? Had the roof over the pumps come down on him? He looked to the passenger door, and something was blocking that one too. Not metal, not a tree. It had scales. Through the windshield he saw a dark, wet stain spreading over the concrete and his bladder emptied.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”

He reached behind his seat for the tire thumper to knock out the windshield and in the next instant Al was flaming bits and smoking pieces flying over the Pacific.

A mushroom cloud of greasy flame rose a thousand feet into the sky. The shock wave leveled trees for a block and knocked out windows for three. Half a mile away, in downtown Pine Cove, motion detector alarms were triggered and added their klaxon calls to the roar of the flames. Pine Cove was awake—and frightened.

The Sea Beast was thrown two hundred feet into the air and landed on his back in the flaming ruins of Bert’s Burger Stand. Five thousand years on the planet and he had never experienced flight. He found he didn’t care for it. Burning gasoline covered him from nose to tail. His gill trees were singed to stumps, jagged shards of metal protruded between the scales of his belly. Still flaming, he headed for the nearest water, the creek that ran behind the business district. As he lumbered down into the creek bed, he looked back to the place where his lover had rejected him and sent out a signal. She was gone now, but he sent the signal anyway. Roughly translated, it said, “A simple no would have sufficed.”

The poster covered half of the trailer’s living room wall: a younger Molly Michon in a black leather bikini and spiked dog collar, brandishing a wicked-looking broadsword. In the background, red mushroom clouds rose over the desert. Warrior Babes of the Outland, in Italian, of course; Molly’s movies had only been released to overseas theaters—direct to video in the United States. Molly stood on the wire-spool coffee table and struck the same pose she had fifteen years before. The sword was tarnished, her tan was gone, the blonde hair had gone gray, and now a jagged five-inch scar ran above her right breast, but the bikini still fit and muscles still raked her arms, thighs, and abdomen.

Molly worked out. In the wee hours of the morning, in the vacant space next to her trailer, she spun the broadsword like a deadly baton. She lunged, and thrust, and leapt into the improbable back flip that had made her a star (in Thailand anyway). At two in the morning, while the village slept around her, Molly the crazy lady became, once again, Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland.

She stepped off the coffee table and went to her tiny kitchen, where she opened the brown plastic pill bottle and ceremoniously dropped one tablet into the garbage disposal as she had every night for a month now. Then she went out the trailer door, careful not to let it slam and wake her neighbors, and began her routine.

Stretches first—the splits in the high wet grass, then a hurdler’s hamstring stretch, touching her forehead to her knee. She could feel her vertebrae pop like a string of muted firecrackers as she did her back stretches. Now, with dew streaking her legs, her hair tied back with a leather boot lace, she began her sword work. A two-handed slash, a thrust, riposte, leap over the blade, spin and slash—slowly at first, working up momentum—one handed spin, pass to the other hand, reverse, pass the sword behind her back, speeding up as she went until the sword cut the air with a whistling whirr as she worked up to a series of backflips executed while the sword stayed in motion: one, two, three. She tossed the sword into the air, did a back flip, reached to catch it in midspin—a light sweat sheeted her body now—reached to catch it—the sword silhouetted against a three-quarter moon—reached to catch it and the sky went red. Molly looked up as the shock wave rocketed through the village. The blade slashed the back of her wrist to the bone and stuck in the ground, quivering. Molly swore and watched the orange mushroom cloud rise in the sky over Pine Cove.

She held her wrist and stared at the fire in the sky for several minutes, wondering if what she was seeing was really there, or if perhaps she’d been a little hasty about stopping her meds. A siren sounded in the distance, then she heard something moving down in the creek bed—as if huge rocks were being kicked aside. Mutants, she thought. Where there were mushroom clouds, there were mutants, the curse of Kendra’s nuked-out world.

Molly snatched the sword and ran into her trailer to hide.

The shock wave from the explosion had dissipated to the level of a sonic boom by the time it reached Theo’s little cabin two miles out of town. Still, he knew that something had happened. He sat up in bed to wait for the phone to ring. A minute and a half later, it did. The 911 dispatcher from San Junipero was on the line.

“Constable Crowe? You’ve had some sort of explosion at the Texaco station on Cypress Street in Pine Cove.

There are fires burning nearby. I’ve dispatched fire and ambulance, but you should get over there.“

Theo struggled to sound alert. “Anyone hurt?”

“We don’t know yet. The call just came in. It sounds like a fuel tank went up.”

“I’m on my way.”

Theo swung his long legs out of bed and pulled on his jeans. He snatched his shirt, cell phone, and beeper from the nightstand and headed out to the Volvo. He could see an orange corona from the flames in the sky toward town and billowing black smoke streaking the moonlit sky.

As soon as he started the car, the radio crackled with the voices of volunteer firemen who were racing to the site of the explosion in Pine Cove’s two fire engines.

Theo keyed the mike. “Hey, guys, this is Theo Crowe. Anyone on scene yet?”

“ETA one minute, Theo,” came back at him. “Ambulance is on scene.”

An EMT from the ambulance came on the radio. “The Texaco is gone. So’s the burger stand. Doesn’t look like the fire is spreading. I don’t see anyone around, but if there was anybody in those two buildings, they’re toast.”

“Delicate, Vance. Very professional,” Theo said into the mike. “I’ll be there in five.”

The Volvo bucked over the rough dirt road. Theo’s head banged on the roof and he slowed enough to buckle his seat belt.

Bert’s Burger Stand was gone. Gone. And the minimarket at the Texaco, gone too. Theo felt an empty rumbling in his stomach as he pictured his beloved minimarket nachos going black in the flames.

Five minutes later he pulled in behind the ambulance and jumped out of the Volvo. The firefighters seemed to have the fire contained to the asphalt area of the Texaco and the burger stand. A little brush had burned on the hill behind the Texaco and had charred a few trees, but the firemen had drenched that area first to keep the fire from climbing into the residential area.

Theo shielded his face with his hands. The heat coming off the burning Texaco was searing, even at a hundred yards. A figure in firefighting regalia approached him out of the smoke. A few feet away he pulled up the shield on his helmet and Theo recognized Robert Masterson, the volunteer fire chief. Robert and his wife Jenny owned Brine’s Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines. He was smiling.

“Theo, you’re gonna starve to death—both your food sources are gone.”

Theo forced a smile. “Guess I’ll have to come to your place for brie and cabernet. Anyone hurt?” Theo was shaking. He hoped Robert couldn’t see it by the light of the fire and the rotating red lights of the emergency vehicles. He’d left his Sneaky Pete pipe on the nightstand.

“We can’t locate the driver of the truck. If he was in it, we lost him. Still too hot to get close to it. The explosion threw the cab two hundred feet that way.” Robert pointed to a burning lump of metal at the edge of the parking lot.

“What about the underground tanks? Should we evacuate or something?”

“No, they’ll be fine. They’re designed with a vapor lock, no oxygen can get down there, so no fire. We’re going to have to let what’s left of the minimart just burn out. Some cases of Slim Jims caught fire and they burn like the sun, we can’t get close.”

Theo squinted into the flames. “I love Slim Jims,” he said forlornly.

Robert patted his shoulder. “It’ll be okay. I’ll order some for you, but you can’t tell anyone I’m carrying them. And Theo, when this is all over, come see me at the shop. We’ll talk.”

“About what?”

Robert pulled off his fire helmet and wiped back his receding brown hair. “I was a drunk for ten years. I quit. I might be able to help you.”

Theo looked away. “I’m fine. Thanks.” He pointed to a ten-foot-wide burned strip that started across the street and led away from the fire in a path to the creek. “What do you make of that.”

“Looks like someone drove a burning vehicle out of the fire.”

“I’ll check it out.” Theo got a flashlight from the Volvo and crossed the street. The grass was singed and there were deep ruts cut into the dirt. They were lucky this had happened after the rainy season had started. Two months earlier and they would have lost the town.

He followed the track to the creek bed, fully expecting to find a wrecked vehicle pitched over the bank, but there was nothing there. The track ended at the bank. The water wasn’t deep enough to cover anything large enough to make a trail like that. He played the flashlight around the bank and stopped it on a single deep track in the mud. He blinked and shook his head to clear his vision, then looked again. It couldn’t be.

“Anything over there?” Robert was coming across the grass toward him.

Theo jumped down onto the bank and kicked the mud until the print was obliterated.

“Nothing,” Theo said. “Must have just been some burning fuel sprayed out this way.”

“What are you doing?”

“Stomping out the last of a burning squirrel. Must have gotten caught in the flames and ran over here. Poor guy.”

“You really need to come see me, Theo.”

“I will, Robert. For sure I will.”

Eight

He knew he should return to the safety of the sea, but his gill trees were singed and he didn’t relish the idea of treading water until they healed. If he’d known the female was going to react so violently, he would have retracted his gills into the folds beneath his scales where they would have been safe. He made his way down the creek bed until he spotted a herd of animals sleeping above the bank. They were ugly things, pale and graceless, and he could sense parasites living in every one of them, but this was no time to be judgmental. After all, some brave beast had to be the first to eat a mastodon, and who would have thought that those furballs would turn out to be the tasty treats that they were.

He could hide among this wormy herd until his gills healed, then perhaps he’d take one of the females on a grateful hump. But not now, his heart still ached for the purring female with the silvery flanks. He needed time to heal.

The Sea Beast slithered up the bank into an open space among the herd, then curled his legs and tail under his body and assumed their shape. The change was painful and took more effort than he was used to, but after a few minutes he was finished and he quietly fell asleep.

No, this wasn’t what she had planned at all. She had stopped taking her meds because they had been giving her the shakes, and she’d been willing to deal with the voices if they came back, but not this. She hadn’t counted on this. She was tempted to run to her kitchen area and gulp down one of her blue pills (Stelazine—“the Smurfs of Sanity,” she called them) to see if it could chase the hallucination, but she couldn’t tear herself from the trailer window. It was too real—and too weird. Could there be a big, burnt beast lumbering out of the creek? And if so, had she just watched it turn into a double-wide trailer?

Hallucinations, that was one of the five symptoms of schizophrenia. Molly kept a list of all the symptoms. In fact, she’d stolen a desk drawer version of the DSM-IV—The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness—from Valerie Riordan. According to the DSM-IV, you had to have two of the five symptoms. Hallucinations were one; okay, that was a possibility. But delusions, no way; she wasn’t the least bit deluded, she knew she was having hallucinations. Number three was disorganized speech or incoherence. She’d give it a try.

“Hi, Molly, how the heck are you?” she asked.

“Not well, thank you. I’m worried that my speech may be disorganized,” she answered.

“Well, you sound fine to me,” she said, by way of being polite.

“Thanks for saying so,” she replied with genuine gratitude. “I guess I’m okay.”

“You’re fine. Nice ass, by the way.”

“Thanks, you’re not too bad yourself.”

“See, not disorganized at all,” she said, not realizing that the conversation was over.

Symptom four was grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior. She looked around her trailer. Most of the dishes were done, the videotapes of her movies were arranged chronologically, and the goldfish were still dead in the aquarium. Nope, nothing disorganized in this place. Schizo 1, Sanity 3.

Number five, negative symptoms, such as “affective flattening, alogia, or avolition.” Well, a woman hits her forties, of course there’s a little affective flattening, but she was sure enough that she didn’t have the other two symptoms to not even look them up.

But then there was the footnote: “Only one criterion required if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person’s behavior or thoughts.”

So, she thought, if I have a narrator, I’m batshit. In most of the Kendra movies, there had been a narrator. It helped tie a story together that was supposed to take place in the nuked-out future when, in fact, it was being filmed in an abandoned strip mine near Barstow. And narration was easy to dub into foreign languages because you didn’t have to match the lips. So the question she had to ask herself, was: “Do I have a narrator?”

“No way,” said the narrator.

“Fuck,” said Molly. Just when she’d settled into having a simple personality disorder, she had to learn to be psychotic all over again. Being schizo wasn’t all bad. Being diagnosed schizo ten years ago had gotten her the monthly disability check from the state, but Val Riordan had assured her that since then her status had changed from schizophrenic: paranoid type, single episode, in partial remission, with prominent negative symptoms, persecutory-type delusions, and negative stressors (Molly liked to think of the negative stressors as “special sauce”) to a much more healthy, post-morbid shizotypal personality disorder, bipolar type (no “special sauce”). To make the latter you had to fulfill the prerequisite of at least one psychotic event, then hit five out of nine symptoms. It was a much tougher and more subtle form of batshit. Molly’s favorite symptom was: “Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms.”

The narrator said, “So the magical thinking—that would be that you believe that in another dimension, you actually are Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland?”

“Fucking narrator again,” Molly said. “You’re not going away, are you? I don’t need this symptom.”

“You can’t really say that your ‘magical thinking’ affects your behavior, can you?” the narrator asked. “I don’t think you can claim that symptom.”

“Oh hell no,” Molly said. “I’m just out practicing with a broadsword at two in the morning, waiting for the end of civilization so I can claim my rightful identity.”

“Simple physical fitness regimen. Everyone’s trying to get into shape these days.”

“So they can hack apart evil mutants?”

“Sure, Nautilus makes a machine for that. Mutant Master 5000.”

“That’s a crock.”

“Sorry, I’ll shut up now.”

“I’d appreciate that. I really don’t need the ‘voices’ symptom, thanks.”

“You’ve still got the monster-trailer hallucination outside.”

“I thought you were going to shut up.”

“Sorry, that’s the last you’ll hear from me. Really.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“You said…”

“Sorry.”

So without voices all she had to deal with was the hallucination. The trailer was still sitting there, but admittedly, it just looked like a trailer. Molly could imagine trying to tell the shrink at county about it when they admitted her.

“So you saw a trailer?”

“That’s right.”

“And you live in a trailer park?”

“Yep.”

“I see,” the shrink would say. And somewhere between those two little words the judgment would be pronounced: crazy.

No, she wasn’t going to go that route. She would confront her fears and go forward, just as Kendra had in The Mutant Slayer: Warrior Babes II. She grabbed her sword and left her trailer.

The sirens had subsided now, but she could still see an orange glow from the explosion. Not a nuclear blast, she thought, just some sort of accident. She strode across the lot and stopped about ten feet away from the trailer.

Up close, it looked—well, it looked like a damn trailer. The door was in the wrong place, on the end instead of the side, and the windows were frosty, as if they’d iced over. There was a thin patina of soot over its entire length, but it was a trailer. It didn’t look like a monster at all.

She stepped forward and ventured a poke with her sword. The aluminum skin of the trailer seemed to shy away from the sword point. Molly jumped back.

A warm wave of pleasure swept through her body. For a second she forgot why she had come out here and let the wave take her. She poked the trailer again, and again the pleasure wave washed over her, this time even more intense. There was no fear, no tension, just the feeling that this was exactly where she should be—where she should always have been. She dropped her sword and let the feeling take her.

The frosty layer on the trailer’s two end windows seemed to lift, revealing the slitlike pupils of two great golden eyes. Then the door began to open, not from side to side, but splitting itself in the middle and opening like a mouth. Molly turned on her heel and ran, wondering even as she went why she hadn’t just stayed there by the trailer where everything felt so good.

Estelle was wearing a leather fedora, a pair of dark sunglasses, a single lavender sock, and a subtle and satisfied smile. Sometime after her husband had died—after she’d moved to Pine Cove and started taking the antidepressants, after she’d stopped coloring her hair or giving a damn about her wardrobe—Estelle had vowed that no man would ever see her naked again. At the time, she considered it a fair trade: carnal pleasures, of which there were few, for guilt-free cookies, of which there were many. Now, having broken that vow and lying in her feather bed next to this sweaty, stringy old man, who was teasing her left nipple with his tongue (and who didn’t seem to mind that said nipple was leading her breast over her arm rather than jutting skyward like the cupola on the Taj Mahal), Estelle felt like she understood, at last, the Mona Lisa’s smile. Mona had been getting some, and she had her cookies too.

“You are some storyteller,” Estelle said.

A spidery black hand crawled up her thigh and parked an index finger moistly on her pleasure button—just settled there—and she shuddered. “I didn’t finish,” Catfish said.

“You didn’t? Then what was all that ‘Hallelujah, Lord, I’m comin home!’ followed by the barking?”

“I didn’t finish the story,” Catfish said, his enunciation remarkably clear, considering he didn’t miss a lick.

Harmonica player, Estelle thought. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”

And she didn’t. One minute they were sipping spiked tea and the next there was an explosion and she had her mouth locked over his, moaning into him like a saxophonist playing passion.

“You didn’t see me fightin you,” Catfish said. “We got time.”

“We do?”

“Sho‘, but you gonna have to pay my way now. You done chased the Blues off me and I feels like they ain’t never comin back. I’m out a job.”

Estelle looked down to see Catfish grinning in the soft orange light and grinned herself. Then she realized that they hadn’t lit any candles, and she didn’t have any orange lights. Somewhere in the tussle between the kitchen and the bedroom, amid the tossing of clothes and groping of flesh, they had turned the lights out. The orange glow was coming through the window at the foot of the bed.

Estelle sat up. “The town is on fire.”

“It is in here,” Catfish said.

She pulled the sheets up to cover herself. “We need to do something.”

“I got an idea a somethin we can do.” He moved his spidery fingers and her attention was taken away from the window.

“Already?”

“Seem soon to me too, girl, but I’m old and this could be my last one.”

“That’s a cheery thought.”

“I’m a Bluesman.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. Then she rolled over on him and stayed there, off and on, until dawn.

Nine

When Mikey “the Collector” Plotznik wheeled into town and saw that the Texaco station had blown up, leaving a charred circle two hundred yards wide around it, he knew that it was going to be a great day. It was a shame about the burger stand going up too, and he’d miss their spicy fries, but hey, you don’t often get to see the toasting of a major landmark like the Texaco. The fire was all out now, but several firemen were still sifting through the wreckage. The Collector waved to them as he wheeled by. They waved back, somewhat reticently, for the Collector’s reputation preceded him and made them nervous.

Today would be the day, Mikey thought. The Texaco was an omen, the star in the sky over his lifelong dream. Today he’d catch Molly Michon naked, and when he did (and brought back the proof), his reputation would grow to mythic proportions. He patted the disposable camera he carried in the front pouch of his hooded sweatshirt. Oh yes, he’d have evidence to back up his story. They would believe him—and bow to him.

At this point in his life, the Collector was more interested in explosions than in naked women. He was only ten, and it would be a couple of years before his interests moved to girls. Freud never identified a stage of development known as “pyrotechnic fascination,” but that was only because there wasn’t an abundant supply of disposable lighters in nineteenth-century Vienna. Ten-year-old boys blow shit up. It’s what they do. But today a strange new feeling had come over Mikey, a feeling he couldn’t put a word to, but if he could, the word would have been “horny.” As he Rollerbladed through town, tossing the Los Angeles Times into the shrubs and gutters of businesses along Cypress Street, he felt a tightness in his shorts that until now he had associated with having to take a raging pee in the morning. Today it signified a need to see the Crazy Lady in a state of undress.

Paperboys are the carriers of preadolescent myth. On every paper route, there is a haunted house, a kid-eating dog, an old woman who tips with twenties, and a woman who answers the door in the nude. Mikey had never actually seen any of these things, but that never stopped him from spinning wild stories for his buddies at school. Today he would get proof, he could feel it in his loins.

He skated down the driveway into the Fly Rod Trailer Court, chucked a paper into the rose bushes in front of Mr. Nunez’s trailer, then made a beeline for the Crazy Lady’s house. He could see a blue glow coming through her windows, a TV. She was home and awake. Yes!

He pulled up a couple of doors down and noticed that a new trailer had moved in next to the Crazy Lady. A new customer? Why not give it a try? The Crazy Lady didn’t receive the paper, so his pretense for knocking on her door was to get her to subscribe. He could practice on these new people. As he skated up to the front door of the new trailer, lights came on in the two front windows. Yes! Someone was home. Strange curtains—they looked like cat’s eyes.

Through a part in the curtains, Molly watched the kid come down the road into the trailer park. She liked kids, but she didn’t like this kid. At least once a week he knocked on her door and tried to get her to subscribe to the paper, and once a week she told him to go away and never come back. Sometimes he would bring one of his little buddies along. She could hear them skulking around her trailer, trying to peek in the windows. “Swear to God, she’s got a dead guy in there that she does it with. I’ve seen him. And she ate a kid once.”

The kid was heading for the monster trailer.

In the background, a videotape was playing on her TV—Mechanized Death: Warrior Babe VII—and THE SCENE was coming up. Molly looked away from the window and watched THE SCENE for the thousandth time.

Kendra is standing in the back of a jeep, manning a rack of net guns as the jeep pursues the Evil Warlord across the desert. The driver turns, as he is supposed to, throwing up a fishtail of dust, but the front wheel of the jeep hits a rock and the jeep rolls. Kendra is thrown fifty feet in the air and lands in a heap. The steel bra she is wearing cuts deep into her chest and blood sprays out across the dust.

The bastards! Every time she watches THE SCENE she can’t believe the bastards left it in. The accident was real, the blood was Molly’s, and when she returned to the set ten days later, a security guard escorted her to the producer’s trailer.

“I can pay you extra’s wages as a mutant,” the producer said, “but let’s face it, babe, you didn’t get your billing because of your acting ability. You think I’m gonna hold up filming for ten days when the whole schedule is only three weeks long? We got a new Kendra. Wrote the accident and the facial reconstruction into the script. She’s a cyborg now. Now you can get in line with the mutants to pick up your bag of rags, or you can get the fuck off the set. My audience wants perfect bodies, and you were getting up there anyway. With that scar you don’t sell anymore.”

Molly had just turned twenty-seven years old.

She pulled herself from THE SCENE and looked out the window again. The kid was there, right there in front of the monster trailer. She should warn him or something.

She pounded on the window and the kid looked up, not startled, but with a dreamy expression on his face. Molly gestured for him to move away. The window she was looking out of didn’t open. (Trailers built in those days were designed so people would burn up in case of a fire. The manufacturers thought it would keep the lawsuits down.)

The kid just stood there, his fist poised before the door as if he were frozen in the middle of knocking.

As Molly watched, the door began to open. Not on the hinges, but vertically, like a garage door. Molly pounded furiously on the window with the hilt of her sword. The kid smiled. A huge red tongue snaked out of the door, wrapped around the kid, and slurped him in, Rollerblades, paper satchel, and all. Molly screamed. The door slammed shut.

Molly watched, stunned, not knowing what to do. A few seconds later the mouth opened and expectorated a soccer-ball-sized wad of newspaper.

The hours of Theo’s day had moved like slugs crawling on razor wire. By four in the afternoon, he felt as if he’d been awake for a week and the cups of French roast he’d been drinking had turned to foaming acid in his stomach. Mercifully, there hadn’t been a single call for a bar fight or domestic dispute, so he had spent the entire day at the scene of the fuel truck explosion, talking to firemen, representatives from Texaco Oil, and an arson investigator sent up from the San Junipero Fire Department. Much to his surprise, going all day without a hit from his Sneaky Pete pot pipe had not sent him into fits of anxiety as it usually did. He was a little paranoid, but he wasn’t sure that that wasn’t just an informed response to the world anyway.

At a quarter past four, the arson investigator crossed the charred parking lot to where Theo was leaning on the hood of his Volvo. The investigator was in his late twenties, clean-cut, and carried himself like an athlete, even in the orange toxic waste suit. He carried a plastic space helmet under his arm like a tumorous football.

“Constable Crowe, I think that’s about all I can do today. It’ll be dark soon, and as long as we keep the area closed off, I’m sure everything will still be here in the morning.”

“What’s your call so far?

“Well, we generally look for evidence of accelerants, gas, kerosene, paint thinner—and I’d say there were definitely some flammable liquids involved here.” He smiled a weary smile.

“So you don’t know what happened?”

“Offhand, I’d say a fuel truck blew up, but without further investigation I’d hate to make a commitment at this time.” Again the smile.

Theo smiled back. “So no cause?”

“The driver probably didn’t seal the hose correctly and a cloud of fumes got set off. There wasn’t much wind last night, so the fumes would have just clung to the ground and built up. Anything could have set it off: the driver could have been smoking, the pilot lights at the hamburger place, a spark in the truck exhaust. Right now I’d say it was totally accidental. It was a company-owned store, and it was turning a profit, so there really isn’t a financial motive for arson. Texaco will definitely be building your town a new burger stand and probably paying off some nuisance settlements from people claiming trauma, duress, and irritation.”

“I have the information on the driver,” Theo said. “I’ll check to see if he was a smoker.”

“I asked him. He’s keeping quiet,” came a voice from a few yards away.

Theo and the arson investigator looked up to see Vance McNally coming toward them holding up a Ziploc bag full of white and gray powder. “I’ve got him right here,” the EMT said. “You want to interrogate him?”

“Very funny, Vance,” Theo said.

“They’re going to have to do the autopsy with a flour sifter,” Vance said.

The investigator took the Ziploc from Vance and examined it. “You find any remains of a cigarette lighter? Anything like that?”

“Not my job,” Vance said. “The fire was so hot it turned the seat springs to liquid. Even incinerated the bones, except for those little bits of calcium in there. Honestly, this might not all be our boy. We might be giving his wife a bag full of burnt-up truck parts to put in an urn on the mantel.”

The investigator shrugged and handed the bag back to Vance. Then to Theo he said, “I’m going home. I’ll come back tomorrow and look around some more. As soon as I give the okay, the oil company will send in a crew to drain the ground tanks.”

“Thanks,” Theo said. The investigator left in a county car.

Vance McNally turned the Ziploc bag of truck driver in the air. “Theo, this ever happens to me, I want you to get all my friends together, have a big party, and snort me, okay?”

“You have friends, Vance?”

“Okay, it was just an idea,” Vance said. He turned and carried his bag to the waiting ambulance.

Theo sipped his coffee and noticed something moving in the charred brush beyond the Texaco. It looked as if someone was holding up a TV antenna and getting altogether too close to the yellow tape he had run around the perimeter. Jeez, was he going to have to stay here all night guarding the scene? He pried himself off the Volvo and headed for the offender.

“Hey there!” Theo called.

Gabe Fenton, the biologist, emerged from the brush, indeed holding up some kind of antenna, followed by his Labrador retriever, Skinner. The dog ran to meet Theo and greeted him with two muddy paw prints on the chest.

Theo rubbed Skinner’s ears to hold him at bay, the classic slobbering Labrador control move. “Gabe, what in the hell are you doing down here?”

The biologist was covered with burrs and foxtails, his face striped with soot from the charred brush. He looked exhausted, yet there was a note of excitement bordering on ecstasy in his voice. “You won’t believe this, Theo. My rats moved en masse this morning.”

Theo tried, but couldn’t match Gabe’s enthusiasm. “That’s swell, Gabe. Texaco blew up last night.”

Gabe Fenton looked around at the surrounding area as if seeing the destruction for the first time. “What time?”

“About four in the morning.”

“Hmmm, maybe they sensed it.”

“They?”

“The rats. Around 2 A.M. they all started moving west. I can’t figure out what caused it. Here, look at the screen.” Gabe had a laptop computer strapped into a harness around his waist. He turned it so Theo could see the screen. “Each of these dots represents an animal I have implanted with a tracking chip. Here’s their location at 1 A.M.” He clicked a key and the screen drew a topographical map of the area. Green dots were scattered pretty much evenly along the creek bed and the business district of Pine Cove.

Gabe hit another key. “Now here they are at two.” All but a few of the dots had moved into the ranchland east of Pine Cove.

“Uh-huh,” Theo said. Gabe was a nice guy. Spent too much time with vermin, but he was a nice guy. Gabe needs to talk to humans occasionally, Theo thought.

“Well, don’t you see? They all moved at once, except for these ten over here that moved to the shore.”

“Uh-huh,” Theo said. “Gabe, the Texaco blew up. A guy was killed. I was talking to firemen in space suits all day. Every paper in the county has called me. The battery is almost out on my cell phone. I haven’t eaten since yesterday and I only slept an hour last night. Help me find the significance in rat migration, okay?”

Gabe looked crestfallen. “Well, I don’t know the significance yet. I’m tracking the ten that didn’t move east, hoping the anomalies will give a clue to the behavior of the larger group. Strange thing is, four of the ten disappeared off my screen a little after two. Even if they were killed, the chips should still transmit. I need to find them.”

“And I wish you the best of luck, but this area may still be dangerous. You can’t be here, buddy.”

“Maybe there were fumes,” Gabe said. “But that doesn’t explain why they all moved in the same direction. Some even came through this area from the shore.”

Theo couldn’t bear to express to Gabe how little he cared. “You had any dinner, Gabe?”

“No, I’ve been doing this since last night.”

“Pizza, Gabe. We need pizza and beer. I’ll buy.”

“But I need to…”

“You’re a single guy, Gabe. You need pizza every eighteen hours or you can’t function properly. And I have a question to ask you about footprints, but I want you to watch me drink a few beers before I ask so I can claim diminished capacity. Come, Gabe, let me take you to the land of pizza and beer.” Theo gestured to his Volvo. “You can stick the antenna out the sunroof.”

“I guess I could take a break.”

Theo opened the passenger door and Skinner leapt into the car, leaving sooty paw prints on the seat. “Your dog needs pizza. It’s the humane thing to do.”

“Okay,” Gabe said.

“I want to show you something over by the creek bed.”

“What.”

“A footprint. Or what’s left of one.”

Ten minutes later they sat over frosty mugs of beer at Pizza in the Pines, Pine Cove’s only pizza parlor. They’d taken a window table so Gabe could keep an eye on Skinner, who was bouncing up and down outside, giving them an ever-changing view of the street, then the street with dog face (ears akimbo), then the street, then the street with dog face again. Other than to order a beer, Gabe Fenton hadn’t said a word since they’d gone to the creek bed.

“Will he just keep doing that?” Theo asked.

“Until we take him a slice of pizza, yes.”

“Amazing.”

Gabe shrugged. “He’s a dog.”

“Always the biologist.”

“One needs to keep the mind limber.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think that you obliterated most of what you thought was a footprint.”

“Gabe, it was a footprint. A talon or something.”

“There are a thousand explanations for a depression in the mud like that, Theo, but one of them is not an animal track.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one, there hasn’t been anything that large on this continent for about sixty million years, and for another, animals tend to leave more than one track, unless it’s a creature especially adapted for hopping.” Gabe grinned.

The flying dog head pogoed by the windowsill.

“There were a lot of people and vehicles around there, the other tracks might have been wiped out.”

“Theo, don’t let your imagination run away with you. You’ve had a long day and…”

“And I’m a pothead.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“I know, I’m saying it. Tell me about your rats. What will you do when you find them?”

“Well, first I’m going to keep searching for the stimulus of their behavior, then I’ll catch a few of the group that migrated and compare their brain chemistry to those that headed toward the shore.”

“Does that hurt them?”

“You have to blend up their brains and run the liquid in a centrifuge.”

“I guess so then.”

The waitress brought their pizza and Gabe was severing cables of cheese from his first slice when Theo’s cell phone rang. The constable listened for a second, then stood and dug into his pocket for money. “I’ve got to go, Gabe.”

“What’s up?”

“The Plotznik kid is missing. No one’s seen him since he left on his paper route this morning.”

“Probably hiding. That kid is evil. He rigged up something with his remote control car that affected the chips in my rats once. I spent three weeks trying to figure out why they were running figure eights in the parking lot outside the grocery story before I found him lurking in the weeds with the controller.”

“I know,” Theo said. “Mikey told me that if he wired ten of your rats together, he could pick up the Discovery Channel. I still have to find him. He has parents.”

“Skinner is a pretty good tracker. Want to take him?”

“Thanks, but I doubt that the kid had a pizza in his pocket.”

Theo folded his phone, snagged a slice of pizza for the road, and headed out the door.

Ten

Val Riordan leaned against her office door, trying to catch her breath and maintain her temper. Nothing in her clinical experience compared to the sessions she held on the day after the Texaco exploded. She had seen twenty patients in ten hours, and every one of them had wanted to talk about sex. And not abstract sex either, not issues or attitudes about sex, just squishy, thumping sex itself. It was unnerving.

She’d anticipated a spike in libido among her patients (it was a common symptom of withdrawal from antidepressants), but the books said not more than five to fifteen percent would have a reaction—about the same number that experienced a loss of libido upon taking the drugs. But today she’d hit one hundred percent. It was as if she were running a kennel for hopeless horndogs rather than a psychiatric practice.

After the last patient, she’d come out of her office to find her new receptionist, Chloe, furiously masturbating, her feet hooked into the edge of the desk, her steno chair squeaking like a tortured squirrel. Val had excused herself, turned on her heel, walked back into her office, and shut the door.

Chloe, twenty-one, had maroon hair, an entire wardrobe rendered in black, and a sapphire nose ring. Val had begun treating the girl in her teens for bulimia, then hired her when the volume of appointments skyrocketed after the placebo went into effect. Chloe worked in exchange for therapy; Val had thought it would be a good financial move. Frankly, she’d liked her better when she just threw up a lot.

Val was still trying to figure out exactly what to do when there was a soft knock on the door.

“Yes?”

“Sorry,” Chloe said through the door.

“Uh, Chloe, that is not appropriate office behavior.”

“Well, your last appointment had left. I thought that you would be working on your notes or something for a while. I’m really sorry.”

“That’s it? My last appointment leaves, so let the wild rumpus begin?”

“Am I fired?”

Val thought for a second. There were twenty more patients to see tomorrow and twenty the day after that. If the weirdness didn’t kill her, the workload would. She couldn’t afford to lose Chloe now. “No, you’re not fired. But please, no more of that in the office.”

“Do you have time to talk? I know my next session isn’t until next week, but I really need to talk to you.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer to go home and, uh, think about things?”

“You mean finish? No, I’m finished for now. That’s what I want to talk to you about. That wasn’t the first time today.”

Val gulped. It was highly unprofessional to talk to a patient through a door. She steeled herself and opened it. “Come in.” She returned to her desk without looking at the girl. Chloe took a seat across from her.

“So this wasn’t the first time today?” Val was the psychotherapist now, not the boss. If she’d been the boss, she would have come over the desk and strangled the little slut.

“No, I can’t seem to get enough. I, well, it started about two in the morning, and I went straight though until time to get ready for work. Then once or twice while each patient was in session.”

Val’s jaw dropped. Sixteen hours of intermittent masturbation? The other patients she had seen had cited two in the morning as when their sexual adventures had started too. She said, “And how do you feel about that?”

“I feel okay. My wrist hurts a little. Do you think I could have carpal tunnel?”

“Chloe, if you think that you’re going to file a workmen’s compensation claim for this…”

“No no no, I just want to stop.”

“Did something happen to set this off? Something at two in the morning? A dream perhaps?” Her other patients had described various sexual dreams. Winston Krauss, the pharmacist with the sexual obsession for marine mammals, confessed to dreaming of having sex with a blue whale, riding it through the depths like Ahab with a hard-on. Upon awakening, he’d abused his inflatable Flipper until it would no longer hold air.

Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Her long maroon hair hid her face. “I dreamed I was having sex with a tank truck, and it blew up.”

“A tank truck?”

“I came.”

“Sexual dreams are completely normal, Chloe.” Right, a tank truck? That’s normal. “Tell me, was there fire in your dream?” Pyromaniacs derived sexual pleasure from setting and watching fires. That’s how they caught them, look in the crowd for a grinning guy with a woody and gas stains on his shoes.

“No, no fire. I woke up at the explosion. Val, what’s wrong with me? All I want to do is, you know, do it.”

“And you feel that you might do something impulsive?”

Chloe put on her cynical Goth-girl face. “If you mean something like buffing the muffin while I’m at work, yes, Dr. Riordan, I’m a little worried. Can’t you adjust my medication or something?”

There it was. In the past, that would have been the answer. Increase the Prozac to eighty milligrams, about four times the dose for the average depressed patient, and let the side effect of reduced libido do the work. Val had used the method to treat a nymphomaniac when she was an intern and it had worked marvelously. But what now? Duct tape oven mitts to her receptionist’s hands? Although her typing probably wouldn’t suffer much, it might make the patients nervous.

Val said. “Chloe, masturbation is a natural thing. Everyone does it. But obviously there are appropriate times and places. Perhaps you should just cut back. Allow yourself to masturbate as a reward for controlling your urges.”

Chloe’s face went slack. “Cut down? I’m worried about driving home safely. I have a stick shift. I need both hands to drive, but I don’t think I’m going to have them. Do you have a patch you can prescribe, like they do for smoking?”

“A patch?” Val suppressed a laugh. She imagined a twitching, moaning line of people around the block at the pharmacy, there to pick up their prescriptions for the orgasm patch. It would make heroin look like Gummi Bears. “No, there’s no patch, Chloe. You’re just going to have to try to control yourself. I have a feeling that this is a side effect of your medication. It should pass in a day or two. I want to hear more about this dream of yours. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

Chloe stood, obviously not satisfied with the help her therapist was offering, which was none. “I’ll try.” She left the office, closing the door behind her.

Val let her head fall to the desk. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, why didn’t I go into pathology? she thought. It would be so peaceful sitting around, boiling up beakers of urine and culturing bugs. No wackos. No stress. Okay, occasionally you’d be exposed to some deadly anthrax spores, but at least other people’s sex lives stay in the bedroom and the tabloids where they belong.

Her appointment with Martin and Lisbeth Luder rose in her head. They were in their seventies, had been in counseling because they hadn’t had a decent conversation since 1958, and today they had come in and dumped a half hour of explicit sexual narrative on her, an account of perversions they’d indulged in the night before, starting at around 2 A.M. The visual conjured in Val’s mind—all that parched, wrinkled flesh in furious friction—culminated in flames, as if some giant cosmic Boy Scout had decided to rub two old people together to make a fire. The worst of it, the absolute worst of it, is that she’d found herself getting turned on while listening. She’d had to change her panties between appointments four times today.

She considered pouring herself a hefty tumbler of brandy and settling down in front of the television, but that wasn’t going to do it. Batteries; she needed four C-cell batteries and she needed them now. Then it was time to dig through her lingerie drawers and find a long-forgotten friend—and hope that it still worked.

Long past dark and Molly was still staring though the gap in the curtains at the trailer that ate the kid. The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don’t always feel as if you’re nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door. Not that she was ready to go out and proclaim that fact to anyone, because no matter how sane you feel, some stuff just sounds too crazy. So she watched, still wearing her Warrior Babe outfit, hoping someone else would come along and notice. Around eight, someone did.

She saw Theophilus Crowe going from door to door in the park. He came into view two trailers down at the Morales home, spoke briefly with Mr. Morales at the door, then headed for the dragon trailer.

Molly was torn. She liked Theo. Yes, he’d taken her to County once or twice, but he’d always been kind to her—warned her about the guy in the day room who cheated at Parcheesi by eating the marbles. And he never spoke to her like she was a crazy woman. Theo was a fan.

As Theo was raising his black Mag lite to tap on the dragon trailer’s door, Molly saw the two windows on the end slowly open, revealing the cat’seye pupils. Theo obviously didn’t see them. He was looking at his shoes.

She threw up the aluminum sash and shouted, “They’re not home!”

The constable turned toward Molly. “Just a second,” she said.

She bolted out the door of her trailer and stopped by the street where Theo could see her. “They aren’t home. Come here a second,” she repeated.

Theo tucked his Mag lite into his belt. “Molly, how are you?”

“Fine, fine, fine. I need to talk to you, okay? Over here, okay?” She didn’t want to tell him why. What if the eyes weren’t there? What if it was just a trailer? She’d be on her way to County in a heartbeat.

“They’re not home then?” Theo said, pointing over his shoulder to the dragon trailer. He was staring at her now, at the same time trying not to stare. He had a goofy grin on his face, the same sort Molly had seen on the kid right before he got slurped.

“Nope, gone all day.”

“What’s with the sword?

Oh shit! She forgot she’d grabbed the sword on the way out. “I was just making some stir-fry. Chopping up some veggies.”

“That ought to do it.”

“Broccoli stems,” she said, as if that explained everything. He was looking at the leather bikini, and she watched his eyes stop on the scar above her breast, then look away. She covered the scar with her hand. “One of my old Kendra costumes. Everything else is in the dryer.”

“Sure. Hey, you don’t get the Times, do you?”

“Nope. Why?”

“The kid that delivers it, Mikey Plotznik, left for his route this morning and no one has seen him since. Looks like the last paper he delivered was a few doors down. You didn’t happen to see him, did you?”

“About ten, blond kid, Rollerblades? Kinda evil?”

“That’s him.”

“Nope, haven’t seen him.” She watched the eyes of the dragon trailer close behind Theo and took a deep breath.

“You seem a little tense, Molly. You okay?”

“Fine, fine, just wanted to get back to my stir-fry. You hungry?”

“Did Val Riordan get hold of you?”

“Yep, she called. I’m not nuts.”

“Of course not. I’d like you to keep an eye out for this kid, Molly. One of his buddies fessed up that Mikey had a little bit of an obsession with you.”

“Me? No kidding?”

“He might be creeping around your trailer.”

“Really?”

“If you see him, give me a call, would you? His folks are worried about him.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Thanks. And ask your neighbors when they get home, would you?”

“You betcha.” Molly realized he was stalling. Just staring at her with that goofy grin on his face. “They just moved in. I don’t know them very well, but I’ll ask.”

“Thanks.” He said, still just standing there, like a twelve-year-old ready to make an assault on the wall-flowers at his first dance.

“I’d better go, Theo. I have broccoli in the dryer.” No, she had wanted to say she had to get back to dinner, or to her laundry, not both.

“Okay. See ya.”

She ran into her trailer, slammed the door, and leaned against it. Through the window she could see the dragon trailer open an eye and close it quickly. She could have sworn it was winking at her.

A niggling voice in Theo’s head told him that finding the Crazy Lady attractive—extremely attractive—was an indicator that he was less than sane himself. On the other hand, he didn’t feel that bad about it. He didn’t feel bad about anything, not since he’d walked into the trailer park anyway. He had to deal with an explosion, a lost kid, the recent increase in general nuttiness in town—a virtual shit storm of responsibility—but he didn’t feel all that bad. And in that moment outside of Molly’s trailer, reflecting and waiting for the tide of lust to ebb, he realized that he hadn’t smoked any pot all day. Strange. Normally this long without nursing from his Sneaky Pete and his skin would be crawling.

He was heading back to his Volvo to resume the search for the lost boy when his cell phone rang. Sheriff John Burton didn’t say hello.

“Get to a land line,” Burton said.

“I’m in the middle of trying to find a lost kid,” Theo replied.

“A land line now, Crowe. My private line. You have five minutes.”

Theo drove to a pay phone outside the Head of the Slug Saloon and checked his watch. When fifteen minutes had passed, he dialed Burton’s number.

“I said five minutes.”

“Yes, you did.” Theo smiled to himself in spite of Burton’s tone, which was on the verge of screaming.

“No one goes on the ranch, Crowe. The lost kid is not on the ranch, do you hear me?”

“It’s standard procedure to search all the ranchland. Emergency services has the area gridded out. We have to cover the whole grid. I was going to call in some deputies to help us. The volunteer fire guys are exhausted from the explosion this morning.”

“No. None of my guys. Don’t call the Highway Patrol or the CCC either. And no aircraft. If the grid on the ranch has to be checked off, then check it off. No one goes on that land, is that clear?”

“And what if the kid actually is on the ranch. You’re talking about a thousand acres of pasture and forest that won’t be searched.”

“Oh bullshit, the kid is probably in a tree house somewhere with a stack of Playboys. He’s only been missing for what, twelve hours?”

“What if he’s not?”

There was silence on the line for a moment. Theo waited, watching three new couples leave the Head of the Slug in less than a minute. New couples: in Pine Cove everyone knew who everyone else was dating, and these were people who didn’t go together. Not that unusual a phenomenon perhaps on a Friday night at 2 A.M., but this was Wednesday, and it was barely eight o’clock. Maybe he wasn’t the only one feeling a wave of horniness. The couples were groping each other as if trying to get all the foreplay out of the way before they reached the car.

Burton came back on the line. “I’ll see that the ranchland is searched and call you if they find the kid. But I want to be the first to know if you find him.”

“That it?”

“Find that little fucker, Crowe.” Burton hung up.

Theo got into his Volvo and drove to his cabin at the edge of the ranch. There were at least twenty citizen volunteers searching for Mikey Plotznik. The effort could spare him long enough to catch a shower and change his smoke-saturated clothes. As he parked the Volvo, an expensive, tricked-out red pickup truck pulled into the ranch entrance and rolled slowly by. As they passed, a Hispanic man sitting in the bed laughed and saluted Theo with the barrel of an AK-47 assault rifle.

Theo looked away and walked to the dark cabin, wishing that there was someone there waiting for him.

Eleven

Catfish awoke to find a paint-spattered woman padding about the house in nothing but a pair of wool socks, in which she had stuck several sable brushes that delivered ochre, olive, and titanium white strokes to her calves whenever she moved. Canvases were propped on easels, chairs, counters, and windowsills—seascapes every one. Estelle moved from canvas to canvas, palette in hand, furiously painting details in the waves and beaches.

“Y’all woke up inspired,” Catfish said.

It was past dusk, they had slept away the daylight. Estelle painted by the light of fifty candles and the orange glow that washed from the open doors of the wood stove. Color correctness be damned, these paintings should be viewed by fire.

Estelle stopped painting and raised her brush arm to cover her breasts. “They weren’t finished. I knew something was missing when I painted them, but I didn’t know what until now.”

Catfish cinched his pants around his waist and walked shirtless among the paintings. The waves writhed with tail and scale and teeth and talon. Predator eyes shone out of the canvases, brighter, it seemed, than the candles that lit them.

“You done painted that old girl in all of ‘em?”

“It’s not a girl. It’s male.”

“How you know that?”

“I know.” Estelle turned and went back to her painting. “I feel it.”

“How you know it look like that?”

“It does, doesn’t it? It looks like this?”

Catfish scratched the stubble on his chin and pondered the paintings.

“Close. But it ain’t a boy. That ol‘ monster the same one come after me an Smiley for catchin its little one.“ Estelle stopped painting and turned to him. ”You have to play tonight?“

“In a little while.”

“Coffee?” He stepped up to her, took the brush and palette from her, and kissed her on the forehead. “That sho‘ would be sweet.” She padded to the bedroom and came back wearing a tattered kimono.

“Tell me, Catfish. What happened?” He was sitting at the table. “I think we done broke a record. I’m sore.” Estelle smiled in spite of herself, but pressed on. “What happened back then, in the bayou? Did you call that thing up out of the water somehow?”

“What you thinkin, woman? I can do that, you think I be playin clubs for drinks and part the door?”

“Tell me how you felt back then, when that thing came out of the swamp.”

“Scared.”

“Besides that.”

“Wasn’t nothing besides that. You heard it. Scared is all there is.”

“You weren’t scared after we got back here last night.”

“No.”

“Neither was I. What did you feel back then? Before and after the thing came after you.”

“Not like I’m feelin now.”

“And how is that?”

“I’m feelin real good to be here talkin to you.”

“No kidding. Me too. How about back then?”

“Stop doggin me, girl. I’ll tell you. But I gots to go play in an hour and I don’t know that I can.”

“Why not?”

“The Blues ain’t on me. You done chased ‘em off.”

“I can throw you out in the cold without a shirt if you think it will help.”

Catfish squirmed in his chair. “Maybe some coffee.”

After we gets some distance from whatever chasin us, we stop the Model T Ford and me and Smiley put that big ol‘ catfish thing in the backseat—his tail hangin out one side an’ his head out’t‘other. Now this ain’t at all what I expected, and Smiley ain’t got the Blues on him, but I’m gettin me a grand case myself. Then I realizes we got us five hundred dollar coming, and them ol’ Blues done melt right away.

I say, “Smiley, I believes we should have us some celebratin, startin with some liquor and endin up with some fine Delta pussy. What you say?”

Ol‘ Smiley, like usual, don’t wanna piss on the parade, but bein who he is, he point out we aint got no money and Ida May don’t approve of no pussy more’en a hundred yard from the house. But he feelin it too, I can tell, and before long we headed down a back road to find a bootlegger I know down there name of Elmore that sells to colored folk.

That ol‘ white boy ain’t got but two teeth, but he grindin ’em when we pulls up, all mad and wavin his shotgun like we come to bust up his still. I say, “Hey, Elmore, how your lovely wife and sister?”

He say she fine, but lessin we shows some money quick, he gonna shoot him some niggers and get back to her before she cool off.

“We a little short,” I say. “But we have us five hundred dollar come morning iffin you kind enough to give us a jug on credit.” An‘ then I shows him the catfish.

That boy liked to shit his pants, and I was hopin he would, just to cover the smell comin off him natural, but instead he say, “I ain’t waitin ‘til mornin’. You want a jug, you give me a hunk o‘ that catfish right now. A big hunk.”

Smiley and I thinks it over, and before long we got us a half-gallon of corn mash and ol‘ Elmore got hisself enough catfish to feed his wives and children and them—thats both for a week or more.

Up the road a spell and this old whore name of Okra givin us the same speech about money, plus she sayin we need to take us a bath before she let us anywhere near her girls. And I comes back with the five-hundred-dollar story. She say five hundred dollar tomorrow and we can come in tomorrow, but if we want some pussy tonight, she want a hunk of that old catfish in the back. Them hos can eat some catfish too, I’m tellin you. I thought Smiley finally gettin the Blues on him when I hears him sayin how he give up a hundred dollar worth of catfish just for a bath. But that his choice. He wait in the car ‘til I’m done and we head off to find a place to sleep ’til morning when we can cash in the fish.

We pulls down a side road into some bushes, and we commencin to get us some sleep after a drink or two, when who come out the woods but a whole bunch of boys wearin them white sheets and pointy hoods, sayin, “Nigger, I guess you didn’t read the sign.”

And they tie us up to that ol‘ catfish and make us drag it back in the woods to a big ol’ fire they got goin.

That sho‘ a chill, I gots to tell you. To this day I can’t walk by sheets hangin on a line without my backbone freeze up. I knows we sho’ gonna die now, sayin my prayers and all best I can, while them boys kickin me in the mouth an‘ such while eatin catfish pieces what they roasted on sticks.

Then I feels it and the kickin stops. I see ol‘ Smiley lyin in the dirt, coverin his head with his arms, one ol’ bloody eye lookin‘ over at me. He feel it too.

Them Klansmen staring into the woods like they long-lost momma gonna come out, big ol‘ grins on they faces, half of ’em rubbin they dicks through they pants. And she come out, all right. Big as a train, a howl like to make your ears bust and bleed. She take two of them in the first bite.

I don’t have to write Smiley no letter. Before we can say somethin, we up and runnin, still tied up to what left of that catfish carcass, running back for the road. We finds us a knife in the car and we gets loose lickety-split—Smiley crankin that ol‘ Model T and me behind the wheel workin the choke. Hollerin and screamin comin out the woods sounding like music now, them Klansmen gettin all eat up.

Then it get quiet, just the sound of our breath and Smiley crankin the Model T. I’m yellin for him to hurry, I can hear that thing crashin though the woods. And finally, the Model T cranks over, but I can hardly hear it, ‘cause that old dragon thing done broken out the woods and lets go a roar. I tells Smiley to get in, but he run back to the back of the car.

“What you doing?” I say.

“Five hundred dollar,” he say.

And I see he throwing the catfish in the backseat. That stinky thing ain’t nothin but a head now, so Smiley throw it in by hisself. Then he makes to jump on the running board and I looks over and he just snatched out the air. Gone. And them jaws coming down for the second time when I pull that ol‘ Model T in gear and take off.

Smiley gone. Gone.

Next day I find that white man say he pay five hundred dollar for the catfish, and he look at that big fish head and jus laugh at me. I say I lose the best friend I ever had, he better give me my goddamn money. But he laugh and tell me go away. So I hit him.

Took that old fish head to court with me, but it don’t make no difference. That judge give me six months in jail—hittin a white man and all. He tell the bailiff, “Take Catfish away.”

They call me Catfish since. I don’t tell the story no more, but the name still there. Had the Blues on me ever since, but they ain’t no makin amends. By the time I get out, Ida May die of grief, and I ain’t got a friend alive. Been on the road since.

That thing on the beach, make that sound, she lookin for me.

“It’s a male,” Estelle said. She didn’t know what else to say.

“How you know?”

“I know.” She took his hand. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“I just wanted him to get the Blues on him so we can make us a record.”

They sat there at the table for a while, holding hands.

Catfish let his coffee go cold in the cup. Estelle ran the story around in her head, both relieved and fearful that the shadows in her paintings now had a shape. Somehow, as fantastic as it was, Catfish’s story seemed familiar.

She said, “Catfish, did you ever read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway?”

“He that boy write about bullfights and fishing? I met him once, down Florida way. Why?‘

“You met him?”

“Yeah, that sumbitch didn’t believe that story neither. Said he like to fish, but he don’t believe me. Why you ask?”

“Never mind,” Estelle said. “If this thing eats people, don’t you think we should report it?”

“I been tellin folks about that monster for some fifty years, ain’t no one believed me yet. Said I was the biggest liar ever come outta the Delta. I’d have me a big house and a stack of records if not for that. You call the law and tell them ‘bout this, they gonna call you the crazy woman of Pine Cove.”

“We already have one of those.”

“Well, ain’t no one gonna get eat but me, and if I lose this gig ‘cause they thinkin I’m crazy, I have to be movin on then. You understand?”

Estelle took Catfish’s cup from the table and placed it in the sink. “You’d better get ready to go play.”

Twelve

To distract herself from the dragon next door, Molly had put on her sweats and started to clean her trailer. She got as far as filling three black trash bags with junk food jetsam and was getting ready to vacuum up the collection of sow bug corpses that dotted her carpet when she made the mistake of Windexing the television. Outland Steel: Kendra’s Revenge was playing on the VCR and when the droplets of Windex hit the screen, they magnified the phosphorescent dots, making the picture look like an impressionist painting: Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Warrior Babe perhaps.

Molly froze the frame on the gratuitous shower scene. (There was always a shower scene in the first five minutes of her films, despite the fact that Kendra lived on a planet almost completely devoid of water. To address this problem, one young director had gotten the bright idea of using “anti-radioactive foam” in the shower scene and Molly had spent five hours with whipped Ivory Snow suds being blown on to her by an offscreen Shop-Vac. She ended up playing the rest of the film in a Bedouin burnoose to cover the rash that developed all over her body.)

“Art film,” Molly said, sitting on the floor in front of the TV, dowsing it with Windex for the fiftieth time. “I could have been a model in Paris in those days.”

“Not a chance,” said the narrator. He was still around. “Too skinny. They liked fat chicks back then.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“You’ve used half a bottle of Windex for this little trip to Paris.”

“Seems like cheap travel to me,” Molly said. Even so, she got up and took two glasses from the top of the TV. She was taking them to the kitchen when the doorbell rang.

She opened the door with the rims of the glasses pinched in one hand. Outside, two women in dresses and heels and lots of hair spray were standing on her steps. They were both in their early thirties, blonde, and wore stiff smiles of either insincerity or drug use, Molly couldn’t be sure which.

“Avon?” Molly asked.

“No,” the blonde in front said with a titter. “I’m Marge Whitfield, this is Katie Marshall, we’re from the Coalition for a Moral Society. We’d like to talk to you about our campaign to reinstate school prayer. I hope we haven’t caught you at a bad time.” Katie was in pink. Marge in pastel blue.

“I’m Molly Michon. I was just cleaning up a little.” Molly held up the two glasses. “Come on in.”

The two women stepped in and stood in the doorway as Molly took the glasses to the sink. “You know, it’s interesting,” Molly said, “but if you put Diet Coke in one glass, and regular Coke in another, and let them sit for, oh, say six months, then come back, there will be all sorts of green stuff growing on the regular Coke, but the Diet Coke will be as good as new.”

Molly returned to the living room. “Can I get you two something to drink?”

“No thank you,” Marge droned in robot response. She and Katie were staring at the paused image of a wet and naked Molly on the television screen. Molly breezed by them and flipped off the television. “Sorry, an art film I made in Paris when I was younger. Won’t you sit down?”

The women sat down next to each other on Molly’s tattered couch, their knees pinched together so tight they could have crushed diamonds to powder.

“I love your air freshener,” Katie said, trying to pull out of her terror. “It smells so clean.”

“Thanks, it’s Windex.”

“What a cute idea,” Marge said.

This was good, Molly thought. Normal people. If I can hold myself together for normal people like these, I’ll be okay. This is good practice. She sat down on the floor in front of them. “So your name is Marge. You don’t hear that outside of detergent commercials anymore. Did your parents watch a lot of TV?”

Marge tittered. “It’s short for Margaret, of course. My grandmother’s name.”

Katie jumped in. “Molly, we’re very concerned that our children’s education is totally without any spiritual instruction. The Coalition is collecting signatures for reinstatement of prayer in school.”

“Okay,” Molly said. “You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes, we’ve both moved here from Los Angeles with our husbands. A small town is just a better place to raise children, as I’m sure you know.”

“Right,” Molly said. They had no idea who she was. “That’s why I brought my little Stevie here.” Stevie was Molly’s goldfish who had died during one of her stays in County. Now he lived in a Ziploc in her freezer and regarded her with a frosty gaze every time she retrieved some ice.

“And how old is Stevie?”

“Uh, seven or eight. I forget sometimes, it was a long labor.”

“He’s a year behind my Tiffany,” Marge said.

“Well, he’s a little slow.”

“And your husband is…?”

“Dead.”

“I’m so sorry,” Katie said.

“No need, you probably didn’t kill him.”

“Anyway,” Katie said, “we’d really like to have your signature to send to the state senate. Single mothers are an important part of our campaign. And we’re also collecting donations for the campaign to have the Constitution amended.” She put on an embarrassed smile. “God’s work needs funding too.”

“I live in a trailer,” Molly said.

“We understand,” Marge said. “Finances are difficult for a single mother. But your signature is just as important to God’s work.”

“But I live in a trailer. God hates trailers.”

“Beg pardon?”

“He burns them up, freezes, them out, tears them up with tornadoes. God hates trailers. Are you sure I wouldn’t be hurting your cause?”

Katie giggled. “Oh, Mrs. Michon, don’t be silly. Just last week I read where a woman’s trailer was picked up by a tornado and dropped almost a mile away and she survived. She said that she was praying the whole time and that God had saved her. You see?”

“Then who sent the tornado in the first place?”

The two pastel women squirmed on the couch. The blue one spoke first. “We’d love to have you at our Bible study group, where we could discuss that, but we have to be getting along. Would you mind signing the petition?” She pulled a clipboard out of her oversized purse and handed it over to Molly with a pen.

“So if this works, kids will be able to pray in school?”

“Why, yes.” Marge brightened.

“So the Muslim kids can turn to Mecca seven times a day or whatever and it won’t count against their grades?”

The blue and pink pastel ladies looked at each other. “Well, America is a Christian nation, Mrs. Michon.”

Molly didn’t want them to think she was a pushover. She was a smart woman. “But kids of other faiths can pray too, right?”

“I suppose so,” Katie said. “To themselves.”

“Oh good,” Molly said as she signed the petition, “because I know that Stevie could move up to the Red Jets reading group if he could sacrifice a chicken to Vigoth the Worm God, but the teacher won’t let him.” Why did I say that? Why did I say that? What if they ask where Stevie is?

“Mrs. Michon!”

“What? He’d do it at recess,” Molly said. “It’s not like it would cut into study time.”

“We are working on behalf of the One True God, Mrs. Michon. The Coalition is not an interfaith organization. I’m sure that if you had felt the power of His spirit, you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“Oh, I’ve felt it.”

“You have?”

“Of course. You can feel it too. Right now.”

“What do you mean?”

Molly handed the clipboard back to Katie and stood up. “Come next door with me. It’ll only take a second. I know you’ll feel it.”

Theo’s hopes of finding Mikey Plotznik rose as he drove through the residential areas of Pine Cove. Nearly every neighborhood had two or three people out searching with flashlights and cell phones. Theo stopped and took reports from each search party, then made suggestions as if he had the slightest idea what he was doing. Who was he kidding? He couldn’t even find his car keys half the time.

Most of Pine Cove’s neighborhoods were without sidewalks or streetlights. The canopy of pine trees absorbed the moonlight and darkness drank up Theo’s headlights like an ocean of ink. He plugged his handheld spotlight in the lighter socket and swept it across the houses and into the vacant lots, spotting nothing but a pair of mule deer eating someone’s rosebuds. As he drove by the beach park—a grass playground the size of a football field, surrounded by cypress trees and blocked from the Pacific wind by an eight-foot redwood fence—he spotted a flash of white moving on one of the picnic tables. He pulled into the parking strip beside the park and pointed the Volvo’s headlights, as well as the spotlight, at the table.

A couple was going at it right there on the table. The flash of white had been the man’s bare ass. Two faces turned into the light, eyes as wide as the two deer Theo had surprised earlier. Normally, Theo would have driven on. He was used to finding people “in the act” in cars behind the Head of the Slug, or parked along the more rugged strips of coastline. He wasn’t the sex police, after all. But tonight he was irritated by the scene. It had been almost a whole day since he’d had a hit from his Sneaky Pete. Maybe it’s a symptom of withdrawal, he thought.

He turned off the Volvo and got out, taking his flashlight with him. The couple scrambled into their clothes as he approached, but didn’t try to escape. There was nowhere for them to go except over the fence, where a narrow beach was bordered on both sides by cliffs and washed by treacherous, freezing rip tides.

When he was halfway across the park, Theo recognized the fornicators and stopped. The woman, a girl really, was Betsy Butler, a waitress down at H.P.‘s Cafe. She was struggling to pull down her skirt. The man, balding and slack-chested, was the newly widowed Joseph Leander. Theo flashed on the image of Bess Leander hanging from a peg in the spotless dining room.

“A little discretion’s in order here, you think Joe?” Theo shouted as he walked toward them.

“Uh, it’s Joseph, Constable.”

Theo felt his scalp go hot with anger. He wasn’t an angry man by nature, but nature hadn’t been working the last few days. “No, It’s Joseph when you’re doing business or when you’re grieving over your dead wife. When you’re boning a girl half your age on a picnic table in a public park, it’s Joe.”

“I—we—things have been so difficult. I don’t know what came over us—I mean, me. I mean…”

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen a kid around here tonight? A boy, about ten?”

The girl shook her head. She was covering her face with one hand and staring into the grass at her feet. Joseph Leander’s gaze darted around the park as if a magic escape hatch would open up in the dark if he could only spot it. “No, I haven’t seen a boy.”

Technically, Theo knew he could arrest them both on the spot for indecent exposure, but he didn’t want to take the time to process them into County Justice. “Go home, Joe. Alone. Your daughters shouldn’t be by themselves right now. Betsy, do you have a ride?”

Without uncovering her face, she said, “I only live two blocks away.”

“Go home. Now.” Theo turned and walked back to the Volvo. No one had ever accused Theo of being clever (except for the time at a college party when he fashioned an emergency bong out of a two-liter Coke bottle and a Bic pen), but he was feeling somewhat less than clever for not having investigated Bess Leander’s death more carefully. It was one thing to be hired because you’re thought to be a fool, it’s quite another to live up to the reputation. Tomorrow, he thought. First find the kid.

Molly stood in the mud with the two pastel Christian ladies looking at the dragon trailer.

“Can you feel it?”

“Why, whatever do you mean?” Marge said. “That’s just a dirty old trailer—excuse me—mobile home.” Until a second ago, she had only been concerned with her powder-blue high heels sinking into the wet turf. Now she and her partner were staring at the dragon trailer, wide-eyed.

They could feel it, Molly could tell. She could feel it too: a low-grade sense of contentment, something vaguely sexual, not quite joy, but close. “You’re feeling it?”

The two women looked to each other, trying to deny that they were feeling anything. Their eyes were glazed over as if they’d been drugged, and they fidgeted as if suppressing giggles. Katie, the pink one, said, “Maybe we should visit these people.” She took a tentative step toward the dragon trailer.

Molly stepped in front of her. “There’s no one there. It’s just a feeling. You two should probably go fill out your petition.”

“It’s late,” said powder blue. “Maybe one more visit, then we have to go.”

“No!” Molly blocked their path. This wasn’t as fun as she thought it would be. She had wanted to freak them out a little, not harm them. She had the distinct feeling that if they got any closer to the dragon trailer, school prayer would be losing two well-groomed votes. “You two need to get home.” She took each by a shoulder and led them back to the street, then pushed them toward the entrance of the trailer park. They looked longingly over their shoulders at the dragon trailer.

“I feel the spirit moving in me, Katie,” Marge said.

Molly gave them another push. “Right, that’s a good thing. Off you go.” And she was supposed to be the crazy one.

“Go, go, go,” Molly said. “I have to get Stevie’s dinner ready.”

“We’re sorry we missed meeting your little boy,” Katie said. “Where is he?”

“Homework. See ya. Bye.”

Molly watched the women walk out of the park and climb into a new Chrysler minivan, then she turned back to the dragon trailer. For some reason, she was no longer afraid.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you, Stevie?”

The dragon trailer shifted shape, angles melting to curves, windows going back to eyes, but the glow wasn’t as intense as it had been in the early dawn. Molly saw the burned gill trees, the soot and blistered flesh between the scales. Soft blue lines of color flashed across the dragon’s flanks and faded. Molly felt her heart sink in sympathy. This thing, whatever it was, was hurting.

Molly took a few steps closer. “I have a feeling you’re too old to be a Stevie. And the original Stevie might be offended. How about Steve? You look like a Steve.” Molly liked the name Steve. Her agent at CAA had been named Steve. Steve was a good name for a reptile. (As opposed to Stevie, which was more of a frozen goldfish name.)

She felt a wave of warmth run through her amid the sadness. The monster liked his name.

“You shouldn’t have eaten that kid.”

Steve said nothing. Molly took another step forward, still on guard. “You have to go away. I can’t help you. I’m crazy, you know? I have the papers from the state to prove it.“

The Sea Beast rolled over on his back like a submissive puppy and gave Molly a pathetically helpless look, no easy task for an animal capable of swallowing a Volkswagen.

“No,” Molly said.

The Sea Beast whimpered, no louder than a newborn kitten.

“Oh, this is just swell,” Molly said. “Imagine the meds Dr. Val is going to put me on when I tell her about this. The vegetable and the lizard, that’s what they’ll call us. I hope you’re happy.”