The Servants of Twilight

PART THREE: THE HOUNDS

As the authorities went about their work, Christine and Joey waited in the kitchen because that was one of the few rooms in the house that wasn't splashed with blood.

Christine had never seen so many policemen in one place before. Her house was crowded with uniformed men, plainclothes detectives, police lab technicians, a police photographer, a coroner and his assistant.

Initially, she had welcomed the lawmen because their presence gave her a feeling of security, at last. But after a while she wondered if one of them might be a follower of Mother Grace and the Church of the Twilight.

That notion didn't seem far-fetched. In fact, the logical assumption was that a militant religious cult, determined to force its views upon society at large, would make a special point of planting its people in various law-enforcement agencies and converting those who were already employed in that capacity. She remembered Officer Wilford, the born-again Christian who had disapproved of her language and manner of dress, and she wondered if perhaps Grace Spivey had been the mid-wife of his "rebirth."

Paranoia.

But considering the situation, perhaps a measure of paranoia was not a sign of mental illness; maybe, instead, it was prudent, a necessity for survival.

As rain continued to spatter the windows and as thunder shoved its way roughly through the night outside, she watched the cops warily, regarded each unusual move with suspicion. She realized that she couldn't go through the rest of her life distrusting everyone; that would require a constant watchfulness and a level of tension that would utterly drain her physical, emotional, and mental energies. It would be like living a life entirely on a high wire. For the moment, however, she couldn't relax; she remained on guard, alert, her muscles half tensed, ready to spring at anyone who made a threatening move toward Joey.

Again, the boy's resiliency surprised her. When the police had first arrived, he had seemed to be in shock. His eyes had been glazed, and he hadn't been willing or able to speak. The sight of so much bloody violence and the threat of death had left a mark on him that, for a while, had seemed disturbingly profound. She knew this experience would scar him for life; there was no escaping that. But for a time she had been afraid that the harrowing events of the past couple of hours would render him catatonic or precipitate some other dangerous form of psychological withdrawal. But eventually he had come out of it, and she had encouraged him by getting his battery-powered Pac-Man game and playing it with him. The electronic Pac-Man musical theme and the beeping sounds made by the cookie-gobbling yellow circle on the game board made a bizarre counterpoint to the grimness of murder and the seriousness of the homicide investigation being conducted around them.

Joey's recovery had also been helped by Chewbacca's miraculous recovery from the blow to the head that one of the assassins had delivered with the butt of a shotgun. The dog had been knocked unconscious, and his scalp had been skinned a bit, but the mild bleeding had stopped in response to pressure which Christine applied with antiseptic pads. There were no signs of concussion. Now the pooch was almost as good as new, and he stayed close to them, lying on the floor by Joey's chair, occasionally rising and looking up at the Pac-Man game, cocking his head, trying to figure out what the noisy device was.

She was no longer so sure that this dog's strong resemblance to Brandy was a bad thing. To endure the horror and turmoil, Joey needed reminders of more placid times, and he needed a sense of continuity that, like a bridge, would let him cross this period of chaos with his wits intact. Chewbacca, largely because of his resemblance to Brandy, could serve both those functions.

Charlie Harrison was in and out of the kitchen every ten or fifteen minutes, checking up on them and on the two new bodyguards he had stationed with them. One man, George Swarthout, sat on a tall stool by the kitchen phone, drinking coffee, watching Joey, watching the police who came in and out, watching Christine as she watched the police. The other, Vince Fields, was outside on the patio, guarding the rear approach to the house.

It wasn't likely that any of Grace Spivey's people would launch a second attack while the house was swarming with cops, but the possibility couldn't be ruled out altogether. After all, kamikaze missions had a certain popularity with religious fanatics.

On each of his visits to the kitchen, Charlie kidded with Joey, played a game of Pac-Man, scratched behind Chewbacca's ears, and did whatever he could to lift the boy's spirits and keep his mind off the carnage in the rest of the house. When the — police wanted to question Christine, Charlie stayed with Joey and sent her into another room, so the boy wouldn't have to listen to such gruesome talk. They wanted to question Joey, too, but, Charlie managed their interrogation of the boy and kept it to a minimum. Christine realized that it wasn't easy for him to be such a rock, such a font of good spirits; he had lost two of his men, not only employees but friends. She was grateful that he seemed determined to conceal his own horror, tension, and grief for Joey's sake.

At eleven o'clock, just as Joey was tiring of Pac-Man, Charlie came in, pulled up a chair to the kitchen table, sat down, and said, "Those suitcases you packed this morning-"

"Still in my car."

"I'll have them put in mine. Go pack whatever else you might need for.

say. a week. We'll be leaving here as soon as you're ready."

"Where are we going?"

"I'd rather not tell you just now. We could be overheard."

Had he, too, considered the possibility that one of Grace Splyey's people might be working as a cop? Christine wasn't sure whether his paranoia made her feel better or worse.

Joey said, "We gonna hole up in a hideout somewhere?"

"Yep," Charlie said." That's exactly what we're going to do."

Joey frowned." The witch has magic radar. She'll find us."

"Not where I'm taking you," Charlie said." We've had a soreerer cast a spell on the place so she can't detect it."

"Yeah?" Joey said, leaning forward, fascinated." You know a soreerer? "

"Oh, don't worry, he's a good guy," Charlie said." He doesn't do black magic or anything like that."

"Well, sure," the boy said." I wouldn't figure a private eye would work with an evil soreerer."

Christine had a hundred questions for Charlie, but she didn't think it was a good idea to ask any of them in front of Joey and perhaps disturb his fragile equilibrium. She went upstairs, where the coroner was overseeing the removal of the red-haired killer's body, and she packed another suitcase. Downstairs, in Joey's room, she packed a second case for him, then, after a brief hesitation, stuffed some of his favorite toys in another bag.

She was gripped and shaken by the unsettling feeling that she would never see this house again.

Joey's bed, the Star Wars posters on his wall, his collection of plastic action figures and spaceships seemed slightly faded, as if they were not really here, as if they were objects in a photograph. She touched the bedpost, touched an E.T. doll, put a hand to the cool surface of the blackboard that stood in one corner, and she could feel those things beneath her fingers, but still, somehow, they didn't seem real any more.

It was a strange, cold, augural feeling that left a hollowness within her.

No, she thought. I'll be back. Of course I will.

But the feeling of loss remained with her as she walked out of her son's room.

Chewbacca was taken out first and put into the green Chevy.

Then, in raincoats, shepherded by Charlie and his men, they left the house, and Christine shuddered when the cold, stinging rain struck her face.

Newspapermen, television camera teams, and a van from an all-news radio station awaited them. Powerful camera lights snapped on as soon as Christine and Joey appeared. Reporters jostled one another for the best position, and all of them spoke at once:

"Mrs. Scavello-"

— a moment, please-',

"— just one question-"

She squinted as the lights lanced painfully at her eyes.

"who would want to kill you and-"

"— is this a drug case-"

She held Joey tightly. Kept moving.

,'-do you-"

"— can you-"

Microphones bristled at her.

"— have you-"

— will You-"

A kaleidoscope of strange faces formed and reformed in front of her, some in shadow, some unnaturally pale and bright in the backsplash of the camera lights.

"— tell us what it feels like to live through-"

She got a glimpse of the familiar face of a man from KTLA's "Ten O'clock News."

"— tell us-" ',-what-"

,'-how-', 6 I — why-', "-terrorists or whatever they were?"

Cold rain trickled under the collar of her coat.

Joey was squeezing her hand very hard. The newsmen were scaring him.

She wanted to scream at them to get away, stay away, shut up.

They crowded closer.

Jabbered at her.

She felt as if she were making her way through a pack of hungry animals.

Then, in the crush and babble, an unfamiliar and unfriendly face loomed: a man in his fifties, with gray hair and bushy gray eyebrows. He had a gun.

No!

Christine couldn't get her breath. She felt a terrible weight on her chest.

It couldn't be happening again. Not so soon. Surely, they wouldn't attempt murder in front of all these witnesses. This was madness.

Charlie saw the weapon and pushed Christine and Joey out of the way.

At that same instant, a newswoman also saw the threat and tried to chop the gun out of the assailant's hand, but took a bullet in the thigh for her trouble.

Madness.

People screamed, and cops yelled, and everyone dropped to the rain-soaked ground, everyone but Christine and Joey, who ran toward the green Chevy, flanked by Vince Fields and George Swarthout. She was twenty feet from the car when something tugged at her, and pain flashed along her right side, just above the hip, and she knew she had been shot, but she didn't go down, didn't even stumble on the rain-slick sidewalk, just plunged ahead, gasping for breath, heart pounding so hard that each beat hurt her, and she held on to Joey, didn't look back, didn't know if the gunman was pursuing them, but heard a tremendous volley of shots, and then someone shouting, "Get me an ambulance!"

She wondered if Charlie had shot the assailant.

Or had Charlie been shot instead?

That thought almost brought her to a stop, but they were already at the Chevy.

George Swarthout yanked open the rear door of the car and shoved them inside, where Chewbacca was barking excitedly.

Vince Fields ran around to the driver's door.

"On the floor!" Swarthout shouted." Stay down!"

And then Charlie was there, piling in after them, half on top of them, shielding them.

The Chevy's engine roared, and they pulled away from the curb with a shrill screeching of tires, rocketed down the street, away from the house, into the night and the rain, into a world that couldn't have been more completely hostile if it had been an alien planet in another galaxy.

Kyle Barlowe dreaded taking the news to Mother Grace, although he supposed she had already learned about it through a vision.

He entered the back of the church and stood there for a while, filling the doorway between the narthex and the nave, his broad shoulders almost touching both jambs. He was gathering strength from the giant brass cross above the altar, from the Biblical scenes depicted in the stained-glass windows, from the reverent quietude, from the sweet smell of incense.

Grace sat alone, on the left side of the church, in the second pew from the front. If she heard Barlowe enter, she gave no indication that she knew he was with her. She stared straight ahead at the cross.

At last Barlowe walked down the aisle and sat beside her. She was praying. He waited for her to finish. Then he said, "The second attempt failed, too."

"I know," she said.

"What now?"

"We follow them."

"Where?"

"Everywhere." She spoke softly at first, in a whisper he could barely hear, but gradually her voice rose and gained power and conviction, until it echoed eerily off the shadow-hung walls of the nave." We give them no peace, no rest, no haven, no quarter. We must be pitiless, relentless, unsleeping, unshakable. We will be hounds. The hounds of Heaven. We will bay at their heels, lunge for their throats, and bring them to ground, sooner or later, here or there, when God wills it. We shall win. I am sure of it."

She had been staring intently at the cross as she spoke, but now she turned her colorless gray eyes on him, and as always he felt her gaze penetrating to the core of him, to his very soul.

He said, "What do you want me to do?"

"For now, go home. Sleep. Prepare yourself for the morning. "

"Aren't we going after them again tonight?"

"First, we must find them."

"How?"

"God will Iead. Now go. Sleep."

He stood, stepped into the aisle." Will you sleep, too? You need your rest," he said worriedly.

Her voice had faded to a reedy whisper once more, and there was exhaustion in it." I can't sleep, dear boy. An hour a night.

Then I wake, and my mind is filled with visions, with messages from the angels, contacts from the spirit world, with worries and fears and hopes, with glimpses of the promised land, scenes of glory, with the awful weight of the responsibilities God has settled upon me." She wiped at her mouth with the back of one hand." How I wish I could sleep, how I long for sleep, for surcease from all these demands and anxieties! But He has transformed me so that I can function without sleep during this crisis.

I will not sleep well again until the Lord wills it. For reasons I don't understand, He needs me awake, insists upon it, gives me the strength to endure without sleep, keeps me alert, almost too alert." Her voice was shaking, and Barlowe imagined it was both awe and fear that put the tremor in it." I tell you, dear Kyle, it's both glorious and terrible, wonderful and frightful, exhilarating and exhausting to be the instrument of God's will."

She opened her purse, withdrew a handkerchief, and blew her nose.

Suddenly she noticed that the hankie was stained brown and yellow, disgustingly knotted and crusted with dried snot.

"Look at this," she said, indicating the handkerchief." It's horrible.

I used to be so neat. So clean. My husband, bless his soul, always said my house was cleaner than a hospital operating room. And I was always very conscious of grooming; I dressed well. And I never would have carried a revolting handkerchief like this, never, not before the Gift was given to me and crowded out so many ordinary thoughts." Tears glimmered in her gray eyes." Sometimes. I'm frightened.

grateful to God for the Gift, yes. grateful for what I've gained but frightened about what I've lost. "

He wanted to understand what it must be like for her, to be the instrument of God's will, but he couldn't comprehend her state of mind or the mighty forces working within her. He did not know what to say to her, and he was depressed that he couldn't conifort her.

She said, "Go home, sleep. Tomorrow, perhaps, we'll kill the boy.

In the car, speeding through the storm-sodden streets, Charlie insisted on having a look at Christine's wound, although she said it wasn't serious. He was relieved to discover that she was right; she had only been grazed; the bullet had left a shallow furrow, two inches long, just above her hip. It was more of an abrasion than a wound, mostly cauterized by the beat of the bullet; the slug wasn't in her, and there was only minor bleeding. Nevertheless, they stopped at an all-night market, where they picked up alcohol and iodine and bandages, and Charlie dressed the wound while Vince, behind the wheel, got them on the road again. They switched from street to street, doubled back, circled through the rain-lashed darkness, like a flying insect reluctant to light anywhere for fear of being swatted, crushed.

They took every possible precaution to insure that they weren't followed, and they didn't arrive at the safe-house in Laguna Beach until almost one o'clock in the morning. It was halfway up a long street, with (in daylight) a view of the ocean; a small place, almost a bun alow, two bedrooms and one bath; quaint, about forty years old but beautifully maintained, with a trellised front porch, gingerbread shutters; shrouded in bougainvillaea that grew up one wall and most of the way across the roof. The house belonged to Henry Rankin's aunt, who was vacationing in Mexico, and there was no way Grace Spivey or anyone from the Church of the TWilight could know about it.

Charlie wished they had come here earlier, that he had never allowed Christine and Joey to return to their own house. Of course, he'd had no way of knowing that Grace Spivey would take such drastic and violent action so soon. Killing a dog was one thing, but dispatching assassins armed with shotguns, sending them boldly into a quiet residential neighborhood. well, he hadn't imagined she was that crazy. Now he had lost two of his men, two of his friends. An emotional acid, part grief and part self-reproach, ate at him. He had known Pete Lockburn for nine years, Frank Reuther for six, and liked both of them a great deal. Although he knew he wasn't at fault for what had happened, he couldn't help blaming himself, he felt as bleak as a man could feel without contemplating suicide.

He tried to conceal the depth of his grief and rage because he didn't want to upset Christine further. She was distraught about the murders and seemed determined to hold herself, in part, accountable. He tried to reason with her: Frank and Pete knew the risk when they took the job; if she hadn't hired Klemet Harrison, the bodies now on the way to the morgue would be hers and Joey's, so she'd done the right thing by seeking help.

Regardless of the arguments he presented, she couldn't shake off her dark sense of responsibility.

Joey had fallen asleep in the car, so Charlie carried him through the slanting rain, through the drizzling night quiet of the Laguna hills, into the house. He put him down on the bed in the master bedroom, and the boy didn't even stir, only murmured softly and sighed. Together, Charlie and Christine undressed him and put him under the covers.

"I guess it won't hurt if he misses brushing his teeth just one night," she said worriedly.

Charlie couldn't suppress a smile, and she saw him smiling, and she seemed to realize how ironic it was to be fretting about cavities only hours after the boy had escaped three killers.

She blushed and said, "I guess, if God spared him from the bullets, He'll spare him from tooth decay, huh?"

"It's a good bet."

Chewbacca curled up at the side of the bed and yawned heartily. He'd had a rough day, too.

Vince Fields came to the doorway and said, "Where do you want me, boss?"

Charlie hesitated, remembering Pete and Frank. He had put them in the line of fire. He didn't want to put Vince in the line of fire, too.

But, of course, it was ridiculous of him to think that way. He couldn't tell Vince to hide in the back of the closet where it was safe. It was Vince's job to be in the line of fire if necessary; Vince knew that, and Charlie knew that, and they both knew it was Charlie's job to give the orders, regardless of the consequences. So what was he waiting for?

Either you had the guts to accept the risks in this job, or you didn't.

He cleared his throat and said, "Uh. I want you right here, Vince. Sitting on a chair. Beside the bed."

Vince sat down.

Charlie took Christine to the small tidy kitchen, where George Swarthout had made a large pot of coffee and had poured cups for himself and Vince. Charlie sent Geor,e to the living room windows, to keep watch on the street, poured some of the coffee for himself and Christine.

"Miriam-Henry's aunt-is a brandy drinker. Would you like a slug in that coffee?"

"Might be a good idea," Christine said.

He found the brandy in the cabinet by the refrigerator and laced both cups of coffee.

They sat across from each other at a small table by a window that looked out on a rain-hammered garden where, at the moment, only shadows bloomed.

He said, "How's your hip?"

"Just a twinge.

"Sure?"

"Positive. Listen, what happens now? Will the police make arrests?"

"They can't. The assailants are all dead."

"But the woman who sent them isn't dead. She's a party to attempted murder. A conspirator. She's as guilty as they were."

"We've no proof Grace Spivey sent them."

"If all three of them are members of her church-"

"That would be an important lead. The problem is, how do we prove they were church members?"

"The police could question their friends, their families."

"Which they would definitely do. if they could find their friends and families."

"What do you mean?"

"None of those three gunmen was carrying identification. No wallets, no credit cards, no driver's licenses, no nothing."

"Fingerprints. Couldn't they be identified by their fingerprints? "

"Of course, the police will be following up on that. But unless those men were in the army or have criminal records or once held a security job that required them to be fingerprinted, their prints won't be on file anywhere."

"So we might never know who they were?"

"Maybe not. And until we can identify them, there's no way to trace them back to Grace Spivey."

She scowled as she drank some of her coffee and brandy, mulling over the situation, trying to see what they might have missed, trying to come up with a way to link the killers with the Church of the Twilight. Charlie could tell her that she was wasting her time, that Grace Spivey had been too careful, but she had to reach that conclusion on her own.

Finally she said, "The man who attacked us in front of the house.

was he the one who was driving the van?"

"No. He's not the man I watched through binoculars."

"But if he was in that van, even as a passenger, maybe it's still parked down the street from my house."

"Nope. The police looked for it. No white van anywhere in the neighborhood. Nothing at all that would point to The True Word or to the Church of the Twilight."

" What about their weapons?"

"Those are being checked out, too. But I expect they weren't purchased legitimately. There'll be no way to find out who bought them."

Her face soured by frustration, she said, "But we know Grace Spivey threatened Joey, and we know one of her people has been following us in a van. After what happened tonight, isn't that reason enough for the cops to at least go talk to her?"

"Yes. And they will."

"When? "

"Now. If they haven't already. But she'll deny everything."

" They'll keep a watch on her?"

"Nope. No point in it, anyway. They might be able to watch her, but they can't keep tabs on everyone who's a member of her church. That would require a lot more manpower than they have. Besides, itd be unconstitutional."

"Then we're right back where we started," she said miserably.

"No. Eventually, maybe not right away but in time, one of those nameless dead men or one of their guns or the pictures I took of the man in the van will give us a concrete connection with Grace Spivey. These people aren't perfect. Somewhere, they've overlooked a detail, made a mistake, and we'll capitalize on it. They'll make other mistakes, too, and sooner or later we'll have enough evidence to nail them."

"Meanwhile?"

"You and Joey will lay low."

"Here?"

"For the time being."

"They'll find us."

"No."

"They will," she said grimly.

"Not even the police know where you are."

"But your people know."

"We're on your side."

She nodded, but he could see that she still had something to say, something she really didn't want to say but something she couldn't contain, either.

"What is it? What're you thinking?" he prodded.

"Isn't it possible that one of your people belongs to the Church of the Twilight?"

The question startled him. He hand-picked his people, knew them, liked them, trusted them." Impossible."

"After all, your agency had a Tn-in with Spivey. You rescued those two little children from her cult, snatched them away from their mother. I'd think maybe Grace Spivey would be wary of you, wary enough to plant someone in your organization. She could've converted one of your men."

"No. Impossible. The first time she tried to contact one of them, he'd report it to me immediately."

"Maybe it's one of your new employees, someone who was a Spivey disciple before he ever came to work for you. Have you hired anyone new since you snatched those kids?"

"A few people. But our employees have to undergo a rigorous background investigation before we hire them-"

" Membership in the church could be hidden, kept secret."'

"It'd be difficult."

"I notice you've stopped saying 'impossible."

She'd made him uneasy. He liked to believe that he always thought of everything, prepared for every contingency. But he hadn't thought of this, primarily because he knew his people too well to entertain the notion that any of them was weak-minded enough to sign up with a crackpot cult. Then again, people were strange, especially these days, and the only thing about them that could surprise you was if they never surprised you.

He sipped his coffee and said, "I'll have Henry Rankin run entirely new checks on everyone who's joined us since the Spivey case. If something was missed the first time, Henry'll find it.

He's the best there is."

"And you're sure you can trust Henty?"

"Jesus, Christine, he's like my brother!"

"Remember Cain and Abel."

"Listen, Christine, a little suspicion, a touch of paranoiathat's good.

I encourage it. Makes you more cautious. But you can go too far.

You've got to trust someone. You can't handle this alone."

She nodded, looked down at her half-finished coffee and brandy." You're right. And I guess it's not very charitable of me to worry about how trustworthy your people are when two of them have already died for me."

"They didn't die for you," he said.

"Yes, they did."

"They only-"

"Died for me."

He sighed and said nothing more. She was too sensitive a woman not to feel some guilt about Pete Lockbum and Frank Reuther. She would just have to work it out by herself-the same way he would.

"All right," she said." So while Joey and I are lying low, what'll you be doing?"

"Before we left your house, I called the rectory at the church."

"Her church?"

"Yeah. She wasn't in. But I asked her secretary to arrange a meeting for tomorrow. I made her promise to call Henry Rankin tonight, no matter how late, and let him know when I'm to be there."

"Walking into the lion's den."

"It's not quite that dramatic or dangerous."

"What do you expect to gain by talking to her?"

"I don't know. But it seems the next logical step."

She shifted in her chair, picked up her coffee, put it down without taking a drink, and chewed nervously on her lower lip.

"I'm afraid that.

"What?"

"I'm afraid, if you go to her. somehow she'll make you tell her where we are."

"I'm not that easy," he said.

"But she might use drugs or torture or-"

"Believe me, Christine, I can handle myself and I can handle this old woman and her pack of crazies."

She stared at him for a long time.

Her eyes were mesmerizingly beautiful.

At last she said, "You can. I know it. You can handle them.

I have a lot of faith in you, Charlie Harrison. It's an.

instinct.

I feel good about you. I know you're capable. I don't doubt you.

Really I don't. But I'm still scared."

At I:30, someone from Klemet-Harrison brought Charlie's gray Mercedes to the house in Laguna Beach, so he could drive himself home when he was ready. At 2:05, grainy-eyed and boneweary, he looked at his watch, said, "Well, I guess I'll be going," and went to the sink to rinse out his coffee cup.

When he put his cup in the rack to dry and turned, she was standing at the kitchen window, beside the door, staring out at the dark lawn. She was hugging herself.

He went to her." Christine?"

She turned, faced him.

"You okay?" he asked.

She nodded, being brave." Just a chill."

Her teeth chattered when she spoke.

On impulse, he put his arms around her. Without a hint of reservation, she came against him, allowed herself to be held, her head on his shoulder. Then her arms slipped around him, too, and they were linked, and nothing had ever been better than hugging her. Her hair was against his cheek, her hands on his back, her body molded to him, her warmth piercing him, the scent of her filling him. The embrace had the electrifying quality of a new and longed-for experience and, at the same time, it was a comfortable, familiar sharing. It was difficult to believe he had known her less than one day. He seemed to have wanted her much longer than that-and, of course, he had, though until he'd seen her he hadn't known it was her that he had wanted for so many years.

He could have kissed her then. He had the desire and the nerve to put a hand under her chin and lift her face and press his lips to hers, and he knew she wouldn't resist, might even welcome it. But he did no more than hug her because he sensed the time wasn't exactly right for the commitment that a passionate kiss implied. Now, it would be a kiss that she sought partly out of fear, partly out of a desperate need to be reassured. When at last he did kiss her, he wanted it to be for other reasons entirely: desire, affection, love. He wanted the start to be perfect for them.

When she finally let go of him, she seemed self-conscious.

She smiled shyly and said, "Sorry. Didn't mean to get shaky on you.

I've got to be strong. I know it. There's no room for weakness in this situation."

"Nonsense," he said gently." I needed a hug, too."

"You did?"

"Everyone could use a teddy bear now and then."

She smiled at him.

He hated to leave her. All the way out to the car, with the wind tearing at his coat and the rain battering his bare head, he wanted to turn around and go back in there and tell her that something special was happening between them, something that shouldn't happen this fast, something like you saw in the movies but never in real life. He wanted to tell her now, even if it was the wrong time, because in spite of all his reassuring talk, he didn't know for sure that he would be able to handle Spivey and her crazies; there was a possibility, however slim, that he would never get another chance, never see Christine Scavello again.

He lived in the hills of North Tastin, and he was almost halfway home, cruising a lonely stretch of Irvine Boulevard, thinking about Frank Reuther and Pete Lockburn, when the events of the past few hours became too much to handle, and he was suddenly short of breath. He had to pull to the berm and stop. There were orange groves on one side of the roadway, strawberry fields on the other side, and darkness all around.

At this hour, there was no traffic. Slumped back in his seat, he stared at the rainspattered windshield where the water made ghostly, speckled patterns in the backsplash of his own headlight beams, brieflived patterns erased by the metronomically thumping windshield wipers. It was unnerving and dispiriting to realize that human lives could be erased as suddenly and easily as those rain patterns on the glass. He wept.

In all its years of operation, Klemet-Harrison had lost only one other man in the line of duty. He had been killed in an automobile accident while he was working, although it was unconnected to his assignment and could have taken place as easily on his own time. A few men had been shot at over the years, mostly by estranged husbands who were determined to harass their wives in spite of court orders restraining them from doing so; and a couple of guys had even been hit. But until now no one had been murdered, for God's sake. The private investigation business was far less violent, far less dangerous than it was portrayed on television and in the movies. Sometimes you got roughed up a bit or had to rough up someone else, and there was always the potential for violence, but the potential was rarely realized.

Charlie wasn't afraid for himself, but he was afraid for his men, the people who worked for him and relied upon him. When he had taken this case, maybe he had gotten them into something he shouldn't have. Maybe, by signing on to protect Christine and Joey, he had also signed death warrants for himself and his associates. Who knew what to expect when you were dealing with religious fanatics? Who knew how far they would go?

On the other hand, everyone who worked with him knew the risks, even though they usually expected better odds than these.

And what kind of detective agency would they be, what kind of bodyguards would they be if they walked away from the first really nasty case they handled? And how could he back down on his word to Christine Scavello?

He wouldn't be able to face himself in the morning if he left her defenseless. Besides, he was more certain than ever that he was, with irrational but not entirely involuntary haste, falling in love with her.

In spite of the rain booming on the roof and the thumping of the windshield wipers, the night was unbearably silent in the oppressively humid car; there was a dearth of meaningful sound, just the random noises of the storm which, by their very randomness, reminded him of the chasm of chaos above which his life and all other lives unfolded. That was a thought on which he preferred not to dwell at the moment.

He pulled back onto the road, accelerated, and sent up twin plumes of spray from a deep puddle, heading toward the hills, and home.

Christine hadn't expected to be able to sleep. She stretched out on the bed where Joey lay like a stone, but she figured she would just wait there with her eyes closed, resting, until he woke. She must have dropped off instantly.

She came around once during the night and realized the rain had stopped.

The silence was profound.

George Swarthout was sitting in a chair in the corner, reading a magazine in the soft glow of a table lamp with a mother-ofpearl shade.

She wanted to speak to him, wanted to know if everything was all right, but she hadn't the strength to sit up or even talk. She closed her eyes and drifted down into darkness again.

She came fully awake before seven o'clock, feeling fuzzyheaded after only four and a half hours of sleep. Joey was snoring softly. She left George watching over her son, went into the bathroom, and took a long, hot shower, wincing when water got under the bandage on her hip and elicited a stinging pain from her still-healing wound.

She finally stepped out of the shower, toweled dry, applied a new bandage, and was pulling on her clothes when she sensed that Joey was in trouble, right now, terrible trouble; she felt it in her bones. She thought she heard him scream above the rumbling of the bathroom's exhaust fan. Oh Jesus no. He was being slaughtered out there in the bedroom, hacked to pieces by some Bible-thumping maniac. Her stomach tightened, and her skin goose-pimpled, and in spite of the moaning bathroom fan she thought she heard something else, a thump, a clubbing sound.

They must be beating him, too, stabbing and beating him, and her lungs blocked up, and she knew it, knew Joey was dead, my God, and in a wild panic she pulled up the zipper on her jeans, didn't even finish buttoning her blouse, stumbled out of the bathroom, shoeless, with her wet hair hanging in glossy clumps.

She had imagined everything.

The boy was safe.

He was awake, sitting up in bed, listening wide-eyed as George Swarthout told him a story about a magic parrot and the King of Siam.

Later, worried that her mother would hear about their problems on the news or read about them in the papers, she called, but then wished she hadn't. Evelyn listened to all the details, was properly shocked, but instead of offering much sympathy, she launched into an interrogation that surprised and angered Christine.

"What did you do to these people?" Evelyn wanted to know.

"What people?"

"The people at this church."

"I didn't do anything to them, Mother. They're trying to do it to us.

Didn't you hear what I said?"

"They wouldn't pick on you for no reason," Evelyn said.

"They're crazy, Mother."

"Can't all of them be crazy, a whole churchful of people."

"Well, they are. They're bad people, Mother, real bad people."

"Can't all of them be bad. Not religious people like that.

Can't all of them be after you just for the fun of it."

"I told you why they're after us. They've got this crazy idea that Joey-"

"That's what you told me," Evelyn said, "but that can't be it. Not really. There must be something else. Must be something you did that made them angry. But even if they're angry, I'm sure they're not trying to kill anybody."

"Mother, I told you, they came with guns, and men were killed-"

"Then the people who had guns weren't these church people, " Evelyn said

" You've got it all wrong. It's someone else."

"Mother, I haven't got it all wrong. I-"

"Church people don't use guns, Christine."

"These church people do."

"It's someone else," Evelyn insisted.

"But-"

"You have a grudge against religion," Evelyn said." Always have. A grudge against the Church."

"Mother, I don't hold any grudges-"

"That's why you're so quick to blame this on religious people when it's plainly the work of someone else, maybe political terrorists like on the news all the time, or maybe you're involved in something you shouldn't be and now it's getting out of hand, which wouldn't surprise me. Are you involved in something, Christine, like drugs, which they're always killing themselves over, like you see on TV, dealers shooting each other all the time-is it anything like that, Christine?"

She imagined she could hear the grandfather clock ticking monotonously in the background. Suddenly, she couldn't breathe well.

The conversation progressed in that fashion until Christine couldn't stand any more. She said she had to go, and she hung up before her mother could protest. Evelyn hadn't even said, "I love you," or "be careful," or "I'm worried about you," or "I'll do anything I can to help."

Her mother might as well be dead; their relationship certainly was.

At seven-thirty, Christine made breakfast for George, Vince, Joey, and herself. She was buttering toast when the rain began to fall again.

The morning was so drab, the clouds so low, the light so dim and gray that it might have been the end rather than the beginning of the day, and the rain came out of that somber sky with gutter-flooding force. Fog still churned outside, and without any sun it probably would hang on all day, barely dissipate, and get blindingly thick tonight. This was.the time of year when relentless trains of storms could assault California, moving in from the Pacific, pounding the coastal areas until creeks swelled over their banks and reservoirs topped out and hillsides began to slide, carrying houses into the bottoms of the canyons with deadly swiftness. From the look of it, they were probably in the process of being run over by one of those storm trains right now.

The prospect of a long stretch of bad weather made the threat from the Church of the Twilight even more frightening. When winter rains closed in like this, streets were flooded, and freeways jammed up beyond belief, and mobility was curtailed, and California seemed to shrink, the mountains contracting toward the coast, squeezing the land in between.

When the rainy season was at its worst, California acquired a claustrophobic aspect that you never read about in tourist brochures or see on postcards.

In weather like this, Christine always felt a little trapped, even when she wasn't being hounded by well-armed lunatics.

When she took a plate of bacon and eggs to Vince Fields, where he was stationed by the front door, she said, "You guys must be tired. How long can you keep this up?"

He thanked her for the food, glanced at his watch, and said, "We only have about an hour to go. The replacement team will be here by then."

Of course. A replacement team. A new shift. That should have been obvious to her, but it hadn't been. She had grown accustomed to Vince and George, had learned to trust them. If either of them had been a member of the Church of the Twilight, she and Joey would have been dead by now. She wanted them to stay, but they couldn't remain awake and on guard forever. Foolish of her not to have understood that.

Now she had to worry about the new men. One of them might have sold his soul to Grace Spivey.

She returned to the kitchen. Joey and George Swarthout were having breakfast at the semicircular pine table which could accommodate only three chairs. She sat down in front of her own plate, but suddenly she wasn't hungry any more. She picked at her food and said, "George, the next shift of bodyguards-"

"Be here soon," he said around a mouthful of eggs and toast.

"Do you know who Charlie. who Mr. Harrison is sending? "

"You mean their names?"

"Yes, their names."

"Nope. Could be any of several fellas. Why?"

She didn't know why she would feel better if she knew their names. She wasn't familiar with Charlie's staff. Their names would mean nothing to her. She wouldn't be able to tell that they were Grace Spivey's people just by their names. She wasn't being rational.

"If you know any of our people and would prefer to have them work a shift here, you should tell Mr. Harrison," George said.

"No. I don't know anybody. I just. well. never mind.

It wasn't important."

Joey seemed to sense the nature of her fear. He stopped teasing Chewbacca with a piece of bacon, put one small hand on Christine's arm, as if to reassure her the way he'd seen Charlie do, and said, "Don't worry, Mom. They'll be good guys. Whoever Charlie sends, they'll be real good."

"The best," George agreed.

To George, Joey said, "Hey, tell Mom the story about the talking giraffe and the princess who didn't have a horse."

"I doubt if it's exactly your mother's kind of story," George said, smiling.

" Then tell me again," Joey said." Please?"

As George told the fairytale-which seemed to be of his own creation-Christine's attention drifted to the rainy day beyond the window. Somewhere out there, two of Charlie's men were coming, and she was increasingly certain that at least one of them would be a disciple of the Spivey creature.

Paranoia. She knew that half her problem was psychological.

She was worrying unnecessarily. Charlie had warned her not to go off the deep end. She wouldn't be much good to either Joey or herself if she started seeing boogeymen in every shadow. It was just the damned lousy weather, closing in on them, the rain and the morning fog, weaving a shroud around them. She felt trapped, suffocated, and her imagination was working overtime.

She was aware of all that.

It didn't matter.

She couldn't talk herself out of her fear. She knew that something bad was going to happen when the two men showed up.

At eight o'clock Tuesday morning, Charlie met Henry Rankin in front of the Church of the Twilight: a Spanish-style structure with stained-glass windows, red tile roof, two bell towers, and a broad expanse of steps leading up to six massive carved oak doors. Rain slanted at the doors, streamed off the steps, making oily puddles on the cracked and canted sidewalk. The doors needed to be refinished, and the building needed new stucco; it was shabby and neglected, but that was in keeping with the neighborhood, which had been deteriorating for decades. The church had once been the home of a Presbyterian congregation, which had fled ten blocks north, to a new site, where there weren't so many abandoned stores, adult bookshops, failing businesses, and crumbling houses.

"You look wiped out," Henry said. He stood at the foot of the church steps, holding a big black umbrella, frowning as Charlie approached under an umbrella of his own.

"Didn't get to bed until three-thirty," Charlie said.

"I tried to make this appointment for later," Henry said.

"This was the only time she would see us."

"It's all right. If I'd had more time, I'd have just lain there, staring at the ceiling. Did the police talk to her last night?"

Henry nodded." I spoke with Lieutenant Carella this morning early. They questioned Spivey, and she denied everything."

"They believe her?"

"They're suspicious, if only because they've had their own problems with more than a few of these cults."

Each time a car passed in the street, its tires hissed on the wet pavement with what sounded like serpentine anger.

"Have they been able to put a name to any of those three dead men? "

"Not yet. As for the guns, the serial numbers are from a shipment that was sent from the wholesaler in New York to a chain of retail sporting goods outlets in the Southwest, two years ago. The shipment never arrived. Hijacked. So these guns were bought on the black market. No way to trace who sold or purchased them."

"They cover their tracks well," Charlie said.

It was time to talk to Grace Spivey. He wasn't looking forward to it.

He had little patience for the psychotic babble in which these cult types frequently spoke. Besides, after last night, anything was possible; they might even risk committing murder on their own doorstep.

He looked at his car, by the curb, where one of his men, Carter Rilbeck, was waiting behind the wheel. Carter would wait for them and send for help if they weren't out in half an hour. In addition, both Charlie and Henry were packing revolyers in shoulder holsters.

The rectory was to the left of the church, set back from the street, beyond an unkempt lawn, between two coral trees in need of trimming, ringed by shrubbery that hadn't been thinned or shaped in months. Like the church, the rectory was in in-repair.

Charlie supposed that if you really believed the end of the world was imminent-as these Twilighters claimed to believe-then you didn't waste time on such niceties as gardening and house painting.

The rectory porch had a creaking floor, and the doorbell made a thin, harsh, irregular sound, more animal than mechanical.

The curtain covering the window in the center of the door was abruptly drawn aside. A florid-faced, overweight woman with protuberant green eyes stared at them for a long moment, then let the curtain fall into place, unlocked the door, and ushered them into a drab entry hall.

When the door was closed and the susurrous voice of the storm faded somewhat, Charlie said, "My name is-"

"I know who you are," the woman replied curtly. She led them back down the hall to a chamber on the right, where the door was ajar. She opened the door all the way and indicated that they were to enter. She didn't come with them, didn't announce them, just closed the door after them, leaving them to their own introductions. Evidently, common courtesy was not an ingredient in the bizarre stew of Christianity and doomsday prophecy that Spivey's followers had cooked up for themselves.

Charlie and Henry were in a room twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide, sparsely and cheaply furnished. Filing cabinets lined one wall. In the center were a simple metal table on which lay a woman's purse and an ashtray, one metal folding chair behind the table, and two chairs in front of it. Nothing else. No draperies at the windows. No tables or cabinets or knickknacks.

There were no lamps, either, just the ceiling fixture, which cast a yellowish glow that, blending with the gray storm light coming through the tall windows, gave the room a muddy look.

Perhaps the oddest thing of all was the complete lack of religious objects: no paintings portraying Christ, no plastic statues of Biblical figures or angels, no needlepoint samplers bearing religious messages, none of the sacred objects-or kitsch, depending on your point of view-that you expected to find among cult fanatics. There had been none in the hallway, either, or in any of the rooms they had passed.

Grace Spivey was standing at the far end of the room, at a window, her back to them, staring out at the rain.

Henry cleared his throat.

She didn't move.

Charlie said, "Mrs. Spivey?"

Finally she turned away from the window and faced them.

She was dressed all in yellow: pale yellow blouse, a gay yellow polka-dot scarf knotted at her neck, deep yellow skirt, yellow shoes.

She was wearing yellow bracelets on each wrist and half a dozen rings set with yellow stones. The effect was ludicrous.

The brightness of her outfit only accentuated the paleness of her puffy face, the withered dullness of her age-spotted skin. She looked as if she were possessed by senile whimsy and thought of herself as a twelve-year-old girl on the way to a friend's birthday party.

Her gray hair was wild, but her eyes were wilder. Even from across the room, those eyes were riveting and strange.

She was curiously rigid, shoulders drawn up tight, arms straight down at her sides, hands curled into tight fists.

"I'm Charles Harrison," Charlie said because he'd never actually met the woman before, "and this is my associate, Mr. Rankin."

As unsteady as a drunkard, she took two steps away from the window. Her face twisted, and her white skin became even whiter. She cried out in pain, almost fell, caught herself in time, and stood swaying as if the floor were rolling under her.

"Is something wrong?" Charlie asked.

"You'll have to help me," she said.

He hadn't figured on anything like this. He had expected her to be a strong woman with a vital, magnetic personality, a takecharge type who would keep them off balance from the start.

Instead it was she who was off balance, and quite literally.

She was standing in a partial crouch now, as if pain were bending her in half. She was still stiff, and her hands were still fisted.

Charlie and Henry went to her.

"Help me to that chair before I fall," she said weakly." It's my feet"

Charlie looked down at her feet and was shocked to see blood on them. He took her left arm, and Henry took her right, and they half carried her to the chair that stood behind the metal table. As she sat down, Charlie realized there was a bleeding wound on the bridge of each foot, just above the tongue of each shoe, twin holes, as if she had been stabbed, not by a knife but by something with a very narrow blade-perhaps an ice pick.

"Can I get you a doctor?" he asked, disconcerted to find himself being so solicitous to her.

"No," she said." No doctor. Please sit down."

"But-"

"I'll be all right. I'll be fine. God watches over me, you know. God is good to me. Sit. Please."

Confused, they went to the two chairs on the other side of the table, but before either of them could sit, the old woman opened her fisted hands and held her palms up to them." Look," she said in a demanding whisper." Look at this! Behold this!"

The gruesome sight stopped Charlie from sitting down. In each of the woman's palms, there was another bleeding hole, like those in her feet.

As he stared at her wounds, the blood began to ooze out faster than before.

Incredibly, she was smiling.

Charlie glanced at Henry and saw the same question in his friend's eyes that he knew must be in his own: What the hell is going on here?

"It's for you," the old woman said excitedly. She leaned toward them, stretching her arms across the table, holding her hands out to them, urging them to look.

"For us?" Henry said, baffled.

"What do you mean?" Charlie asked.

"A sign," she said.

"Sign?

"A holy sign."

Charlie stared at her hands.

"Stigmata," she said.

Jesus. The woman belonged in an institution.

A chill worked its way assiduously up Charlie's spine and curled at the base of his neck, flicking its icy tail.

"The wounds of Christ," she said.

What have we walked into? Charlie wondered.

Henry said, "I better call a doctor."

"No," she said softly but authoritatively." These wounds ache, yes, but it's a sweet pain, a good pain, a cleansing pain, and they won't become infected; they'll heal well on their own.

Don't you understand? These are the wounds Christ endured, the holes made by the nails that pinned Him to the cross."

She's mad, Charlie thought, and he looked uneasily at the door, wondering where the florid-faced woman had gone. To get some other crazies? To organize a death squad? A human sacrifice? They had the nerve to call this Christianity?

"I know what you're thinking," Grace Spivey said, her voice growing louder, stronger." You don't think I look like a prophet.

You don't think God would work through an old, crazy-looking woman like me. But that is how He works. Christ walked with the outcasts, befriended the lepers, the prostitutes, the thieves, the deformed, and sent them forth to spread His word. Do you know why? Do you know?"

She was speaking so loudly now that her voice rebounded from the walls, and Charlie was reminded of a television evangelist who spoke in hypnotic rhythms and with the projection of a well-trained actor.

"Do you know why God chooses the most unlikely messengers?" she demanded

" It's because He wants to test you. Anyone could bring himself to believe the preachings of a prettyboy minister with Robert Redford's face and Richard Burton's voice! But only the righteous, only those who truly want to believe in the Word. only those with enough faith will recognize and accept the Word regardless of the messenger!"

Her blood was dripping on the table. Her voice had risen until it vibrated in the window glass.

"God is testing you. Can you hear His message regardless of what you think of the messenger? Is your soul pure enough to allow you to hear?

Or is there corruption within you that makes you deaf?"

Both Charlie and Henry were speechless. There was a mesmerizing quality to her tirade that was numbing and demanding of attention.

"Listen, listen, listen!" she said urgently." Listen to what I tell you. God visited these stigmata upon me the moment you rang the doorbell. He has given you a sign, and that can mean only one thing: You aren't yet in Satan's thrall, and the Lord is giving you a chance to redeem yourselves. Apparently you don't realize what the woman is, what her child is. If you knew and still protected them, God wouldn't be offering you redemption.

Do you know what they are? Do you know?"

Charlie cleared his throat, blinked, freed himself from the fuzziness that had briefly affected his thoughts." I know what you think they are," Charlie said.

"It's not what I think. It's what I know. It's what God has told me.

The boy is the Antichrist. The mother is the black Madonna."

Charlie hadn't expected her to be so direct. He was sure she would deny any interest in Joey, just as she had denied it to the police. He was startled by her forthrightness and didn't know what to make of it.

"I know you're not recording this conversation," she said.

"We have instruments that would have detected a recorder. I would have been alerted. So I can speak freely. The boy has come to rule the earth for a thousand years."

"He's just a six-year-old boy," Charlie said, "like any other six-year-old boy."

"No," she said, still holding her hands up to reveal the blood seeping from her wounds." No, he is more, worse. He must die. We must kill him. It is God's wish, God's work."

"You can't really mean-"

She interrupted him." Now that you have been told, now that God has made the truth clear to you, you must cease protecting them." "They're my clients," Chaflie said." I-"

"If you persist in protecting them, you're damned," the old woman said worriedly, begging them to accept redemption.

"We have an obligation-"

"Damned, don't you see? You'll rot in Hell. All hope lost.

Eternity spent in suffering. You must listen. You must learn."

He looked into her fevered eyes, which challenged him with berserk intensity. His pity for her was mixed with a disgust that left him unable and unwilling to debate with her. He realized it had been pointless to come. The woman was beyond the reach of reason.

He was now more afraid for Christine and Joey than he had been last night, when one of Grace Spivey's followers had been shooting at them.

She raised her bleeding palms an inch or two higher." This sign is for you, for you, to convince you that I am, in fact, a herald bearing a true message. Do you see? Do you believe now? Do you understand?"

Charlie said, "Mrs. Spivey, you shouldn't have done this. Neitheir of us is a gullible man, so it's all been for nothing."

Her face darkened. She curled her hands into fists again.

Charlie said, "If you used a nail that was at all rusty or dirty, I hope you'll go immediately to your doctor and get tetanus,5hots. This could be very serious."

"You're lost to me," she said in a voice as flat as the table to which she lowered her bleeding hands.

"I came here to try to reason with you," Charlie said." I see that's not possible. So just let me warn you-"

"You belong to Satan now. You've had your chance-"

"— if you don't back off-" I 6-and you've thrown your chance away-"

"— if you don't leave the Scavellos alone-"

',-and now you'll pay the terrible price!"

"— I'll dig into this and hang on. I'll keep at it come Hell or high water, until I've seen you put on trial, until I've seen your church lose its tax exemption, until everyone knows you for what you really are, until your followers lose their faith in you, and until your insane little cult is crushed. I mean it. I can be as relentless as you, as determined. I can finish you. Stop while you have a chance."

She glared at him.

Henry said, "Mrs. Spivey, will you put an end to this madness? " She said nothing. She lowered her eyes.

"Mrs. Spivey?"

No response.

Charlie said, "Come on, Henry. Let's get out of here."

As they approached the door, it opened, and an enormous man entered the room, ducking his head to avoid rapping it on the frame. He had to be almost seven feet tall. He had a face from a nightmare. He didn't seem real; only images from the movies were suitable to describe him, Charlie thought. He was like a Frankenstein monster with the hugely muscled body of Conan the Barbarian, a shambling hulk spawned by a bad script and a low budget. He saw Grace Spivey weeping, and his face knotted with a look of despair and rage that made Charlie's blood turn to icy slush. The giant reached out, grabbed Charlie by the coat, and nearly hauled him off the floor.

Henry drew his gun, and Charlie said, "Hold it, hold it," because although the situation was bad it wasn't necessarily lethal.

The big man said, "Whatd you do to her? Whatd you do?"

"Nothing," Charlie said." We were-"

"Let them go," Grace Spivey said." Let them pass, Kyle."

The giant hesitated. His eyes, like hard bright sea creatures hiding deep under a suboceanic shelf, regarded Charlie with a pure malignant fury that would have given nightmares to the devil himself. At last he let go of Charlie, lumbered toward the table at which the woman sat. He spotted blood on her hands and wheeled back toward Charlie.

"She did it to herself," Charlie said, edging toward the door.

He didn't like the wheedling note in his own voice, but at the moment there didn't seem to be room for pride. To give in to a macho urge would be ironclad proof of feeble-mindedness." We didn't touch her."

"Let them go," Grace Spivey repeated.

In a low, menacing voice, the giant said, "Get out. Fast."

Charlie and Henry did as they were told.

The florid-faced woman with the protruding green eyes was waiting at the front of the rectory. As they hurried down the hallway, she opened the door. The instant they stepped onto the porch, she slammed the door behind them and locked it.

Charlie went out into the rain without putting up his umbrella.

He turned his face toward the sky. The rain felt fresh and clean, and he let it hammer at him because he felt soiled by the madness in the house.

"God help us," Henry said shakily.

They walked out to the street.

Dirty water was churning to the top of the gutter. It formed a brown lake out toward the intersection, and bits of litter, like a flotilla of tiny boats, sailed on the wind-chopped surface.

Charlie turned and looked back at the rectory. Now its grime and deterioration seemed like more than ordinary urban decay; the rot was a reflection of the minds of the building's occupants.

In the dust-filmed windows, in the peeling paint and sagging porch and badly cracked stucco, he saw not merely ruin but the physical world's representation of human madness. He had read a lot of science fiction as a child, still read some now and then, so maybe that was why he thought of the Law of Entropy, which held that the universe and all things within it moved in only one basic direction-toward decay, collapse, dissolution, and chaos.

The Church of the TWilight seemed to embrace entropy as the ultimate expression of divinity, aggressively promulgating madness, unreason, and chaos, reveling in it.

He was scared.

After breakfast, Christine called Val Gardner and a couple of other people, assured them that she and Joey were all right, but didn't tell any of them where she was. Thanks to the Church of the Twilight, she no longer entirely trusted her friends, not even Val, and she resented that sad development.

By the time she finished making her phone calls, two new bodyguards arrived to relieve Vince and George. One of them, Sandy Breckenstein, was tall and lean, about thirty, with a prominent Adam's apple; he brought to mind Ichabod Crane in the old Disney cartoon version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Sandy's partner was Max Steck, a bull of a man with bigknuckled hands, a massive chest, a neck almost as thick as his head-and a smile as sweet as any child's.

Joey took an immediate liking to both Sandy and Max and was soon running back and forth from one end of the small house to the other, trying to keep company with both of them, jabbering away, asking them what it was like to be a bodyguard, telling them his charmingly garbled version of George Swarthout's story about the giraffe who could talk and the princess who didn't have a horse.

Christine was not as quick as Joey to place her confidence in her new protectors. She was friendly but cautious, watchful.

She wished she had a weapon of her own. She didn't have her pistol any more. The police had kept it last night until they could verify that it was properly registered. She couldn't very well take a knife from the kitchen drawer and walk around with it in her hand; if either Sandy or Max was a follower of Grace Spivey, the knife might not forestall violence but precipitate it. And if neither of them was a Twilighter, she would only offend and alienate them by such an open display of distrust. Her only weapons were wariness and her wits, which wouldn't be terribly effective if she found herself confronted by a maniac with a 357 Magnum.

However, when trouble paid a visit, shortly after nine o'clock, it did not come from either Sandy or Max. In fact, it was Sandy, keeping watch from a chair by a living room window, who saw that something was wrong and called their attention to it.

When Christine came in from the kitchen to ask him if he wanted more coffee, she found him studying the street outside with visible tension.

He had risen from the chair, leaned closer to the window, and was holding the binoculars to his eyes.

"What is it?" she asked." Who's out there?"

He watched for a moment longer, then lowered the binoculars.

"Maybe nobody."

" But you think there is."

"Go tell Max to keep a sharp eye at the back," Sandy said, his Adam's apple bobbling." Tell him the same van has cruised by the house three times."

Her heartbeat accelerated as if someone had thrown a switch.

"A white van?"

"No," he said." Midnight blue Dodge with a surfing mural on the side.

Probably it's nothing. Just somebody who's not familiar with the neighborhood, trying to find an address. But.

uh. better tell Max, anyway."

She hurried into the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and she tried to deliver the news to Max Steck calmly, but her voice had a tremor in it, and she couldn't control her hands, which made nervous, meaningless, butterfly gestures in the air.

Max checked the lock on the kitchen door, even though he had tested it himself when he'd first come on duty. He closed the blinds entirely on one window. He closed them halfway on the other.

Chewbacca had been lying in one corner, dozing. He raised his head and snorted, sensing the new tension in the air.

Joey was sitting at the table by the garden window, busily using his crayons to fill in a picture in a coloring book. Christine moved him away from the window, took him into the corner, near the humming refrigerator, out of the line of fire.

With the short attention span and emotional adaptability of a six-year-old, he had pretty much forgotten about the danger that had forced them to hide out in a stranger's house. Now it all came back to him, and his eyes grew big." Is the witch coming?"

"It's probably nothing to worry about, honey."

She stooped down, pulled up his jeans, and tucked in his shirt, which had come half out of his waistband. His fear made her heart ache, and she kissed him on the cheek.

"Probably just a false alarm," she said." But Charlie's men don't take any chances, you know."

"They're super," he said.

"They sure are," she said.

Now that it looked as if they might actually have to put their lives on the line for her and Joey, she felt guilty about being suspicious of them.

Max shoved the small table away from the window, so he wouldn't have to lean over it to look out.

Chewbacca made an interrogatory whining sound in the back of his throat, and began to pad around in a circle, his claws ticking on the kitchen tile.

Afraid that the dog would get in Max's way at a crucial moment, she called to it, and then so did Joey. The animal couldn't have learned its new name yet, but it responded to tone of voice.

It came to Joey and sat beside him.

Max peered through a chink between two of the slats in the blind and said, "This damn fog sure is hanging on this morning."

Christine realized that, in the fog and obscuring rain, the garden-with its azaleas, bushy oleander, veronicas, carefully shaped miniature orange trees, lilacs, bougainvillaea-draped arbor, and other shrubbery-would make it easy for someone to creep dangerously close to the house before being spotted.

In spite of his mother's reassurances, Joey looked up at the ceiling, toward the sound of rain on the roof, which was loud in this one-story house, and he said, "The witch is coming. She's coming."

Dr. Denton Boothe, both a psychologist and psychiatrist, was living proof that the heirs of Freud and Jung didn't have all the answers, either. One wall in Boothes office was covered with degrees from the country's finest universities, awards from his colleagues in half a dozen professional organizations, and honorary doctorates from institutions of learning in four countries.

He had written the most widely adopted and highly praised textbook on general psychology in thirty years, and his position as one of the most knowledgeable experts in the specialty of abnormal psychology was unchallenged. Yet Boothe, for all his knowledge and expertise, wasn't without problems of his own.

He was fat. Not just pleasantly plump. Fat. Shockingly, grossly overweight. When Charlie encountered Denton Boothe ("Boo" to friends), after not having seen him for a few weeks, he was always startled by the man's immensity; he never seemed to remember him as being that fat.

Boothe stood five-eleven, Charlie's height, but he weighed four hundred pounds. His face did a good imitation of the moon. His neck was a post. His fingers were like sausages. Sitting, he overflowed chairs.

Charlie couldn't understand why Boothe, who could uncover and treat the neuroses even of those patients highly resistant to treatment, could not deal with his own compulsive eating. It was a puzzlement.

But his unusual size and the psychological problems underlying it did nothing to change the fact that he was a delightful man, kind and amusing and quick to laugh. Although he was fifteen years older than Charlie and infinitely better educated, they had hit it off on first encounter and had been friends for several years, getting together for dinner once or twice a month, exchanging gifts at Christmas, making an effort to keep in touch that, sometimes, surprised both of them.

Boo welcomed Charlie and Henry into his office, part of a corner suite in a glass high-rise in Costa Mesa, and insisted on showing them his latest antique bank. He collected animated banks with clockwork mechanisms that made a little adventure out of the deposit of each coin. There were at least two dozen of them displayed at various points in the office. This one was an elaborate affair the size of a cigar humidor; standing on the lid were hand-painted metal figurines of two bearded gold prospectors flanking a comically detailed donkey. Boo put a quarter in the hand of one prospector and pushed a button on the side of the bank. The prospector's hand came up, holding the coin out to the second prospector, but the donkey's hinged head lowered, and its jaws clamped shut on the quarter, which the prospector relinquished. The donkey raised its head again, and the quarter dropped down its gullet and into the bank underneath, while both prospectors shook their heads in dismay. The name on the donkey's saddlebags was Uncle Sam.

"It was made in 1903. So far as anyone knows, there are only eight working models in the world," Boo said proudly." It's titled "The Tax Collector,' but I call it "There Is No Justice in a Jackass Universe." "

Charlie laughed, but Henry looked baffled.

They adjourned to a corner of the room where large comfortable armchairs were grouped around a glass-topped coffee table.

Boo's chair groaned softly as he settled into it.

Being a corner office, the room had two exterior walls that were largely glass. Because this building faced away from the other high-rise structures in Costa Mesa, toward one of the few remaining tracts of agricultural land in this part of the county, there seemed to be nothing outside but a gray void composed of churning clouds, gauzy veils of lingering fog, and rain that streamed down the glass walls in a vertical river. The effect was disorienting, as if Boothes office didn't exist in this world but in an alternate reality, anotherdimension.

" You say this is about Grace Spivey?" Boothe asked.

He had a special interest in religious psychoses and had written a book about the psychology of cult leaders. He found Grace Spivey intriguing and intended to include a chapter about her in his next book.

Charlie told Boo about Christine and Joey, about their encounter with Grace at South Coast Plaza and the attempts on their lives.

The psychologist, who didn't believe in being solemn with patients, who used cajolery and humor as part of his therapy, whose face seldom played host to a frown, was now scowling.

He said, "This is bad. Very bad. I've always known Grace is a true believer, not just a phony, mining the religious rackets for a buck. She's always been convinced that the world really was coming to an end. But I never believed she was sunk this deep in psychotic fantasy." He sighed and looked out at his twelfth floor view of the storm." You know, she talks a lot about her visions,' uses them to whip her followers into a frenzy. I've always thought that she doesn't really have them, that she merely pretends to have them because she realizes they're a good tool for making converts and keeping disciples in line. By using the visions, she can have God tell her people to do the things she wants them to do, things they might not accept if they didn't think the orders were coming straight down from Heaven."

" But if she's a true believer," Henry said, "how would she justify fakery to herself?"

" Oh, easily, easily," the psychologist said, looking away from the rain-filled February morning." She'd justify it by saying she was only telling her followers things that God would've told them, anyway, if He actually had appeared to her in visions.

The second possibility, which is more disturbing, is that she ac Lually is seeing and hearing God."

" You don't mean literally seeing Him," Henry said, surprised.

" No, no," Boo said, waving one pudgy hand. He was an agnostic, flirting with atheism. He sometimes told Charlie that, considering the miserable state of the world, God must be on extended vacation in Albania, Tahiti, Cleveland or some other remote corner of the universe, where the news just wasn't getting to Him. He said, "I mean that she's seeing and hearing God, but, of course, He's merely a figment of her own sick mind.

Psychotics, if they're far enough over the line, often have visions, sometimes of a religious nature and sometimes not. But I wouldn't have thought Grace had gone that far 'round the bend."

Charlie said, "She's so far gone that they don't even have Taco Bells where she's at."

Boo laughed, not as heartily as Charlie would have liked, but he did laugh, which was better than the scowl that made Chaflie nervous. Boo had no pretensions about his profession and held nothing sacred; he was as likely to use the term "fruitcake" as "mentally disturbed." He said,

"But if Grace has slipped her moorings altogether, then there's something about this situation that's hard to explain."

To Henry, Charlie said, "He loves to explain things. A born pedant.

He'll explain beer to you while you're trying to drink it.

And don't ask him to explain the meaning of life, or we'll be here until our retirement funds start to pay off."

Boothe remained uncharacteristically solemn." It isn't the meaning of life that puzzles me right now. You say Grace has gone 'round the bend, and it certainly sounds as if you may be correct. But you see, if she really believes all this Antichrist stuff, and she's willing to kill an innocent child, then she's evidently a paranoid schizophrenic with apocalyptic fantasies and delusions of grandeur. But it's hard to imagine someone in that condition would be able to function as an authority figure or conduct the business of her cult."

"Maybe someone else is running the cult," Henry said.

"Maybe she's just a figurehead now. Maybe someone else is using her."

Boothe shook his head." It's damned difficult to use a paranoid schizophrenic the way you're suggesting. They're too unpredictable. But if she's really turned violent, has begun to act on her doomsday prophecies, she doesn't have to be crazy. Could be another explanation."

" Such as?" Charlie asked.

"Such as. maybe her followers are disillusioned with her.

Maybe the cult is falling apart, and she's resorting to these drastic measures to renew her disciples' excitement and keep them faithful."

"No," Charlie said." She's nuts." He told Boo about his macabre meeting with Grace just a short while ago.

Boothe was startled." She actually drove nails into her hands? "

"Well, we didn't see her do it," Charlie admitted." Maybe one of her followers wielded the hammer. But she obviously cooperated."

Boo shifted, and his chair creaked." There's another possibility. The spontaneous appearance of crucifixion stigmata on the hands and feet of psychotics with religious persecution complexes is a rare phenomenon but not entirely unheard of."

Henry Rankin was astonished." You mean they were real.?

You mean… God did that to her?"

"Oh, no, I don't mean to imply this was a genuine holy sign or anything of that sort. God had nothing to do with it."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," Charlie told him." I was afraid you were suddenly going mystical on me. And if there are two things I'd never expect you to do, one is to go mystical on me, and the other is to become a ballet dancer."

The worried look on the fat man's face did not soften.

Charlie said, "Jesus, Boo, I'm already scared, but if the situation worries you this much, I'm not half as frightened as I ought to be."

Boothe said, "I am worried. As for the stigmata phenomenon, there is some evidence that, in a Messianic frenzy, a psychotic may exert a control on his body. on tissue structure. an almost, well, psychic control that medical science can't explain.

Like those Indian holy men who walk on hot coals or lie on nails and prevent injury by an act of will. Grace's wounds would be the other side of that coin."

Henry, who liked everything to be reasonable and orderly and predictable, who expected the universe to be as neat and wellpressed as his own wardrobe, was clearly disturbed by talk of psychic abilities. He said, "They can make themselves bleed just by thinking about it?"

"They probably don't even have to think about it, at least not consciously," Boo said." The stigmata are the result of a strong unconscious desire to be a religious figure or symbol, to be venerated, or to be a part of something bigger than self, something cosmic." He folded his hands on his ample stomach." For instance. how much do you know about the supposed miracle at Fatima?"

"Not much," Charlie said.

"The Virgin Mary appeared to a lot of people there, thousands of people," Henry said, "back in the twenties, I think."

"A stunning and moving divine visitation-or one of the most incredible cases of mass hysteria and self-hypnosis ever recorded," Boo said, clearly favoring the second explanation.

"Hundreds of people reported seeing the Virgin Mary and described a turbulent sky seething with all the colors of the rainbow. Among those in the huge crowd, two people developed crucifixion stigmata; one man's hands began to bleed, and nail holes appeared in a woman's feet. Several people claimed to have spontaneously acquired tiny punctures in a ring around their heads, as if from a crown of thorns. There's a documented case of an onlooker weeping tears of blood; subsequent medical examination showed no eye damage whatsoever, no possible source of blood. In short, the mind is still largely an uncharted sea.

There are mysteries in here"-he tapped his head with one thick finger-"that we may never understand."

Charlie shivered. It was creepy to think Grace had descended so far into madness that she could make her body bleed spontaneously for the sole purpose of lending substance to her sick fantasies.

"Of course," Boo said, "you're probably right about the hammer and nails. Spontaneous crucifixion stigmata are rare.

Grace probably did it to herself-or had one of her people do it."

The rain streamed down the walls of glass, and a miserably wet black bird swooped close, seeking escape from the cold downpour, then darted away an instant before crashing through the window.

Considering what Boothe had told them about tears of blood and mentally-inflicted stigmata, Charlie said, "I think I've stumbled across the meaning of life."

"What's that?" Boo asked.

"We're all just actors in a cosmic horror film in God's private movie theater."

"Could be," Boo said." If you read your Bible, you'll see that God can think up more horrible punishments than anything Tobe Hooper or Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock ever dreamed of."

With his binoculars, Sandy Breckenstein had gotten the license plate number the third time the blue Dodge van with the surfing murals had driven by the house. While Christine Scavello had hurried into the kitchen to report the presence of a suspicious vehicle to Max, Sandy had phoned Julie Gethers, the police liaison at Klemet-Harrison, and had asked her to get a make on the Dodge.

While he waited for a response from Julie, he stood tensely by the window, binoculars in hand.

Within five minutes, the van made a fourth pass, heading up the hill this time.

Sandy used the binoculars and saw, indistinctly, two men behind the rain-washed windshield.

They seemed to be studying this house in particular.

Then they were gone. Sandy almost wished they'd parked out front. At least there he could keep an eye on them. He didn't like having them out of sight.

While Sandy stood at the window, chewing on his lip, wishing he had become a certified public accountant like his father, Julie at HQ made contact with the Department of Motor Vehicles and then with the Orange County Sheriffs Department. Thanks to computerization at both agencies, the information was obtained quickly, and she returned Sandy's call in twelve minutes. According to the DMV, the blue van was registered to Emanuel Luis Spado of Anaheim. According to the Sheriffs office, which shared hot sheet data with all other police agencies in the county, Mr.

Spado had reported his vehicle stolen as of six o'clock this morning.

As soon as he had that information, Sandy went into the kitchen to share it with Max, who was equally uneasy about it.

"It's trouble," Max said bluntly.

Christine Scavello, who had moved her son out of the line of fire, into the corner by the refrigerator, said, "But it doesn't belong to the church."

"Yeah, but it could've been someone from the church who stole it," Sandy said.

"To put distance between the church and any attack they might make on us here," Max explained.

"Or it could just be coincidence that someone in a stolen van is cruising this street," the woman said, though she sounded as if she didn't believe it.

"Never met a coincidence I liked," Max said, keeping a watch on the garden behind the house.

"Me either," Sandy said.

"But how did they find us?" Christine demanded.

"Beats me," Sandy said.

"Damned if I know," Max said." We took every precaution."

They all knew the most likely explanation: Grace Spivey had an informer planted at Klemet-Harrison. None of them wanted to say it. The possibility was too unnerving.

"What'd you tell them at HQ?" Max asked.

"To send help," Sandy said.

"You think we should wait for it?"

"No."

"Me neither. We're sitting ducks here. This place was a good idea only as long as we figured they'd never find it. Now, our best chance is to get out, get moving, before they know we've spotted them. They won't be expecting us to suddenly pull up and light out."

Sandy agreed. He turned to Christine." Get your coats on.

You can take only two suitcases, 'cause you'll have to carry them both.

Max and I can't be tied down with luggage on the way to the car; we've got to keep our hands free."

The woman nodded. She looked stricken. The boy was pale and waxy. Even the dog seemed to be worried; it sniffed the air, cocked its head, and made a peculiar whining noise.

Sandy didn't feel so good himself. He knew what had happened to Frank Reuther and Pete Lockburn.

Thunder shook the window-walls.

Rain fell harder than ever.

Heat streamed from the ceiling vents, but Charlie couldn't get rid of a chill that made his hands clammy.

Denton Boothe said, "I've talked with people who knew Grace before this religious fanaticism. Many of them mention how close she and her husband were. Married forty-four years, she idolized the man. Nothing was too good for her Albert. She kept his house exactly as he liked it, cooked only his favorite foods, did everything the way he preferred. The only thing she was never able to give him was the thing he would have liked the most-a son. At his funeral, when she broke down, she kept saying, over and over, 'I never gave him a son." It's conceivable that, to Grace, a male child-any male child-is a symbol of her failure to give her husband what he most desired. While he was alive, she could make up for that failure by treating him like a king, but once he was gone she had no way to atone for her barrenness, and perhaps she began to hate little boys. Hate them, then fear them, then fantasize that one of them was the Antichrist, here to destroy the world. It's an understandable if regrettable progression for psychosis."

Henry said, "If I recall, they did adopt a daughter-"

"The one who had Grace committed for psychiatric evaluation when this Twilight business first came up," Charlie said.

"Yes," Boo said." Grace sold her house, liquidated investments, and put the money into this church. It was irrational, and the daughter was correct in seeking to preserve her mother's estate. But Grace came through the psychiatric evaluation with flying colors-"

"How?" Charlie wondered.

"Well, she was cunning. She knew what the psychiatric examiner was looking for, and she had sufficient control of herself to hide all those attitudes and tendencies that would have set off the alarm bells."

"But she was liquidating property to form a church," Henry said."

Surely the doctor could see that wasn't the act of a rational person."

"On the contrary. Provided she understood the risks of her actions and had a firm grip on all the potential consequences, or at least as long as she convinced the examining doctor that she had a firm grip, the mere fact that she wanted to give everything to God's work would not be sufficient to declare her mentally incompetent. We have religious liberty in this country, you know.

It's an important constitutional freedom, and the law steps respectfully around it in cases like this."

"You've got to help me, Boo," Charlie said." Tell me how this woman thinks. Give me a handle on her. Show me how to turn her off, how to make her change her mind about Joey Scavello."

"This kind of psychopathic personality is not frightened, shaky, about to collapse. Just the opposite. With a cause she believes in, supported by delusions of grandeur that are intensely religious in nature. well, despite appearances to the contrary, she's a rock, utterly resistant to pressure and stress. She lives in a reality that she made for herself, and she's made it so well that there's probably no way you can shake it or pull it apart or cause her to lose faith in it."

"Are you saying I can't change her mind?"

"I would think it's impossible."

"Then how do I make her back off? She's a flake; there must be an easy way to handle her."

"You're not listening-or you don't want to hear what I'm telling you.

You mustn't make the mistake of assuming that, just because she's psychotic, she's vulnerable. This sort of mental problem carries with it a peculiar strength, an ability to withstand rejection, failure, and all forms of stress. You see, Grace evolved her psychotic fantasy for the sole purpose of protecting herself from those things. It's a way of armoring herself against the cruelties and disappointments of life, and it's damned good armor."

Charlie said, "Are you telling me she has no weaknesses?"

"Everyone has weaknesses. I'm just telling you that, in Grace's case, finding them won't be easy. I'll have to look over my file on her, think about it awhile… Give me a day at least."

"Think fast," Charlie said, getting to his feet, "I've got a few hundred homicidal religious fanatics breathing down my neck."

At the door, as they were leaving his office, Boo said, "Charlie, I know you put quite a lot of faith in me sometimes-"

" Yeah, I've got a Messiah complex about you."

Ignoring the joke, still unusually somber, Boo said, "I just don't want you to pin a lot of hope on what I might be able to come up with. In fact, I might not be able to come up with anything. Right now, I'd say there's only one answer, one way to deal with Grace if you want to save your clients."

"What's that?"

" Kill her," Boo said without a smile.

"You certainly aren't one of those bleeding-heart psychiatrists who always want to give mass murderers a second chance at life. Where'd you get your degree-Attila the Hun School of Head-Shrinking?"

He very much wanted Boo to joke with him. The psychiatrist's grim reaction to the story of his meeting with Grace this morning was so out of character that it unsettled Charlie. He needed a laugh. He needed to be told there was a silver lining somewhere. Boo's gray-faced sobriety was almost scarier than Grace Spivey's flamboyant ranting.

But Boo said, "Charlie, you know me. You know I can find something humorous in anything. I chuckle at dementia praecox in certain situations. I am amused by certain aspects of death, taxes, leprosy, American politics, and cancer. I've even been known to smile at reruns of 'Lavem & Shirley' when my grandchildren have insisted I watch with them. But I see nothing to laugh at here. You are a dear friend, Charlie. I'm frightened for you."

" You don't really mean I should kill her."

"I know you couldn't commit cold-blooded murder," Boothe said." But I'm afraid Grace's death is the only thing that might redirect these cultists' attention away from your clients."

"So itd be helpful if I was capable of cold-blooded murder."

"Yes.

"Helpful if I had just a little killer in me."

"Yes." "Jesus.

"A difficult state of affairs," Boo agreed.

The house had no garage, just a carport, which meant they had to expose themselves while getting in the green Chevy. Sandy didn't like it, but there was no other choice except to stay in the house until reinforcements arrived, and his gut instinct told him that would be a mistake.

He left the house first, by the side door, stepping directly into the open carport. The roof kept the rain from falling straight down on him, and latticework covered with climbing honeysuckle kept it from slanting in through the long side of the stall, but the chilly wind drove sheets of rain through the open end of the structure and threw it in his face.

Before giving the all-clear signal for Christine and Joey to come outside, he went to the end of the carport, into the driveway, because he wanted to make sure no one was lurking in front of the house. He wore a coat but went without an umbrella in order to keep his hands free, and the rain beat on his bare head, stung his face, trickled under his collar. No one was at the front door or along the walk or crouching by the shrubbery, so he called back to the woman to get into the car with the boy.

He took a few more steps along the driveway in order to have a look up and down the street, and he saw the blue Dodge van.

It was parked a block and a half up the hill, on the other side of the street, facing down toward the house. Even as he spotted it, the van swung away from the curb and headed toward him.

Sandy glanced back and saw that Christine, lugging two suitcases and accompanied by the dog, had just reached the car, where the boy had opened the rear door for her." Wait!" he shouted to them.

He looked back at the street. The van was coming fast now.

Too damned fast.

" Into the house!" Sandy shouted.

The woman must have been wound up tight because she didn't even hesitate, didn't ask what was wrong, just dropped the suitcases, grabbed her son, and headed back the way she'd come, toward the open door in which Max now stood.

The rest of it happened in a few seconds, but terror distorted Sandy Breckenstein's time sense, so that it seemed as though minutes passed in an unbearably extended panic.

First, the van surprised him by angling all the way across the street and entering the driveway of the house that was two doors uphill from this one. But it wasn't stopping there. It swung out of that driveway almost as soon as it entered, not back into the street but onto the grass. It roared across the lawn in front of that house, coming this way, tearing up grass, casting mud and chunks of sod in its wake, squashing flowers, knocking over a birdbath, engine screaming, tires spinning for a moment but then biting in again, surging forward with maniacal intent.

What the hell The passenger door of the van flew open, and the man on that side threw himself out, struck the lawn, and rolled.

Sandy thought of rats deserting a doomed ship.

The van plowed through the picket fence between the lawn and the next property.

Behind Sandy, Max yelled, "What's happening?"

Now only one house separated the Dodge from this property.

Chewbacca was barking furiously.

The driver gave the van more gas. It was coming fast, like an express train, like a rocket.

The intent was clear. Crazy as it seemed, the van was going to ram the house in which they'd been hiding.

"Get out!" Sandy shouted back toward Christine and Joey and Max." Out of the house, away from here, fast!"

Max plunged out of the house, and the three of them-and the dog-fled toward the back yard, which was the only way they could go.

Uphill, the Dodge swerved to avoid a jacaranda in the neighboring yard and struck the fence between this property and that one.

Sandy had already turned away from the van. He was already running back along the side of the house.

Behind him, the picket fence gave way with a sound like cracking bones.

Sandy raced through the carport, past the car, leaping over the abandoned suitcases, yelling at the others to hurry, for God's sake hurry, screaming at them to get out of the way, urging them into the rear lawn, and then toward the back fence, beyond which lay a narrow alley.

But they didn't get all the way to the rear of the small lot before the van rammed into the house with a tremendous crash.

A split second later, an ear-pulverizing explosion shook the rainchoked day, and for a moment it sounded as if the sky itself was falling, and the earth rose violently, fell.

The van had been packed full of explosives!

The blast picked Sandy up and pitched him, and he felt a wave of hot air smash over him, and then he was tumbling across the lawn, through a row of azaleas, into the board fence by the alleyway, jarring his right shoulder, and he saw fire where the house had been, fire and smoke, shooting up in a dazzling column, and there was flying debris, a lot of it-chunks of masonry, splintered boards, roofing shingles, lath and plaster, glass, the padded back of an armchair that was leaking stuffing, the cracked lid of a toilet seat, sofa cushions, a piece of carpeting-and he tucked his head down and prayed that he wouldn't be struck by anything heavy or sharp.

As debris pummeled him, he wondered if the driver of the van had leaped out as the man on the passenger's side had done.

Had he jumped free at the last moment-or had he been so committed to murdering Joey Scavello that he had remained behind the wheel, piloting the Dodge all the way into the house?

Maybe he was now sitting in the rubble, flesh stripped from his bones, his skeletal hands still clutching the fire-blackened steering wheel.

The explosion was like a giant hand that slammed Christine in the back.

Briefly deafened by the blast, she was thrown away from Joey, knocked down. In a temporary but eerie silence, she rolled through a muddy flower bed, crushing dense clusters of bright red and purple impatiens, aware of billowing waves of superheated air that seemed to vaporize the falling rain for a moment. She cracked a knee painfully against the low brick edging that ringed the planting area, tasted dirt, and came to rest against the side of the arbor, which was thickly entwined with bougainvillaea. Still in silence, cedar shingles and shattered pieces of stucco and unidentifiable rubble fell on her and on the garden around her. Then her hearing began to return when the toaster, which she had so recently used when making breakfast, clanged onto the grass and noisily hopped along for some distance, as if it were a living thing, trailing its cord like a tail. An enormously heavy object, perhaps a roof beam or a large chunk of masonry, slammed down into the roof of the ten-foot-long, tunnel-like arbor, collapsing it.

The wall against which she was leaning sagged inward, and torn bougainvillaea runners drooped over her, and she realized how close she had come to being killed.

"Joey!" she shouted.

He didn't answer.

She pushed away from the ruined arbor, onto her hands and knees, then staggered to her feet, swaying.

"Joey!”

No answer.

Foul-smelling smoke poured across the lawn from the demolished house; combined with the lingering fog and the windwhipped rain, it reduced visibility to a few feet. She couldn't see her boy, and she didn't know where to look, so she struck off blindly to her left, finding it difficult to breathe because of the acrid smoke and because of her own panic, which was like a vise squeezing her chest. She came upon the scorched and mangled door of the refrigerator, forced her way between two miniature orange trees, one of which was draped in a tangled bed sheet, and walked across the rear door of the house, which was lying flat on the grass, thirty feet from the frame in which it had once stood. She saw Max Steck. He was alive, trying to extricate himself from the thorny trailers of several rose bushes, among which he had been tossed. She moved past him, still calling Joey, still getting no answer, and then, among all the other rubble, her gaze settled on a strangely unnerving object.

It was Joey's E.T. doll, one of his favorite toys, which had been left behind in the house. The blast had torn off both of the doll's legs and one of its arms. Its face was scorched. Its round little belly was ripped open, and stuffing bulged out of the rent. It was only a doll, but somehow it seemed like a harbinger of death, a warning of what she would find when she finally located Joey. She began to run, keeping the fence in sight, circling the property, frantically searching for her son, tripping, falling, pushing up again, praying that she would find him whole, alive.

"Joey! "

Nothing.

"Joey! "

Nothing.

The smoke stung her eyes. It was hard to see.

"Joooeeeeey! "

Then she spotted him. He was lying at the back of the property, near the gate to the alley, face down on the rain-soaked grass, motionless.

Chewbacca was standing over him, nuzzling his neck, trying to get a response out of him, but the boy wouldn't respond, couldn't, just lay there, still, so very still.

She knelt and nudged the dog out of the way.

She put her hands on Joey's shoulders.

For a moment she was afraid to turn him over, afraid that his face had been smashed in or his eyes punctured by flying debris.

Sobbing, coughing as another tide of smoke lapped out from the burning ruins behind them, she finally rolled him gently onto his back. His face was unmarked. There were smears of dirt but no cuts or visible fractures, and the rain was swiftly washing even the dirt away. She could see no blood. Thank God.

His eyelids fluttered. Opened. His eyes were unfocused.

He had merely been knocked unconscious.

The relief that surged through her was so powerful that it made her feel buoyant, as if she were floating inches off the ground.

She held him, and when his eyes finally cleared, she checked him for concussion by holding up three fingers in front of his face and asking him how many he saw.

He blinked and looked confused.

"How many fingers, honey?" she repeated.

He wheezed a few times, getting smoke out of his lungs, then said,

"Three. Three fingers."

"Now how many?"

Having freed himself from the thorn-studded rose bushes, Max Steck joined them.

To Joey, Christine said, "Do you know who I am?"

He seemed puzzled, not because he had trouble finding the answer but because he couldn't figure out why she was asking the question." You're Mom," he said.

"And what's your name?"

"Don't you know my name?"

"I want to see if you know it," she said.

"Well, sure, I know it," he said." Joey. Joseph. Joseph Antheny Scavello." No concussion.

Relieved, she hugged him tight.

Sandy Breckenstein crouched beside them, coughing smoke out of his lungs. His forehead was cut above his left eye, and blood sheathed one side of his face, but he wasn't seriously hurt.

"Can the boy be moved?" Breckenstein asked.

"He's fine," Max Steck said.

"Then let's get out of here. They may come nosing around to see if the explosives took care of us."

Max unlatched the gate, pushed it open.

Chewbacca dashed through, into the alleyway, and the rest of them followed.

It was a narrow alley, with the back yards of houses on both sides of it, as well as a garage here and there, and lots of garbage cans awaiting pickup. There were no gutters or drains, and water streamed down the width of the one-lane passage, rushing toward storm culverts at the bottom of the hill.

As the four of them sloshed into the middle of the shallow stream, trying to decide which way to go, another gate opened two doors up the hill, and a tall man in a hooded yellow rain slicker came out of another yard. Even in the rain and the gloom, Christine could see that he was carrying a gun.

Max brought up his revolver, gripping it in both hands, and shouted,

"Drop it!"

But the stranger opened fire.

Max fired, too, three shots in quick succession, and he was a much better marksman than his enemy. The would-be assassin was hit in the leg and fell even as the sound of the shots roared up the hillside. He rolled, splashing through the rivulet, his yellow rain slicker flapping like the wings of an enormous and brightly colored bird. He collided with two garbage cans, knocked them over, half-disappeared under a spreading mound of refuse. The gun flew out of his hand, spun along the macadam.

They didn't even wait to see if the man was dead or alive.

There might be other Twilighters nearby.

"Let's get out of this neighborhood," Max said urgently." Get to a phone, call this in, get a backup team out here."

With Sandy and Chewbacca leading the way and Max bringing up the rear, they ran down the hill, slipping and sliding a bit on the slick macadam but avoiding a fall.

Christine looked back a couple of times.

The wounded man had not gotten up from the garbage in which he'd landed.

No one was pursuing them.

Yet.

They turned right at the first corner, raced along a flat street that ran across the side of the hill, past a startled mailman who jumped out of their way. A ferocious wind sprang up, as if giving chase. As they fled, the wind-shaken trees tossed and shuddered around them, and the brittle branches of palms clattered noisily, and an empty soda can tumbled along at their heels.

After two blocks, they left the flat street and turned into an other steeply sloped avenue. Overhanging trees formed a tunnel across the roadway and added to the gloom of the sunless day, so that it almost seemed like evening rather than morning.

Breath burned in Christine's throat. Her eyes still stung from the smoke they had left behind them, and her heart was beating so hard and fast that her chest ached. She didn't know how much farther she could go at this pace. Not far.

She was surprised that Joey's little legs could pump this fast.

The rest of them weren't keeping back much on account of the boy; he could hold his own.

A car was coming up the hill, headlights stabbing out before it, cutting through the thinning mist and the deep shadows cast by the huge trees.

Christine was suddenly sure that Grace Spivey's people were behind those lights. She grabbed Joey by one shoulder, turned him in another direction.

Sandy shouted at her to stay with him, and Max shouted something she couldn't make out, and Chewbacca began barking loudly, but she ignored them.

Didn't they see death coming?

She heard the car's engine growing louder behind her. It sounded feral, hungry.

Joey stumbled on a canted section of sidewalk, went down, skidding into someone's front yard.

She threw herself on him to protect him from the gunfire she expected to hear at any second.

The car drew even with them. The sound of its laboring engine filled the world.

She cried out, "No!"

But the car went by without stopping. It hadn't been Grace Spivey's people, after all.

Christine felt foolish as Max Steck helped her to her feet. The entire world wasn't after them. It only seemed that way.

In downtown Laguna Beach, in an Arco Service Station they took shelter from the storm and from Grace Spivey's disciples.

After Sandy Breckenstein showed the manager his PI license and explained enough of the situation to gain cooperation, they were allowed to bring Chewbacca into the service bay, as long as they tied him securely to a tool rack. Sandy didn't want to let the dog outside, not only because it would get wet-it was already soaked and shivering-but because there was a possibility, however insignificant, that Spivey's people might be cruising around town, looking for them, and might spot the dog.

While Max stayed with Christine and Joey at the rear of the service bays, away from doors and windows, Sandy used the pay phone in the small, glassed-in sales room. He called KlemetHarrison. Charlie wasn't in the office. Sandy spoke with Sherry Ordway, the receptionist, and explained enough of their situation to make her understand the seriousness of it, but he wouldn't tell her where they were or at what number they could be reached. He doubted that Sherry was the informant who was reporting to the Church of the T, but he could not be absolutely sure where her loyalties might lie.

He said, "Find Charlie. I'll only talk to him."

"But how's he going to know where to reach you?" Sherry asked.

"I'll call back in fifteen minutes."

"If I can't get hold of him in fifteen minutes-"

"I'll call back every fifteen minutes until you do," he said, and hung up.

He returned to the humid service bays, which smelled of oil and grease and gasoline. A three-year-old Toyota was up on one of the two hydraulic racks, and a fox-faced man in gray coveralls was replacing the muffler. Sandy told Max and Christine that it was going to take awhile to reach Charlie Harrison.

The pump jockey, a young blond guy, was mounting new tires on a set of custom chrome wheels, and Joey was watching, fascinated by the specialized power tools, obviously bubbling over with questions but trying not to bother the man with more than a few of them. The poor kid was soaked to the skin, muddy, bedraggled, yet he wasn't complaining or whining as most children would have been doing in these circumstances.

He was a damned good kid, and he seemed able to find a positive side to any situation; in this case, getting to watch tires being mounted appeared to be sufficient compensation for the ordeal he had just been through.

Seven months ago, Sandy's wife, Maryann, had given birth to a boy. Troy Franklin Breckenstein. Sandy hoped his son would turn out to be as well-behaved as Joey Scavello.

Then he thought: If I'm going to wish for anything, maybe I'd better wish that I live long enough to see Troy grow up, whether or not he's well-behaved.

When fifteen minutes had passed, Sandy returned to the sales room out front, went to the phone by the candy machine, and called Sherry Ordway at HQ. She had beeped Charlie on his telepage, but he hadn't yet called in.

The rain bounced off the macadam in front of the station, and the street began to disappear under a deep puddle, and the pump jockey finished another tire, and Sandy was jumpier than ever when he called the office a third time.

Sherry said, "Charlie's at the police lab with Henry Rankin, trying to find out if forensics discovered anything about those bodies at the Scavello house that would help him tie them to Grace Spivey."

"That sounds like a long shot."

"I guess it's the best he has," Sherry said.

That was more bad news.

She gave him the number where Charlie could be reached, and he jotted it down in a small notebook he carried.

He dialed the forensics lab, asked for Charlie, and had him on the line right away. He told him about the attack on Miriam Rankin's house, laying it out in more detail than he'd given Sherry Ordway.

Charlie had heard the worst of it from Sherry, but he still sounded shocked and dismayed by how quickly Spivey had located the Scavellos.

"They're both all right?" he asked.

"Dirty and wet, but unhurt," Sandy assured him.

"So we've got a turncoat among us," Charlie said.

"Looks that way. Unless you were followed when you left their house last night."

"I'm sure we weren't. But maybe the car we used had a bug on it."

" Could be."

"But probably not," Charlie said." I hate to admit it, but we've probably got a mole in our operation. Where are you calling from?"

Instead of telling him, Sandy said, "Is Henry Rankin with you? "

"Yeah. Right here. Why? You want to talk to him?"

"No. I just want to know if he can hear this."

"Not your side of it."

"If I tell you where we are, it's got to stay with you. Only you,"

Sandy said. He quickly added: "It's not that I have reason to suspect Henry of being Spivey's plant. I don't. I trust Henry more than most.

The point is, I don't really trust anyone but you. You, me-and Max, because if it was Max, he'd already have snuffed the kid."

"If we do have a bad apple," Charlie said, "it's most likely a secretary or bookkeeper or something like that."

"I know," Sandy said." But I've got a responsibility to the woman and the kid. And my own life's on the line here, too, as long as I'm with them."

"Tell me where you are," Charlie said." I'll keep it to myself, and I'll come alone."

Sandy told him.

"This weather. better give me forty-five minutes," Charlie said.

"We're not going anywhere," Sandy said.

He hung up and went out to the garage to be with the others.

When the rains had first come, yesterday evening, there had been a brief period of lightning, but none in the past twelve hours. Most California storms were much quieter than those in other parts of the country. Lightning was not a common accompaniment of the rains here, and wildly violent electrical storms were rare. But now, with its hills grown dangerously soggy and with the threat of mudslides at hand, with its streets awash, with its coastline hammered by wind-whipped waves almost twice as high as usual, Laguna Beach was suddenly assaulted by fierce bolts of lightning as well. With a crash of accompanying thunder that shook the walls of the building, a cataclysmic bolt stabbed to earth somewhere nearby, and the gray day was briefly, flickeringly bright. With strobelike effect, the light pulsed through the open doors of the garage and through the dirty high-set windows, bringing a moment of frenzied life to the shadows, which twisted and danced for a second or two. Another bolt quickly followed with an even harder clap of thunder, and loose windows rattled in their frames, and then a third bolt smashed down, and the wet macadam in front of the station glistened and flashed with scintillant reflections of nature's bright anger.

Joey had drifted away from his mother, toward the open doors of the garage bays. He winced at the crashes of thunder that followed each lightning strike, but he seemed pretty much unafraid. When the skies calmed for a moment, he looked back at his mother and said, "Wow! God's fireworks, huh, Mom? Isn't that what you said it is?"

"God's fireworks," Christine agreed." Better get away from there."

Another bolt arced across the sky, and the day outside seemed to leap as the murderous current jolted through it. This one was worse than all the others, and the blast from it not only rattled windows and made the walls tremble, but seemed to shake the ground as well, and Sandy even felt it in his teeth.

"Wow!" the boy said.

"Honey, get away from that open door," Christine said.

The boy didn't move, and in the next instant he was silhouetted by a chain of lightning strikes far brighter and more violent than anything yet, so dazzling and shocking in their power that the pump jockey was startled enough to drop a lug wrench. The dog whimpered and tried to hide under the tool rack, and Christine scurried to Joey, grabbed him, and brought him back from the open doorway.

"Aw, Mom, it's pretty," he said.

Sandy tried to imagine what it would be like to be young again, so young that you hadn't yet realized how much there was to fear in this world, so young that the word "cancer" had no definition, so young that you hadn't any real grip on the meaning of death or the inevitability of taxes or the horror of nuclear war or the treacherous nature of the clot-prone human circulatory system. What would it be like to be that young again, so young that you could watch storm lightning with delight, unaware that it might find its way to you and fry your brains in one tenthousandth of a second? Sandy stared at Joey Scavello and frowned.

He felt old, only thirty-two but terribly old.

What bothered him was that he couldn't remember ever having been that young and free of fear, though surely he had been just as innocent of death when he was six. They said that animals lived their lives with no sense of mortality, and it seemed terribly unjust that men didn't have the same luxury. Human beings couldn't escape the knowledge of their death; consciously or subconsciously, it was with them every hour of every day. If Sandy could have had a word with this religious fanatic, this Grace Spivey, he would have wanted to know how she could have such faith in-and devotion for-a God who created human beings only to let them die by one horrible means or another.

He sighed. He was getting morbid, and that wasn't like him.

At this rate he would need more than his usual bottle of beer before bed tonight-like a dozen bottles. Still. he would like to ask Grace Spivey that question.

Shortly before noon, Charlie arrived in Laguna Beach, where he found Sandy, Max, Christine, Joey and the dog waiting for him in the service station.

Joey ran to him, met him just inside the garage doors, shouting, "Hey, Charlie, you shoulda seen the house go boom, just like in a war movie or somethin'! "

Charlie scooped him up and held him." I expected you to be mad at us for slipping up. I thought you'd insist on hiring Magnum again."

"Heck, no," the boy said." Your guys were great. Anyway, how could you've known it was gonna turn into a war movie?"

How indeed?

Charlie carried Joey to the rear of the garage, where the others stood in the shadows between shelves of spare parts and stacks of tires.

Sandy had told him that the woman and the boy were all right, and of course he believed Sandy, but his stomach finally unknotted only now that he saw them with his own eyes. The wave of relief that washed through him was a physical and not just emotional force, and he was reminded-though he didn't need reminding-of just how important these two people had become to him in such a short period of time.

They were a miserable-looking group, pretty much dried out by now, but rumpled and mud-streaked, hair lank and matted.

Max and Sandy looked rough, angry, and dangerous, the kind of men who cleared out a bar just by walking into it.

It was a tribute to Christine's beauty, and an indication of its depth, that she looked almost as good now as when she was scrubbed and fresh and neatly groomed. Charlie remembered how it had felt to hold her, last night in the kitchen of Miriam Rankin's little house, just before he'd gone home, and he wanted to hold her again, felt a warm melting need to hold her, but in front of his men he could do nothing but put Joey down, take her hand in both of his, and say, "Thank God you're all right."

Her lower lip quivered. For a moment she looked as if she would lean against him and cry. But she kept control of herself and said, "I keep telling myself it's just a nightmare. but I can't wake up."

Max said, "We ought to get them out of here now, out of Laguna."

"I agree," Charlie said." I'll take them right now, in my car.

After we've left, you two call the office, tell Sherry where you are, and have a car sent out. Go back up the hill to Miriam's house-"

"There's not anything left of it," Sandy said.

"That was one hell of a blast," Max confirmed." The van mustve been packed wall to wall with explosives."

"There might not be anything left of the house," Charlie said, "but the cops and fire department are still up there. Sherry's been checking into it with the Laguna Beach police, and I talked with heron the phone, coming down here. Report to the cops, help them any way you can, and find out what they've come up with."

"Did they find the guy in the alley, the one I shot?" Max asked.

"Nope," Charlie said." He got away."

"He'd have tove crawled. I shot him in the leg."

"Then he crawled," Charlie said." Or there was a third man around who helped him escape."

"Third?" Sandy said.

"Yeah," Charlie said." Sherry says the second man stayed with the van all the way into the house."

"Jesus."

"They are kamikazes," Christine said shakily.

"There mustn't have been anything left of him but a lot of little pieces," Max said and would have said more, but Charlie stopped him by nodding toward the boy, who was listening, mouth agape.

They were silent, contemplating the van driver's violent demise. The rain on the roof was like the solemn drums in a funeral cortege.

Then the mechanic switched on a power wrench, and all of them jumped at the sudden, clangorous noise.

When the mechanic switched the wrench off, Charlie looked at Christine and said, "Okay, let's get out of here."

Suspiciously studying everything that moved in the rainbattered day, Max and Sandy accompanied them to the gray Mercedes in front of the service station. Christine sat up front with Charlie, and Joey got in back with Chewbacca.

Sitting behind the steering wheel, speaking to Sandy and Max through the open window, Charlie said, "You did a damned fine job." "Almost lost them," Sandy said, turning aside the praise.

"Point is-you didn't," Charlie said." And you're safe, too."

If another of his men had died so soon after the deaths of Pete and Frank, he wasn't sure how he could have handled it. From here on, only he would know where Christine and Joey were.

His men would be working on the case, trying to link the Church of the Twilight to these murders and attempted murders, but only he would know the whereabouts of their clients until Grace Spivey was somehow stopped.

That way, the old woman's spies wouldn't be able to find Christine and Joey, and Charlie wouldn't have to worry about losing another man. His own life was the only one he would be risking.

He put up his window, locked all the doors with the master switch, and drove away from the service station.

Laguna was actually a lovely, warm, clean, vital beach town, but today it seemed drab, cloaked in rain and gray mist and mud. It made Charlie think of graveyards, and it seemed to close in around them like the descending lid of a coffin. He breathed a bit easier when they were out of town, heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Christine turned and looked at Joey, who was sitting quietly in the back of the car. Brandy. no, Chewbacca was lying on the seat, his big furry head in the boy's lap. Joey was listlessly petting the dog and staring out the window at the ocean, which was choppy and wind-tossed in front of a dense wall of ash-gray fog moving shoreward from half a mile out. His face was almost expressionless, almost blank, but not quite. There was a subtle expression, something she had never seen on his face before, and she couldn't read it. What was he thinking? Feeling? She had already asked him twice if he was all right, and he had said he was. She didn't want to nag him, but she was worried.

She wasn't merely concerned about his physical safety, although that fear gnawed at her. She was also worried about his mental condition. If he did survive Grace Spivey's demented crusade against him, what emotional scars would he carry with him for the rest of his life? It was impossible that he would come through these experiences unmarked.

There would have to be psychological consequences.

Now he continued to stroke the dog's head but in a hypnotic fashion, as if not fully aware that the animal was there with him, and he stared at the ocean beyond the window.

Charlie said, "The police want me to bring you in for more questioning

" "The hell with them," Christine said.

"They're more inclined to help now-"

"It took all these deaths to get their attention."

"Don't write them off. Sure, we'll do a betterjob of protecting you than they can, and we might turn up something that'll help them nail Grace Spivey for all this. But now that they've got a homicide investigation under way, they'll do most of the work leading up to the indictments and convictions. They'll be the ones to stop her."

"I don't trust the cops," she said flatly." Spivey probably has people planted there."

"She can't have infiltrated every police force in the country.

She doesn't have that many followers."

"Not every police force," Christine said." Just those in the towns where she carries on her fund raising and seeks out her converts."

"The Laguna Beach police want to talk to you, too, of course, about what happened this morning."

"To hell with them, too. Even if none of them belongs to the Church of the TWilight, Spivey might be expecting me to show up at police headquarters; she might have people watching, waiting to cut us down the minute we step out of the car." She had a sudden terrible thought and said: "You're not taking us to any police station, are you?"

"No," he said." I only said they want to talk to you. I didn't say I thought it was a good idea."

She sagged back against the seat." Are there any good ideas?"

"Got to keep your chin up."

"I mean, what're we going to do now? We have no clothes, nothing but what we've got on our backs. My purse and credit cards. That's not much. We've got nowhere to stay. We don't dare go to our friends or anywhere else we're known. They've got us on the run like a couple of wild animals."

"It's not quite that bad," he said." Hunted animals don't have the luxury of fleeing in a Mercedes Benz."

She appreciated his attempt to make her smile, but she couldn't find the will to do so.

The thump-thump-thump of the windshield wipers sounded like a strange, inhuman heartbeat.

Charlie said, "We'll go into L.A., I think. The Church of the Twilight does some work in the city, but most of its activities are centered in Orange and San Diego Counties. There're fewer of Grace's people floating around in L.A., so there'll be less chance of anyone accidentally spotting us. In fact, almost no chance at all."

"They're everywhere," she said.

"Be optimistic," he said." Remember little ears."

She glanced back at Joey, a pang of guilt cutting through her at the realization that she might be frightening him. But he seemed not to have been paying attention to the conversation in the front seat. He still stared out the window, not at the ocean any longer but at the array of shops along the highway in Corona Del Mar.

"In L.A., we'll buy suitcases, clothes, toiletries, whatever you need,"

Charlie said.

"Then? "

"We'll have dinner."

"Then?"

"Find a hotel."

"What if one of her people works at the hotel?"

"What if one of her people is mayor of Peking?" Charlie said.

"We'd better not go to China, either."

She found a weak smile for him, after all. It wasn't much, but it was all she had in her, and she was surprised she could respond even that well.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what? Being human? Human and afraid?"

"I don't want to get hysterical."

"Then don't."

" won't."

"Good. Because there are favorable developments."

"Such as?"

"One of the three dead men from last night-the red-head you shot-has been identified. His name's Pat O'Hara. They were able to get positive ID on him because he's a professional burglar with three arrests and one conviction on his record."

"Burglar?" she said, baffled by this unexpected introduction of a more ordinary criminal element.

"The cops have done better than come up with a name for him. They can also tie him to Grace."

She sat up straight, startled." How?"

"His family and friends say he joined the Church of the Twilight eight months ago."

"Then there it is!" she said, excited." There's what they need to go after Grace Spivey."

"Well, they've gone back to the church to talk to her again, of course"

"That's all? Just talk to her?"

"At this point, they don't have any proof-"

"O'Hara was one of hers!"

"But there's no proof he was acting on her say-so.

"They all do what she tells them, exactly what she tells them."

"But Grace claims her church believes in free will, that none of her people is any more controlled than Catholics or Presbyterians, no more brainwashed than any Jew in any synagogue."

" Bullshit," she said softly but with feeling.

"True," he said." But it's damned hard to prove it, especially since we can't put our hands on any ex-members of the church who might tell us what it's like in there."

Some of her excitement drained away." Then what good does it do us to have O'Hara identified as a Twilighter?"

"Well, it gives some substance to your claims that Grace is harassing you. The cops take your story a whole lot more seriously now than they first did, and that can't hurt."

"We need more than that."

"There's a little something else."

"What? "

"O'Hara-or maybe it was the other guy who came with him-left something outside your house. An airline flight bag. There were burglary tools in it, but there were others things, too. A large plastic jar full of a colorless liquid that turned out to be ordinary water. They don't know why it was there, what purpose it was meant to serve. More of interest was a small brass crossand a copy of the Bible."

"Doesn't that prove they were there on some crackpot religious mission?"

"Doesn't prove it, no, but it's interesting, anyway. It's one more knot in the hangman's noose, one more little thing that helps build a case against Grace Spivey."

"At this rate we'll have her in court by the turn of the century,"

Christine said sourly.

They were traveling MacArthur Boulevard now, climbing and descending a series of hills that took them past Fashion Island, past hundreds of million-dollar homes, a marshy area of backwater from Newport Bay, and fields of tall grass that bent with the driving rain and then stood straight up and quivered as the erratic storm wind abruptly changed directions. In spite of the fact that it was midday, most of the cars in the oncoming lane had their headlights on.

Christine said, "The police know what Grace Spivey teaches about the coming of Twilight, doomsday, the Antichrist?"

"Yes. They know all of it," Charlie said.

"They know she thinks the Antichrist is already among us?"

"Yes."

"And they know that she's spent the past few years searching for him?"

"Yes."

"And that she intends to kill him when she finds him?"

"She's never said as much in a speech or in any of the religious literature she's had published."

"But that is what she intends. We know it."

"What we know and what we can prove are two different things."

"The police should be able to see that this is why she's fixated on Joey and-"

"Last night, when the police questioned her, she denied knowing you and Joey, denied the scene at South Coast Plaza.

She says she doesn't understand what you have against her, why you're trying to smear her. She said she hadn't found the Antichrist yet and didn't even think she was close. They asked her what she would do if she ever found him, and she said she'd direct prayers against him. They asked if she would try to kill him, and she pretended to be outraged by the very idea. She said she was a woman of God, not a criminal. She said prayer would be enough. She said she'd chain the devil in prayers, bind him up with prayers, drive him back to Hell with nothing but prayer." "And of course they believed her."

"No. I talked to a detective this morning, read the report of their session with her. They think she's unbalanced, probably dangerous, and ought to be considered the primary suspect in the attempts on your lives."

She was surprised.

He said, "You see? You've got to be more positive. Things are happening. Not as fast as you'd like, no, because there are procedures the police must follow, rules of evidence, constitutional rights that must be respected-"

"Sometimes it seems like the only people who have constitutional rights are the criminals among us."

"I know. But we've got to work within the system as best we can."

They passed the Orange County Airport and got on the San Diego Freeway, heading north toward Los Angeles.

Christine glanced back at Joey. He was no longer staring out the window or petting the dog. He was slumped down in a corner of the back seat, eyes closed, mouth open, breathing softly and deeply. The motion of the car had lulled him to sleep.

To Charlie, she said, "What worries me is that while we have to work within the system, slowly and carefully, that Spivey bitch doesn't have any rules holding her back. She can move fast and be brutal. While we're treading carefully around her fights, she'll kill us all."

"She might self-destruct first," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"I went to the church this morning. I met her. She's completely around the bend, Christine. Utterly irrational. Coming apart at the seams."

He told her about his meeting with the old woman, about the bloody stigmata on her hands and feet.

If he intended to reassure her by painting a picture of Grace Spivey as a babbling lunatic teetering on the edge of collapse, he failed. The intensity of the old woman's madness only made her seem more threatening, more predictable, more relentless than ever.

"Have you reported this to the cops?" Christine asked." Have you told them that she threatened Joey to your face?"

" No. It would just be my word against hers."

He told her about his discussion with Denton Boothe, his friend the psychologist." Boo says a psychotic of this sort has surprising strength. He says we shouldn't expect her to collapse and solve this problem for us-but then he didn't see her. If he'd been there with me and Henry, in her office, when she held up her bleeding hands, he'd know she can't hold it together much longer."

"Did he have any suggestions, any ideas about how to stop her? "

"He said the best way was to kill her," Charlie said, smiling.

Christine didn't smile.

He glanced away from the rain-swept freeway long enough to gauge her reaction, then said, "Of course, Boo was joking."

"Was he really?"

"Well. no. he sort of meant it. but he knew it wasn't an option we could seriously consider."

"Maybe it is the only answer."

He looked at her again, his brow creased with worry." I hope you're joking."

She said nothing.

"Christine, if you could somehow get her with a gun, if you killed her, you'd only wind up in prison. The state would take Joey away from you.

You'd lose him anyway. Killing Grace Spivey isn't the answer."

She sighed and nodded. She didn't want to argue about it.

But she wondered.

Maybe she would end up in prison, and maybe they would take Joey away from her, but as least he would still be alive.

When Charlie pulled the Mercedes off the freeway at the Wilshire Boulevard ramp, on the west side of L.A., Joey woke and yawned noisily and wanted to know where they were.

"Westwood," Charlie said.

"I never been to Westwood," Joey said.

"Oh?" Charlie said." I thought you were a man of the world.

I thought you'd been everywhere."

"How could I have been everywhere?" the boy asked." I'm only six."

"Plenty old enough tove been everywhere," Charlie said.

"Why, by the time I was six, I'd been all the way from my home in Indiana clear to Peoria."

"Is that a dirty word?" the boy asked suspiciously.

Charlie laughed and saw that Christine was laughing, too.

"Peoria? No, that's not a dirty word; it's a place. I guess you aren't a man of the world after all. A man of the world would know Peoria as well as he'd know Paris."

"Mom, what's he talking about?"

"He's just being silly, honey."

"That's what I thought," the boy said." Lots of detectives act that way sometimes. Jim Rockford's silly like that sometimes, too."

"That's where I picked it up," Charlie said." From good old Jim Rockford."

They parked the car in the underground garage beside the Westwood Playhouse, across the street from UCLA, and went shopping for clothes and necessities in Westwood Village, putting everything on credit cards.

In spite of the circumstances, in spite of the weather, it was a rather pleasant excursion. There were overhangs or awnings in front of all the stores, and they could always find a dry place to tie Chewbacca while they went inside to browse. The incredible downpour, which was the main topic of conversation among all the salesclerks, helped explain Joey's and Christine's rumpled and bedraggled appearance; no one looked at them askance. Charlie made jokes about some of the clothes they tried on, and Joey held his nose as if detecting a pungent odor when Charlie pretended to consider a loud orange sportshirt, and after a while it almost seemed as if they were an ordinary family on an ordinary outing in a world where all the religious fanatics were over in the Middle East somewhere, fighting over their oil and their mosques. It was nice to think that the three of them were a unit, sharing special bonds, and Charlie felt another surge of that domestic yearning that had never come upon him until he had met Christine Scavello.

They made two trips back to the car to put their purchases in the trunk.

When Christine and Joey had everything they needed, they went to a couple of stores to outfit Charlie, as well. Because he didn't want to risk returning to his own house, where he might pick up a tail, he bought a suitcase, toiletries, and three days worth of clothes.

Several times they saw people on the street who seemed to be watching them or were otherwise suspicious, but in each instance the danger proved to be imaginary, and gradually they relaxed a bit. They were still watchful, alert, but they no longer felt as if there were armed maniacs lurking around every corner.

They finished shopping just as the stores were closing, and by the time they found a cozy-looking restaurant-nothing fancy but with lots of satiny-looking dark wood and stained-glass windows, and a menu rich with fattening speciallies like potato skins stuffed with cheese and bacon-it was almost five-thirty.

It was early for dinner, but they hadn't eaten lunch, and they were starved.

They ordered drinks, and then Christine took Joey to the ladies' room with her, where both of them washed up a bit and changed into some of the new clothes they'd bought.

While they were thus engaged, Charlie used a pay phone to ring the office. Sherry was still at her desk, and she put him through to Henry Rankin, who'd been awaiting his call, but Henry didn't have much news to report. From the results of lab tests, the police believed the stolen blue Dodge van had been carrying a couple of cases of a moldable plastic explosive favored by more than one branch of the United States armed forces, but they couldn't possibly work back to the point at which the stuff had been purchased or stolen. Henry's Aunt Miriam had been reached in Mexico, was shocked at the news that her house was gone, but didn't blame Henry. She didn't seem disposed to return early from her trip, partly because there wasn't anything left to salvage from the rubble anyway, partly because insurance would cover the loss, partly because she had always taken bad news well, but mainly because she had encountered an interesting man in Acapulco. His name was Ernesto. Those were the only recent developments.

"I'll check in twice a day to see how the case is progressing and to make suggestions," Charlie said.

"If I have any news about Aunt Miriam and Emesto, I'll save that for you, too."

"I'd appreciate it."

They were both silent a moment, neither of them in a mood to carry the joke any further.

Finally Henry said, "You think it's wise for you to try to protect them all by yourself?"

"It's the only way."

"I find it hard to believe Spivey has someone planted here, but I'm putting everyone under the microscope, looking for the disease. If one of them's a Twilighter, I'll find him."

"I know you will," Charlie said. He wasn't going to mention that another operative, Mike Specklovitch, was checking up on Henry, at Charlie's orders, while Henry was checking up on everyone else. He felt guilty about that betrayal of trust, even though is was unavoidable.

"Where are you now?" Henry asked.

"The Australian outback," Charlie said.

"What? Oh. None of my business, huh?"

"I'm sorry, Henry."

"That's all right. You're playing it the only way you possibly can,"

Henry said, but he sounded slightly wounded by Charlie's distrust.

Depressed about the way this case was fracturing the muchvalued camaraderie among his employees, Charlie hung up and returned to the table. The waitress was just putting down his vodka martini. He ordered another one even before sipping the first, then took a look at the menu.

Christine returned from the ladies' room in tan corduroy jeans and a green blouse, carrying a bag filled with their old clothes and a few toiletries. Joey wore blue jeans and a cowboy shirt of which he was particularly proud. Their outfits were in need of a steam iron, but they were cleaner and fresher than the clothes they had been wearing since fleeing Miriam Rankin's doomed house in Laguna Beach. Indeed, regardless of the wrinkles in her blouse, Christine looked no worse than stunning, and Charlie's heart lifted again at the sight of her.

By the time they left the restaurant, carrying two hamburgers for Chewbacca, night had settled in completely, and the rain had let up. A light drizzle was falling, and the humid air was oppressively heavy, but it no longer seemed as if they should start building an ark. The dog smelled the burgers, sensed they were for him, and insisted on being fed before they got back to the garage. He gobbled both sandwiches right there in front of the restaurant, and Christine said, "You know, he even has Brandy's manners."

"You always said Brandy had no manners," Joey reminded her.

"That's what I mean."

Now that the storm seemed to be subsiding, the sidewalks along Westwood Boulevard were filling up with students from UCLA on their way to dinner or a movie, window-shoppers, and theatergoers killing some time before heading to the Playhouse. Californians have little or no tolerance for rain, and after a storm like this one, they always burst forth, eager to be out and around, in an almost festive mood. Charlie was sorry it was time to leave; the Village seemed like an oasis of sanity in a deranged world, and he was thankful for the respite it had provided.

The parking garage had been almost full when they'd arrived this afternoon, and they'd had to leave the car on the lowest level. Now, as they took the elevator down to the bottom of the structure, they were all in a better state of mind than they would have thought possible only a few hours ago. There was nothing like good food, a couple of drinks, and several hours of walking freely on public streets without being shot at to convince you that God was in His heaven and that all was right with the world.

But it was a short-lived feeling. It ended when the elevator doors opened.

The lights immediately beyond the doors were all burned out.

There were lights glowing some distance to the left and others to the right, revealing rows of cars and drab concrete walls and massive roof-supporting pillars, but directly in front of the elevator, there was darkness.

How likely was it that three or four lights would be out all at the same time?

That unsettling question flashed into Charlie's mind the moment the doors slid open, and before he could react, Chewbacca began to bark at the shadows beyond the doors. The dog was shockingly ferocious, as if possessed by a sudden black rage, yet he didn't rush out of the elevator to pursue the object of his anger, and that was a sure sign that something very bad was waiting out there for them.

Charlie reached toward the elevator's control board.

Something whizzed into the cab and slammed into the back wall, two inches from Christine's head. A bullet. It tore a hole through the metal panel. The sound of the shot was almost like an afterthought.

"Down!" Charlie shouted, and hit the CLOSE DOOR button, and another shot slammed into the doors as they started to roll shut, and he punched the button for the top floor, and Chewbacca was still barking, and Christine was screaming, and then the doors were completely shut, and the cage was on its way up, and Charlie thought he heard a last futile shot as they rose out of the concrete depths.

The killers hadn't planned on the dog reacting so quickly and noisily.

They had expected Christine and Joey to come out of the elevator, and they hadn't been prepared to hit their quarry within the cab itself.

Otherwise, the shots would have been more carefully placed, and Joey or his mother-or both-would already be dead.

With any luck, the only gunmen were those on the lowest level of the garage. But if they had planned for this contingency, for the possibility that their prey would be forewarned and would not get out of the elevator, then they might have stationed others on the upper floor.

The cab might stop rising at any level, and the doors might open, and another hit squad might be waiting there.

But how did they find us? Charlie asked himself desperately as Christine picked herself up from the floor. In Christ's name, how?

He was still packing his own gun, which he'd taken to the Church of the Twilight this morning, and he drew it, aimed at the doors in front of them.

The cab didn't stop until it reached the top floor of the garage. The doors opened. Yellowish lights. Gray concrete walls.

Gleaming cars parked in narrow spaces. But no men with guns.

"Come on!" Charlie said.

They ran because they knew the men on the bottom floor of the garage must be coming up quickly behind them.

They ran to Hilgarde Avenue, then beyond it, away from UCLA and the commercial area of Westwood, into an expensive and quiet residential neighborhood. Charlie welcomed each convocation of shadows, but dreaded the pools of light surrounding every streetlamp, because here they were the only people on the sidewalks and easily spotted. They turned several times, seeking concealment in the upper-class warren of lushly landscaped streets. Gradually he began to think they had lost their pursuers, though he knew he wouldn't feel entirely safe for a long time to come.

Although the rain had subsided to little more than a light mist, and although they were all wearing raincoats, they were wet and cold again by the time Charlie began looking for transportation.

Automobiles were parked along the street, and he moved down the block, under the dripping coral trees and palms, stealthily trying doors, hoping no one was watching from any of the houses. The first three cars were locked up tight, but the driver's door on the fourth, a two-year-old yellow Cadillac, opened when he tried it.

He motioned Christine and Joey into the car." Hurry."

She said, "Are the keys in it?"

"No."

"Are you stealing it or what?"

"Yes. Get in."

"I don't want you breaking the law and winding up in prison because of me and-"

"Get in! " he said urgently.

The velour-covered bench seat in front accommodated the three of them, so Christine put Joey in the middle, apparently afraid to let him get even as far away as the rear seat. The dog got in back, shaking the rain off his coat and spraying everyone in the process.

The glove compartment contained a small, detachable flashlight that came with the car and that was kept, except when needed, in a specially designed niche where its batteries were constantly recharged. Charlie used it to look under the dashboard, below the steering wheel, where he located the ignition wires. He hot-wired the Cadillac, and the engine turned over without hesitation.

No more than two minutes after he had opened the car door, they pulled away from the curb. For the first block, he drove without headlights.

Then, confident they had gotten away unnoticed, he snapped on the lights and headed up toward Sunset Boulevard.

Christine said, "What if the cops stop us?"

"They won't. The owner probably won't report it stolen until morning.

And even if he discovers it's gone ten minutes from now, it won't make the police hot sheets for a while."

" But they might stop us for speeding-"

"I don't intend to speed."

— or some other traffic violation-"

"What do you think I am-a stunt driver?"

"Are you?" Joey asked.

"Oh, sure, better than Evel Knievel," Charlie said.

"Who?" the boy asked.

"God, I'm getting old," Charlie said.

"Are we gonna get in a car chase like on TV?" Joey asked.

"I hope not," Charlie said.

" Oh, I'd like that," the boy said.

Charlie checked the rearview mirror. There were two cars behind him. He couldn't tell what make they were or anything about them. They were just pairs of headlights in the darkness.

Christine said, "But sooner or later, the car will end up on the hot sheets-"

"We'll have parked it somewhere and taken another car by then," Charlie said.

"Steal another one?"

"I'm sure not going to Hertz or Avis," he said." A rental car can be traced. They might find us that way."

Jesus, listen to me, he thought. Pretty soon I'm going to be like Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, imagining a threat in every corner, seeing giant bugs crawling out of the walls.

He turned left at the next corner.

So did both of the cars behind him.

"How did they find us?" Christine asked.

"Must've planted a transmitter on my Mercedes."

"When would they've done that?"

"I don't know. Maybe when I was at their church this morning."

"But you said you left a man in your car while you went in there, someone who could call for help if you didn't come back out when you were supposed to."

"Yeah. Carter Rilbeck."

"So he'd have seen them trying to plant a transmitter."

"Unless, of course, he's one of them," Charlie said.

"Do you think he could be?"

"Probably not. But maybe they planted the bug before that.

As soon as they knew you'd hired me."

At Hilgarde, he turned right.

So did both of the cars behind him.

To Christine, he said, "Or maybe Henry Rankin is a TWilighter, and when I called him from the restaurant awhile ago, maybe he got a trace on the line and found out where I was."

"You said he's like a brother."

"He is. But Cain was like a brother to Abel, huh?"

He turned left on Sunset Boulevard, with UCLA on the left now and Bel Air on the hills to the right.

Only one of the cars followed him.

She said, "You sound as if you've become as paranoid as I am."

"Grace Spivey gives me no choice."

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Farther away."

"Where?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"We spent all that time buying clothes and things, and now a lot of it's one," she said.

"We can outfit ourselves again tomorrow."

"I can't go home; I can't go to work; I can't take shelter with any of my friends-"

"I'm your friend," Charlie said.

"We don't even have a car now," she said.

"Sure we do."

"A stolen car."

"It's got four wheels," he said." It runs. That's good enough."

"I feel like we're the cowboys in one of those old movies where the Indians trap them in a box canyon and keep pushing them farther and farther toward the wall."

"Remember who always won in those movies," Charlie said.

"The cowboys," Joey said.

"Exactly."

He had to stop for a red traffic light because, as luck would have it, a police cruiser was stopped on the other side of the intersection. He didn't like sitting there, vulnerable. He used the rearview mirror and the side mirror to keep a watch on the car that had followed them, afraid that someone would get out of it while they were immobilized here-someone with a shotgun.

In a weary voice that dismayed Charlie, Christine said, "I wish I had your confidence."

So do I, he thought wryly.

The light changed. He crossed the intersection. Behind him, the unknown car fell back a bit.

He said, "Everything'll seem better in the morning."

"And where will we be in the morning?" she asked.

They had come to an intersection where Wilshire Boulevard lay in front of them. He turned right, toward the freeway entrance, and said, "How about Santa Barbara?"

"Are you serious?"

"It's not that far. A couple hours. We could be there by nine-thirty, get a hotel room."

The unknown car had turned right at Wilshire, too, and was still on his tail.

"L.A."s a big city," she said." Don't you think we'd be just as safe hiding out here?"

"We probably would," he said." But I wouldn't feel as safe, and I've got to settle us down somewhere that feels right to me, so I can relax and think about the case from a calmer perspective. I can't function well in a constant panic. They won't expect us to go as far away from my operations as Santa Barbara. They'll expect me to hang around, at least as close as L.A., so I know we'll be safe up there."

He drove onto the entrance ramp of the San Diego Freeway, heading north.

Checked the rearview mirror. Didn't see the other car yet. Realized he was holding his breath.

She protested." You didn't bargain for this much trouble, this much inconvenience."

"Sure I did," he said." I thrive on it."

"Of course you do."

"Ask Joey. He knows all about us private detectives. He knows we just love danger."

"They do, Mom," the boy said." They love danger."

Charlie looked at the rearview mirror again. No other car had come onto the freeway behind him. They weren't being followed.

They drove north into the night, and after a while the rain began to fall heavily again, and there was fog. At times, because of the mist and rain that obscured the landscape and the road ahead, it seemed as if they weren't driving through the real world at all but through some haunted and insubstantial realm of spirits and dreams.

Kyle Barlowe's Santa Ana apartment was furnished to suit his dimensions.

There were roomy Lay-Z-Boy recliners, a big sectional sofa with a deep seat, sturdy end tables, and a solidly built coffee table on which a man could prop his feet without fear of the thing collapsing. He had searched a long time, in countless used furniture stores, before he'd found the round table in the dining alcove; it was plain and somewhat battered, maybe not too attractive, but it was a little higher than most dining tables and gave him the kind of leg room he required. In the bathroom stood a very old, very large claw-foot tub, and in the bedroom he had one big dresser that he'd picked up for fortysix bucks and a king-size bed with an extra-long custom mattress that accommodated him, though with not an inch to spare.

This was the one place in the world in which he could be truly comfortable.

But not tonight.

He could not be comfortable when the Antichrist was still alive. He could not relax, knowing that two assassination attempts had failed within the past twelve hours.

He paced from the small kitchen to the living room, into the bedroom, back to the living room again, pausing to look out windows. Main Street was eerily lit by sickly yellow streetlamps, as well as by red and blue and pink and purple neon, all bleeding together, disguising the true colors of every object, giving the shadows fuzzy electric edges. Passing cars spewed up phosphorescent plumes of water that splashed back to the pavement, like rhinestone sequins. The failing rain looked silvery and molten, though the night was far from hot.

He tried watching television. Couldn't get interested in it.

He couldn't keep still. He sat down, got up right away, sat in another chair, got up, went into the bedroom, stretched out on the bed, heard an odd noise at the window, got up to investigate, realized it was only rainwater falling through the downspout, returned to bed, decided he didn't want to lie down, returned to the living room.

The Antichrist was still alive.

But that wasn't the only thing that was making him nervous.

He tried to believe nothing else was bothering him, tried to pretend he was only worried about the Scavello boy, but finally he had to admit to himself that another thing was chewing at him.

The old need. Such a fierce need. The NEED. He wanted No!

It didn't matter what he wanted. He couldn't have it. He couldn't surrender to the NEED. He didn't dare.

He dropped to his knees in the middle of the living room and prayed to God to help him resist the weakness in him. He prayed hard, prayed with all his might, with all his attention and devotion, prayed with such teeth-grinding intensity that he began to sweat.

He still felt the old, despicable terrifying urge to mangle someone, to pummel and twist and claw, to hurt somebody, to kill.

In desperation, he got up and went into the kitchen, to the sink, and turned on the cold water. He put the stopper in the drain. He got ice cubes from the refrigerator and added them to the growing pool. When the sink was almost full, he turned the spigot off and lowered his head into the freezing water, forced himself to stay there, holding his breath, face submerged, skin stinging, until he finally had to come up, gasping for air. He was shivering, and his teeth were chattering, but he still felt the violence building in him, so he put his head under again, waiting until his lungs were bursting, came up sputtering and spitting, and now he was frigid, quaking uncontrollably, but still the urge to do violence swelled unchecked.

Satan was here now. Must be. Satan was here and dredging up the old feelings, pushing Kyle's face in them, tempting him, trying to get him to toss away his last chance at salvation.

I won't!

He stormed through the apartment, trying to detect exactly where Satan was. He looked in closets, opened cabinets, pulled aside the draperies to check behind them. He didn't actually expect to see Satan, but he was sure he would at least sense the devil's presence somewhere, invisible though the demon might be. But there was nothing to be found.

Which only meant the devil was clever at concealing himself.

When he finally gave up searching for Satan, he was in the bathroom, and he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: eyes wild, nostrils dilated, jaw muscles popping, lips bloodless and skinned back over his crooked yellow teeth. He thought of the Phantom of the Opera. He thought of Frankenstein's monster and a hundred other tortured, unhuman faces from a hundred other films he had seen on "Chiller Theater."

The world hated him, and he hated the world, all of them, the ones who laughed, who pointed, the women who found him repulsive, all the No.

God. Please. Don't let me think about these things. Get my mind off this subject. Help me. Please.

He couldn't look away from his Boris Karloff-Lon ChaneyRhondo Hatten face, which filled the age-spotted mirror.

He never missed those old horror movies when they were on TV. Many nights he sat alone in front of his black-and-white set, riveted by the ghastly images, and when each picture ended, he went into the bathroom, to this very mirror, and looked at himself and told himself that he wasn't that ugly, wasn't that frightening, not as bad as the creatures that crept out of primeval swamps or came from beyond the stars or escaped from mad scientists' laboratories. By comparison, he was almost ordinary.

At worst, pathetic. But he could never believe himself. The mirror didn't lie. The mirror showed him a face made for nightmares.

He smiled at himself in the mirror, tried to look amiable. The result was awful. The smile was a leer.

No woman would ever have him unless he paid, and even some whores turned him down. Bitches. All of them. Rotten, stinking, heartless bitches.

He wanted to make one of them hurt.

He wanted to bring his pain to one of them, hammer his pain into some woman and leave it in her, so that for a short while, at least, there would be no pain in him.

No. That was bad thinking. Evil thinking.

Remember Mother Grace.

Remember the Twilight and salvation and life everlasting.

But he wanted. He needed.

He found himself at the door of his apartment without being able to recall how he'd gotten there. He had the door half open.

He was on his way out to find a prostitute. Or someone to beat up. Or both.

No!

He slammed the door, locked it, put his back to it, and looked frantically around his living room.

He had to act quickly to save himself.

He was losing his battle against temptation. He was whimpering now, shuddering and mewling. He knew that in a second or two he would open the door again, and this time he would leave, go hunting…

In panic, he rushed to a small bookshelf, pulled out one of the inspirational volumes from his collection of a hundred such titles, tore out a fistful of pages and threw them onto the floor, tore out more pages, and more, until only the covers of the book remained, and then he ripped those apart, too. It felt good to mutilate something. He was gasping and shuddering like a horse in distress, and he seized another book, tore it to pieces, pitched the fragments behind him, grabbed another book, demolished it, then another, another.

When he regained his senses, he was on the floor, weeping softly. Twenty ruined books, thousands of ripped pages, were heaped around him. He sat up, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes. Got to his knees, stood. He wasn't shaking any more. The NEED was gone.

Satan had lost.

Kyle had not surrendered to temptation, and now he knew why God wanted men like him to fight the battle of the Twilight.

If God built His army strictly of men who had never sinned, how could He know that they would be able to resist the devil's entreaties? But by choosing men like me, Kyle thought, men with no resistance to sin, by giving us a second chance at salvation, by making us prove ourselves, God has acquired an army of tempered soldiers.

He looked up at the ceiling but didn't see it. Instead he saw the sky beyond, saw into the heart of the universe. He said, "I'm worthy. I've climbed out of the sewer of sin, and I've proved I'll never sink back down. If what You want is for me to handle the boy for You, I'm worthy now. Give me the boy. Let me have the boy. Let me."

He felt the NEED surging in him again, the desire to choke and rend and crush, but this time it was a purer emotion, the clean white holy desire to be God's gladiator.

It occurred to him that God was asking him to do the very thing he most wanted to avoid. He didn't want to kill again. He didn't want to harm people any more. He was finally gaining a small measure of respect for himself, finally saw the dim but real possibility that he might one day live in peace with the rest of the world-and now God wanted him to kill, wanted him to use his rage against selected targets.

Why? he asked in sudden, silent misery. Why do I have to be the one? I used to thrive on the NEED, but now it scares me, and it should scare me. Why must I be used this way; why not in some other way?

That was what Mother Grace called "wrong-thought," and he tried to wipe it out of his mind. You never challenged God like that. You just accepted what He wanted. God was mysterious. Sometimes He was harsh, and you couldn't understand why He demanded so much of you. Like why He wanted you to kill. or why He'd made you a freak in the first place when He could just as easily have made you handsome.

No. That was more wrong-thought.

Kyle cleaned up the ravaged books. He poured a glass of milk.

He sat down by his telephone. He waited for Grace to call and say that it was time for him to be the hammer of God.