The Summoning

The Summoning

By Bentley Little

LITTLE IS ABSOLUTELY

THE-BEST IN THE BUSINESS

―STEPHEN KING

THE NOVELS OF BENTLEY LITTLE ARE:

"ELECTRIFYING."-West Coast Review of Books

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

850 Third Avenue

New York, NY 10022

Copyright © 1993 by Bentley Little

All rights reserved.

For my grandpa, Lloyd Little, who was there for my family through thick and thin, and who, when I needed it most, helped me out with a "74 Dodge Dart, my first reliable car.

Thanks to the regulars: Dominick Abel, Keith Neilson, Larry and Roseanne Little, Judson and Krista Little.

Thanks also to Richard Laymon, for his much needed and much-appreciated support.

Special thanks to Wai Sau Li, for her assistance with Chinese language, customs and lore; and to the Chu family--Danny, Salina, Fanny, Henny and Susan--for giving me a glimpse into Chinese restaurant life.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman; "

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

―William Butler Yeats "Byzantium"

Jesus appeared to the Pastor Clan Wheeler while he slept. Tall and healthy, bathed in a shimmering glow, Jesus strode across the meadow grass and through the trees while Wheeler followed. It was day, a clear glorious day with the sun hanging warm and white in a deep blue cloudless sky. Around him, the trees and plants were green, bright green, free from dust and dirt, and the grass beneath his feet felt soft and smooth and cushiony. The fresh air was alive with the vibrant sound of birdsong.

Jesus walked around a copse of manzanita bushes, and now Wheeler knew where they were. He recognized the empty feed and grain store and the smattering of trailers which flanked Highway 370 on the north side of town. Only... Only this wasn't desert. And the trailers did not look as shabby as they usually did. Indeed, each seemed bright and shiny and new, and colorful flowers were planted in the lush ground surrounding them. The feed and grain store, while still empty, also seemed refurbished, as though waiting for someone to move in.

Moving gracefully, almost gliding, Jesus ascended the Steep incline which led to the raised road and began walking down the center stripe of the highway. Wheeler followed, past the new Texaco station, past the rebuilt fence of the Williams's old horse corral, until they came to a small clearing between the empty mining administration building and the assaying office at the top of the hill.

Now Jesus stopped and turned to face him. The Savior's features were framed by beautiful hair that hung in thick curls around His shoulders, and His reddish brown beard shone in the sunlight. The expression on His face was one of infinite patience and understanding, and when He spoke His voice carried the firm yet comforting tone of Truth.

"Clan," He said, and His voice was music to Wheeler's ears, "I have chosen you for a special task."

Wheeler wanted to respond, wanted to fall to his knees and sob his grateful thanks, but he was rooted in place, transfixed by the power radiating from Christ's form.

Jesus lifted an arm, gestured toward the land around him. "This is where you will build your church."

Now Clan Wheeler found his voice. "What kind of church am I to build?"

Jesus said nothing, but the church appeared immediately in Wheeler's mind. In one epiphanous instant, he knew everything about the church to be, from its dimensions to its construction materials to the placement of items within its rooms. It was an awesome structure, overwhelming in its scope and ambition, a tremendous testament to God's living glory that rendered p, ale the cathedrals of old and seemed far too grandiose and spectacular to be hidden away in a town like Rio Verde.

"The Lord's greatness can be honored any place at any time," Jesus said, answering his concern before it was vocalized. "The Lord need not locate His church where people will see it; people will see it where it is located."

And Wheeler understood. The faithful, the worthy, the deserving, they would know where the church was built and would make the effort to visit it. Pilgrims from all over the world would flock to Rio Verde to experience the glory of Christ reflected in the magnificence of His church. The blind would be sighted by casting their dead eyes upon it, the crippled would be healed by touching its walls. Believers would be rewarded, nonbelievers would come to believe. Wrong would be righted, and the kingdom of God on earth would spread from the germ of this humble beginning.

Wheeler's eyes filled with tears, and the transcendent form of the Savior began to blur. "I .. . I love you," Wheeler stammered, falling to his knees.

Jesus smiled, a smile so radiant and beatific that it cut through the wavering wall of tears and shone full force on Wheeler's face. "I know," Jesus said.

When Wheeler awoke it was morning, and he found himself staring up at the white speckled ceiling above his bed. He lay there for a moment, thinking, then threw off the covers. He stood and walked across the cold wooden floor to the window, feeling both frightened and exhilarated. He had no doubt of the veracity of his vision, that he had seen the Lord Jesus Christ. God had spoken to him. The sincerity and fervency of his untiring efforts to spread the gospel had been noticed in Heaven, and he had been specifically chosen by Jesus to assist Him in the performance of this duty, to construct this great monument to God's glory.

Wheeler had no illusions about himself. He knew he was small dine. He did not command the attention of the TV evangelists, did not have a nationwide following and probably never would. Then again, maybe God did not look favorably on the way the big-time pastors traded on the Lord's name for their own profit. Maybe He had been looking for just such a humble preacher as himself to carry out His wishes.

Wheeler was not vain enough to believe that he was the only man on earth qualified to perform in the service of the Lord, and he would not be surprised to discover that Jesus had spoken to several men of God other than him self, exhorting all of them to construct churches in different areas of the country or the world. It was unrealistic to suppose that he, Clan Wheeler, out of all of the billions of individuals on the planet, had alone been chosen to do the bidding of the Lord.

Then again... He thought of Noah, thought of Moses, thought of

Abraham.

, Wheeler looked out the window and down the hill toward the abandoned storefront where his church had been forced to hold its first meetings.

He couldn't really see the storefront, could only see a portion of its tar-papered roof between the other buildings, but he knew it was there, and its presence made him feel goock He had carved out a niche in this town with nothing going for him but his own gift of gab and an undying faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. For the past ten years he had been preaching the living gospel in Rio Verde, and despite the presence of established churches, he had found a following and formed a congregation. Donations had allowed him to eventually move out of his original storefront and purchase the old Presbyterian church when that denomination had constructed a new and bigger building on the east end of town. He had continued expanding his flock, making no concessions to modernity, refusing to follow the example of the chain churches and compromise the words of the Lord with secular notions of tolerance. "

.... And now Jesus had rewarded him. :

Wheeler turned away from the window. He knew what he had to do. The path for him had been illuminated, and he had been given detailed instructions. He would obtain a loan, sell this house, take up a collection, do everything he could and anything he had to to pay for the building of the new church. He would have meetings in the vacant lot next to the Dairy Queen, like he did in the old tent days in Phoenix.

The Lord's will would be done.

Shadows shrunk as the sun rose in the east and the desert dawn gained strength. Wheeler continued to stare out the window. The adrenaline within him was still high, but the fear and excitement he had experienced only a few moments before had metamorphosed into something like the peace he had felt when he had been with Jesus. He felt strangely calm. He would have expected to feel tense, pressured, as though the weight of the world had just been placed on his shoulders.

He had met and spoken with Jesus Christ, had been instructed to build a magnificent temple of the Lord, had been asked to participate in the biggest event in the history of modern Christianity, yet he felt oddly disassociated from it all, as though he were watching it happen to someone else.

He smiled as he looked out over the shabby town. Here he was, in this small house in this nondescript desert community, and he alone knew the solution to a question that not even the world's greatest theologians could have answered. It was not an important question, not anything earth-shattering, but somehow it made him feel better than everything else he had learned during the night.

Black.

Jesus' favorite color was black.

Sue Wing tried to be as unobtrusive as possible as she stood behind the restaurant's cash register, folding the newly printed take-out menus.

Behind her, in the kitchen, she heard her parents atgxting loudly in Cantonese, her mother insisting that the air conditioner be set at eighty degrees in order to save money, her father stating that he was going to leave it at seventy so their customers would be comfortable.

Underneath the arguing, from farther back in the kitchen, she heard the tinkly, dissonant sounds of her grandmother's music, faint but appropriate, like a soundtrack to her parents' heated discussion.

Sue picked up another menu, matching the edges and creasing the fold.

She glanced over the top of the register at the restaurant's lone customers, two yuppies who had obviously stopped in town on their way to the lake or the dude ranch. Both of them had short brownish hair, the man's a little shorter than the woman's, and both wore expensive clothes of studied casualness, fashion statements that were supposed to show that they were at once hip and weekend relaxed. The woman had pushed her lightly tinted sunglasses to the top of her head. The man's sunglasses lay on the table beside his elbow. Through the window of the restaurant, Sue could see the couple's red sports car.

She had not liked the man and woman on sight, had not liked the condescending way in which they'd looked around the interior of the small take-out restaurant, as though they had been expecting waiters and banquet tables, had not liked the way they'd exchanged smug, derogatory glances over the contents of the menu.

She peeked at them over the top of the register. They were eating with chopsticks, and though they handled the utensils fairly well, it stir seemed phony to Sue, a pretentious affectation. She had never understood what made affluent white Americans want to use chopsticks--while eating Chinese food. These people used chopsticks at no other time, did not utilize the utensils when eating American food or Mexican food or while they were cooking, but they insisted on using them when they had Chinese food. Did it make them feel more ethnic, as though they were broadening tkeir cultural horizons? She didn't know.

She did know that while her parents and grandmother used chopsticks exclusively, she herself used either forks or chopsticks, depending on what was on the table Her brother John preferred forks and seldom used chopsticks at all.

The woman looked up, and Sue quickly returned her attention to the menus.

"Miss?" the woman called, raising a tan hand.

Sue stepped around the register and over to the table "Could we have some more soy sauce?" The woman pronounced the word "soy" in a strangely awkward glottal-stopped manner that was supposed to be authentic but resembled neither Mandarin nor Cantonese.

"Certainly," Sue said. She hurried back into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of the small foil-wrapped packets of soy sauce from the. box next to the door. Her parents stopped their argument the instant she walked into the kitchen, her father moving over to the stove, her mother heading through the back door to the small room where her grandmother was chopping vegetables. "

She returned to the front of the restaurant. The man and woman ignored her as she placed the packets of soy sauce next to their plates.

Moving back behind the register, she once again began folding menus.

The kitchen was quiet now, the only noise her grandmother's music issuing from the cassette player. She stared down at the menus as she folded. Her parents had not resumed their argument, afraid that she would hear them. They always did this, trying to pretend in front of her and John that they always saw e),e-to-eye on evert thing that they were always in complete accord and never fought. Both she and her brother knew better, but they never said anything about it. Not to their parents.

Sometimes she wished that her family could hash out their problems in the open like a typical American family instead of keeping everything so secretive all the time. It would make things a lot easier in the long run.

The yuppies departed, leaving behind an inappropriately large tip. Sue cleared the table taking the plates back to the sink where her mother, grateful for something to do, had already started washing.

"Clean table," her father told her bluntly in English. "I always do," she said.

She grabbed a wet cloth and wrapped it around her hand as she walked back out front. She looked up while she wiped the table and through the front window she saw John running up the street toward the restaurant. He jumped over the small ditch next to the parking lot and ran across the dirt. He pushed open the restaurant door, causing the attached bells to tinkle, and threw his books on the table nearest the entrance before heading into the kitchen to get something to drink.

"Friday," he said. "Finail),."

She watched her brother without being obvious about it. He was out of breath, but he didn't appear frightened, and she relaxed a little. Last week, a couple of bullies from his junior high had threatened to beat him up, and he had run home in terror. This week, she supposed, the bullies had moved on to someone else.

He came back out a moment later, Dr. Pepper it hand "What are they fighting about this time?" he asked, nod ding toward the kitchen.

Sue smiled. "You could tell?" =,

Neither of them are talking." i: ..

"Air-conditioning," she said.

"Air-conditioning? Again?" John grinned and shook his head. "Let's turn it down to fifty and open all the doors so the air gets out and drive them both crazy." "Knock it off," she said, laughing. "It'd be fun."

She threw the washcloth at him. He caught it and tried to whip her with it, but she ran around the table

"You can't escape me!"

They ran behind, between, and around the restaurant's four tables, chasing each other, yelling, throwing the wash cloth, until their father came out of the kitchen and angrily told them to knock it off.

They stopped, and John glumly handed the washcloth to his father.

"Another fun Friday evening with the Wing family," he said. "

Business was slow, and instead of waiting until after the restaurant closed to eat dinner the way they usually did, they ate early. Their father brought out a platter of chow fun around seven o'clock and set it on the largest table, telling Sue and John, who were both reading, to get plates, chopsticks and forks. They put away their books and followed their father into the kitchen while their mother and grandmother set out bowls of rice.

The meal was pleasant, the air-conditioning argument having been resolved, and after dinner, after they had drunk the mo qua soup, after the table had been cleared Sue told her parents that she was going to go to the theater. There was a new Woody Allen movie playing, she explained and this was its last day.

"Me too!" John said. "I want to go tool"

"No," Sue told him.

"Why not?" Her mother asked in Cantonese. "Why don't you want your brother to go with you?"

"Because I'm going with a friend of mine." "Which friend?"

"Mother, I'm twenty-one, I'm old enough to go to stupid movie without being treated like a criminal."

"A boy? Are you going to the theater with a boy?" "No." "Yes, you are. And you are ashamed to show him to ( your family, and you are sneaking around our backs." "Fine then. I won't go."

"Go," her father said. "It's okay."

"We don't even know this boy!"

"There is no boy!" Sue told her mother, exasperated "If I was going out on a date, I, would tell you. I am not going on a date."

"Then why can't I go?" John asked.

"It's rated "R'."

"Rated "R'?" her mother said. "I'm not sure you shoul( be seeing this movie."

"I've seen thousands of "R' movies on cable. So haw you, So has John."

"Then why can't I go?" John asked.

Sue threw up her hands. "Forget it!" she said in Er English. "God, if I knew it was going to be this complicatec I wouldn't're even brought it up!"

"You can go," her father said. "We're not that busy tonight. I don't need you here." He turned toward his wife and John. "She's old enough to do things with her friends if she wants to," he said. "And she deserves a little privacy."

She took a deep breath. "Thank you," she told her father. She glanced toward her grandmother, who smiled at her and nodded approval.

"Should I pick you up afterward?" her father asked. Sue shook her head. "I'll walk home." "Are you sure? That late?" "I'll be fine."

"What time will you be back?" her mother asked. "The movie starts at eight, gets out at nine-thirty, I'll be home by ten." She glanced at the clock on the wall. "I have to go, I'll be late." She grabbed her jacket from the chair next to the kitchen door and hurried out before her mother could think of another argument. The truth was that she was going to the movie alone, something she did far more often than she would ever admit to her parents. Usually, she went alone not because she had to, but because she liked to. This time, though, it had not been entirely voluntary. She had asked Shelly and Janine to go with her, but neither of them had wanted to see the film. She wasn't about to let the fact that no one wanted to go with her keep her from enjoying herself, however.

Her parents, she knew, especially her mother, would forbid her to leave the house if they realized that she actually liked to go to movies, go shopping and perform other supposedly social activities by herself.

They would probably consider her a disgrace to the family and decide that there was something seriously wrong with her. Or something else wrong with her.

Although neither of her parents had ever said anything, it was clear that both of them already thought there was something amiss because she was twenty-one and not yet married. When her mother was her age, as she never tired of pointing out, she already had a two-year-old daughter. Sue never said a word, but she thought to herself that if he had gotten pregnant at nineteen, her parents would have thought her the slut of the Western world.

On this issue, her grandmother, who more often than not took her side in disputes, was in complete agreement with her parents. Her grandmother had even suggested sending her to live in San Francisco with her aunt so she could find a nice Chinese boy.

She had long since given up trying to explain that she would get married when she was ready and when she fell in love, not when tradition said it was appropriate. These days she just smiled, nodded, and waited for the discussion to end.

A car pulled up to the restaurant as she was leaving, and she moved out of its way, veering off to the right and taking the sandy path that wound through the cactus and cottonwood and acted as a shortcut through the land between the restaurant and the back of the Basha's shopping center.

The movie theater was on the far side of the grocery store, and she arrived just in time, grabbing a seat just as the lights dimmed, the curtains opened, and the first preview came on.

The movie was good, but not one of Woody's best. Not as great as Siskel and Ebert had said it was but still thoughtful and funny and well worth watching. She seemed to be in the minority in her enjoyment of the film, however. Throughout its presentation, people in the audience made loud comments which they and their friends seemed to consider amusing but which she found juvenile and obnoxious. The sparse audience laughed more at the observations of these buffoons than they did at the genuinely funny lines in the film, and it almost made her wish she'd waited to see the movie on video.

Afterward, she walked slowly across the parking lot toward the street.

The lot was deserted save for a cluster of vehicles around the entrance of the theater. She stopped for a moment, looking up. The moonless sky was black, freckled with oversize stars, and the air was chill with a promise of winter. Carried faintly on the light desert breeze was the scent of a mesquite campfire.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the crisp cool air. She loved nights like these, but they always made her sad somehow. These were evenings that should be spent with others, not alone. These were nights for cuddling and comforters and hot chocolate, not nights for mo qua and arguing parents.

Around her, couples made their way to cars and trucks, talking together in low intimate tones. They were high school students mostly, the boys younger versions of their fathers with cowboy hats, boots, and white Skoal circles outlined on the back pockets of their faded Levi's, the girls giggly emulators of their mothers' status quo subservience.

Sue shook her head, looked toward the drooping cottonwood tree at the corner of the parking lot. She was being too hard on these people, and she knew iL She was in a mean mood tonight. Jealousy, probably. Her own mother was no doubt far more subservient than these girls or even their mothers would ever be.

To her right, leaning against a red pickup, she saw a boy and girl kissing passionately, young lovers who no doubt thought their relationship would last forever. She was jealous. This had never been a part of her life when she'd been their age. She'd regretted it then, and she regretted it now. She thought of her senior prom, the only school dance she had ever attended. She'd gone with Clay Brown, a boy she barely knew and who barely knew her. Neither of them had been able to find dates for the prom, and they'd sort of fallen together out of necessity. After the dance, they'd tried to make out, there in the dark of the car on the dirt road next to the river. But though each of them wanted something to happen, nothing had. Their passion had been forced, awkward, and uncomfortable for both of them, and it was instantly clear that there were no sparks, that it was not going to work.

Embarrassed, they'd avoided each other after that. Clay had eventually moved out of town. He was probably married by now.

She watched the young lovers break their kiss and get into the pickup.

They kissed again before driving off.

She continued walking, wondering whether her mother was going to be up and waiting, ready to give her the third degree when she got home .....

"Hey, Sue! Wait up!"

She turned to see Shelly hurrying across the parking lot toward her.

Sue stood, waiting. By the time her friend reached her, the chubby girl was panting and nearly out of breath. "I knew you'd be at the movie, so I decided to come with you, but I didn't see you in there."

"I sat in the back. I thought you didn't want to go." "I changed my mind." "Why? Did you get a date?"

Shelly snorted. "Very funny. Actually, I tried to catch you at the restaurant, but John said you'd already left. I thought I could find you at the theater, but by the time I got here the movie had already started, and i didn't want to walk up and down the aisles looking for you." "Well, I didn't see you either."

"I was near the front, off to the side." She shook her head. "I almost went home. I've never gone to a movie by myself before."

Sue shrugged. "It's something you get used to." She started walking again. "So what was the emergency? Why did you have to find me?"

"I didn't. It's just that, you know, my dad didn't come home after work again, and my mom started taking it out on me, so I had to get out of there. I thought I'd go with you to the movie."

"Now you wish you'd stayed home, right?"

Shelly didn't smile. "No," she said. "It's starting to get bad. I was going to wait to leave until I could afford someplace decent, get my own trailer or something, but now I'm thinking it's better to get out no matter what. I have a half day tomorrow, and I was wondering if you wanted to come with me and see how much apartments are."

"That'll take ten minutes. What are there, those new ones over on Sagebrush, those old ones on Copperhead?"

Shelly shrugged. "I don't know. I thought we'd get a paper and look."

"Yeah, I'll go." Sue looked at her friend. "What about tonight? Are you going back? You could.. stay over at my house." "Yeah, right."

"You could sleep in my room." "Sue, your parents don't like me. They wouldn't let me stay overnight."

"Yes, they would."

Shelly shook her head. "No, they wouldn't. Besides, I'm going home.

My dad's probably back by now, and if they're fighting, I'll be able to slip in without being noticed."

Sue said nothing, did not look at her friend. Shelly was right. Her parents didn't like her. She had never been sure if that was because Shelly was not Chinese or because she had not made the kinds of grades in school that they considered appropriate for a friend of their daughter's. Her parents would have let Shelly stay overnight, and they would have been polite to her, but she herself would have received an extensive grilling about the details of Shelly's home life after her friend had left.

"Come on," Shelly said. "I got my car. I'll give you a ride home."

"All right

The parking lot was empty save for Shelly's broken down Dart and a Toyota pickup near the far side of the theater. Once again, Sue smelled mesquite, and she wondered if it was from the dude ranch or a lone camper sleeping overnight in the surrounding desert.

Shelly unlocked the passenger door of the car. Sue got in, then leaned across the seat to unlock the driver's side. She buckled her seat belt while Shelly started the car and pushed in a Clint Black tape.

Sue groaned. "Not that country crap." ::' Shelly grinned. "If it ain't country, it ain't music." Sue stared out the window at the darkened buildings as the Dart sped up 370 toward Center. In the west, the silhouette of Apache Peak looked black even against the darkness of the sky. They drove in silence, listening to the music. This morning her grandmother had stated that today would not be a good day, and although Sue had dismissed the prediction at the time, she wondered now what her grandmother had meant. It was obvious that the old woman had had some sort of dream that she believed foreshadowed an important event. Had she been thinking of the crisis within Shelly's family, or had it been something else? She would have to asL : The car pulled to a stop in front of Sue's hot and she got out, walking around to Shelly's window. ""Do you want to come in for a while, just stay until things cool down?" Shelly shook her head. "It's been two hours.

Either everything's okay, or the whole night's shot, and they'll be arguing until dawn." She smiled tiredly. ""Or my dad hit the road and is heading down the highway singing

"By the time I Get to Phoenix." "

"Call me tomorrow then."

"I will."

Sue stood on the cracked sidewalk and watched the taillights of her friend's car shrink in the distance, turn a corner, and disappear. She walked up the steps to the front porch. The door was opened before she had finished taking her key out of her purse. Her grandmother stood in the doorway, backlit by the light in the hall, her frizzy hair forming a dark halo around her head. The rest of the house was dark. Everyone else, including her mother, had already gone to bed.

"I'm glad you are safe," her grandmother said in Chinese. "I have been waiting. I thought something might have happened to you."

"I'm fine," Sue said, walking inside, taking off her shoes and closing the door behind her. But the troubled expression'i was worried." n her grandmother's face did not disappear.

"About what?"

The old woman patted her shoulder. "We will talk in the morning. It is late now. I am old and need my rest. You are young and need your rest. We should both be in bed."

"Okay," Sue said The two of them walked down the hall, stopping before the door to Sue's room. Sue yawned, then smiled. "Good night, Grandmother," she said.

Her grandmother nodded, said good night, but she looked troubled and did not smile as she continued down the hall.

A always, Rich Carter awoke with the dawn.

He opened his eyes, yawned, stretched. The drapes were closed, but the bedroom was filled with hazy diffused light, a curtain-filtered distillation of the powerful Indian summer sunrise outside. Next to him, on the bed, Corrie still slept, one arm thrown over her eyes as though some part of her brain had known morning was coming and had ordered her body to preserve the illusion of darkness for as long as possible. He watched her for a moment. Asleep, she appeared almost happy, more content than she ever did when awake. The set of her mouth was softened, the lines of tension in her forehead smoothed away. She looked ten years younger, the way she had when they'd first met.

Sometimes he felt guilty for bringing her here.

Rich reached over and carefully cracked open the curtains, peeking outside. Through the chain-link fence, between the corner of the garage and the palo verde tree at the far end of the backyard, he could see the desert-the flat land, the far-off mesas, and the closer red sandstone buttes. Yellow morning sunlight threw saguaros and ocotillos into clear relief and highlighted the oversize boulders which covered the range of high hills to the north, illuminating aspects of the landscape that could only be seen at this hour on this kind of day. It was mornings like this, when the sky was clear and blue and cloud less and even the most overt intrusions of civilization seemed like only temporary incursions on a beautiful un changing land, that he felt most acutely the tightness of his decision to return to Rio Verde.

Corrie would not agree. Which was one reason why he did not wake her up to share this moment. Corrie hated the desert. Well, maybe hate was too strong a word. But to her the beauty of the desert was not apparent, and the uniqueness of light and sky and landscape had virtually no effect on her. She had gotten used to Rio Verde, but she still required frequent weekend trips to Phoenix and drives to Flagstaff or Randall or Payson. Upon her first view of the town, he recalled, she'd instantly declared it the ugliest place she'd ever seen. Her views had modified somewhat--she now claimed to have seen several towns uglier than Rio Verde, all of them within the county--but she had never grown to love the community the way he'd hoped she would.

The way he did.

On that first trip back, he had thought the town the most welcome sight he'd ever seen. After the Valley, after Southern California, the familiar view of the ribbon of cottonwoods lining the river, the streets and structures built atop the low desert foothills fronting Sinagua Bluffs was one which filled him with comforting pleasure and a sense of contentment. He had been so happy to be back that he had rationalized Corrie's feelings, claiming that they had driven in on 370 instead of 95, coming in from the ugly east end of town, and that this had skewed her initial perceptions. But he'd known then as he knew now that she was a city girl and that life in a small town would take some getting used to. He'd thought it would be easier than this, though.

Rich let the curtain fall. Anna was already up. He could hear the theme music for Sesarr Street from the living room. He pushed off the blankets and got out of bed, careful not to disturb Corrie. He went to the bathroom, then pulled on a robe and walked down the short hallway to the living room. "Hey, sweetie," he said, picking up Anna from the couch and giving her a quick kiss on the forehead.

She giggled and wiped the kiss away. "Knock it off,

Daddy. I have to watch my show."

He put her down.

"What's for breakfast?" she asked. "Lizards and snakes. With bug milk." She giggled again. "No, really." "French toast," he said.

"Goody!" She flashed him a missing-toothed gOn and sat down on the couch to watch TV.

He walked around the breakfast bar into the kitchen. If he ever did decide to leave Rio Verde, it would be because of Anna. He'd never had much sympathy for Corrie's complaints that the town was boring, since he himself was never bored, and he firmly believed that an intelligent person should be able to find something of interest no matter where he or she was located. But sometimes he worried about Anna. Rio Verde was a small town, and while he and Corrie tried to instill in their daughter their own intellectual values, and while cable television ensured that they were electronically connected to the cultural life of the rest of the world, he could not help feeling that she might be... well, missing out on something. He had complete faith in the abilities of the town's teachers--he knew many of them and liked most of those he knewN and he had no doubts about Anna's potential, but he still found himself agreeing with Corrie that their relative isolation would eventually put the girl at a disadvantage when competing with people from other parts of the country. Their isolation was geographical, not intellectual or cultural, but still the fear was there.

If anything could get him out of here, it would be Anna's welfare.

Then again, when he watched news reports of the daily murders in Los Angeles and Detroit and New York, when he read statistics about drugs and violent crime, he thought that a small town like Rio Verde might be the perfect place to raise a child, after all.

It was tough being a parent.

"Hey!" he called. "You want to crack the eggs?"

"Yeah!" Anna said, hurrying into the kitchen. Cracking eggs was one of her favorite things to do.

He held the bowl, while she used both hands to hold the egg and smash it against the rim. Half of the egg white slid down the outside of the bowl, and bits of shell accompanied that portion which mad it inside, but he told her she did a great job. She grinned, then ran back into the living room to watch Sesame Street.

After breakfast, while Anna helped Corrie clean the dishes, Rich re dred to his study. The deadline for this week's paper had come and gone, and Marge Watson had missed it again. The world would survive without this installment of Social Scene, which chronicled the past week's worth of Ladies' Auxiliary news, but he still had a page-two space to fill, and now he was going to have to spend half of his Saturday writing some sort of observational feature.

He turned on his PC, put in the disk for his wordprocessing program, and watched the screen as the computer booted up. Sometimes he wondered what the point of all this was. He knew he didn't have the resources at his disposal to put out a top quality paper, but he worked hard and did the best he could with what he had. Unfortunately, there just weren't enough permanent residents of the town to provide him with a consistent readership, and the tourists who passed through only used the paper to start their campfires. To top it off, his own contributors didn't seem to give a damn if they missed 'their deadlines.

It got downright depressing sometimes.

In his more romantic moments, he liked to think of himself as a tough, hard-boiled reporter, a man whose role could easily be portrayed on the screen by Bogart or Mitchum or perhaps the young Brando. But that was a fanciful daydream, one that didn't hold up even to himself. Truth be told, he was closer to a secretary than anything else. His life wouldn't be worth dramatizing on screen, not even with a soap opera star.

The phone rang, a stereo burr sounding simultaneously from the cordless next to his desk and the wall phone in the kitchen. It rang again, but he waited a moment before picking up the receiver, hoping that Corrie would answer it. She did, and, a beat later, called his name:

"Rich!"

"Got it!" he called back. He picked up the phone. "Hello?"

"Rich? It's me."

"Robert?" He shifted the phone to his other ear, frowning. He could not remember the last time his brother had called this early on a Saturday. "What's up?"

"What are you doing?"

"Talking to you." He tried to keep his tone light, but he could hear the seriousness in Robert's voice.

"No, I mean this morning. Do you have any plans?" "Not really.

Why?"

Robert cleared his throat. "I want you to come out and look at something with me."

"What?"

He cleared his throat again, a nervous habit he'd had since childhood and something he did only when he was under extreme pressure. "We've found a dead body. Out by the arroyo. It's... Manuel Torres."

"The old guy who worked at Troy's garage?"

Yeah. He's .. ." More throat clearing. "You gotta come out here. You gotta see this." ........ "Murdered?"

"You gotta see for yourself."

"All right. Let me grab my camera. I'll meet you... where?"

"The arroyo. But I don't know if you'll be wanting your camera. These aren't pictures that'll be suitable for the paper." , : , "What happened, Robert.> What is it?"

"You gotta see for yourself."

There were two cars, a Jeep, and four men already at the arroyo. Steve Hinkley and Ted Thrall, two deputies, stood next to one of the vehicles, talking. Robert and Brad Woods, the county coroner, were at the edge of the oversize gully, looking down at something.

Rich pulled to the side of the dirt road and got out of the car, grabbing his camera from the passenger seat and slipping the strap over his shoulder. A cloud of red dust, kicked up by the braking tires, washed over him and continued on, carried by the warm morning breeze.

He coughed and spit, wiping his eyes, then glanced over at Robert, who waved him forward.

In a normal town, a real town, he and Robert would not have been able to maintain the professional relationship they now shared. There would have been charges of conflict of interest, allegations that the police and the press were far cozier than they should have been, and he would have had to assign someone else to cover the crime beat.

But Rio Verde was not a normal town. No one here gave a damn whether or not he was the police chief's brother or the mayor's cousin or the president's transvestite son as long as their garage sale ads came out on time--a fact that played hell with his journalistic ethics but sure as shit made his personal life a whole lot easier.

He walked' across the hard-packed sand, past the parked cars, to where Robert and Woods stood solemnly waiting. "Hi," he said, nodding to both.

Robert turned to the coroner. "Would you excuse us for a sec?" he asked. "I want to talk to my brother alone."

The other man nodded and began walking slowly back toward the cars.

Robert looked at Rich for a moment but said nothing. His gaze was troubled. "Is he down--?" Rich began. Robert nodded.

Rich moved closer, standing at the top of the arroyo and looking toward the bottom. His heart began thump "Iesus " he breathed. ing in his chest.. ,

There was nothing left of Manuel Tortes but a skeleton covered with skin.

He stared, unable to look away. Even from here, even from this angle, he could see the wrinkled parchment appearance of the man's face, the way his teeth, protruding between dark deflated lips, looked overlarge in his now shrunken head, the way his nose had collapsed in on itself, a crater between hard-bone cheeks. There were round black holes in the sockets where the old man's eyes had been.

Goose bumps popped up on Rich's arms. Manuel Tortes was sell clothed, wearing faded jeans and a greas Tshirt, but his shoes had fallen off, his pants were partially pulled down, and the thin covering of dried crinkled skin which now outlined the infrastructure of his waist and lower legs was clearly visible. i:'

Around the body, in an almost deliberate semicircle, were dead animals, similarly drained, similarly dried: a crow, a hawk, two jackrabbits, a roadrunner.

"What is this?" Rich asked. "How did this happen?" Robert shook his head, looking toward the two deputies standing by the cruiser. He had not glanced into the arroyo once, Rich noticed, not since he'd arrived.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know what's going on here. Even Brad's never heard tell of anything like this."

Rich found that he, too, was having a hard time looking back into the arroyo. He kept his eyes on his brother. "Who discovered the body?"

"I did. I saw the Jeep parked there, no one around, and I came over to check it out. I was driving the Bronco and had no radio, so when I saw Manuel down there, I hauled ass back to the station, called Brad, called you, and came back here with Ted and Steve."

"You haven't gone down there yet? .... Robert shook his head. "We have to be careful. There might be footprints. We don't want to disturb anything. We'll walk along the cliff a ways and find another way down."

Rich turned away from his brother and looked to his right, to where the arroyo curved away from town. He had not come here for a long time, but as children he and Robert and their friends had played here often, converting crevices into caves, laying boards across outcroppings of rock to make forts and hideouts. They had thought the arroyo private, had assumed that they had discovered it, and no one else knew about it.

It had been their secret place, where they'd hidden from enemies and adults and imaginary antagonists.

He could not remember the last time he'd been here, but as he looked down the length of the gully it seemed different to him. It was now permanently tainted by the presence of death. Of course, he was viewing the scene with adult eyes now, seeing the dead man as an incursion of evil into what had once been a childhood paradise. As kids, he was sure that they would have had no problem adjusting to the idea of the corpse, would, in fact, have concocted some elaborate adventure story to explain its existence, a story that would have made their hideaway seem that much more forbidden and exciting.

What had they known then, though? Nothing. They'd been children. They would not have understood the implications of what had happened, would not have been any more frightened by this dried husk of a man and the dead animals surrounding him than they would have been by a gruesome horror story told around the campfire.

He was scared now, though. And the chill which had come upon him when he'd first looked into the arroyo had not lifted. He turned again toward his brother. "Is this a murder or is this a natural death?"

"A 'natural death'?"

"You know what I mean. Did he just die out here and get, you know, dehydrated or something?"

"I saw him working yesterday when I drove by the garage."

Rich shivered. "Then how could this have happened? How could this physically have been done?"

Robert took a deep breath. "Remember a few years back when we had those rumors of witches and satanists meeting out here? There were supposedly people in robes chanting when the moon was full?"

"But nothing ever came of it. You never found anything. Hell, you never even found anyone who'd seen the chanters. It was all friend-of-a-friend stuff."

"Yeah, but maybe this is connected. I mean, Jesus, look at him." He motioned toward the body. "This is not your average everyday murder."

"There are no 'average everyday murders." This is the first murder you've ever handled."

"And I'm scared shitless. I admit it. I don't know who I'm supposed to inform, how I'm supposed to begin the investigation. What if I screw up? I called Brad, he's here, he'll take the body and do an autopsy. I'll tell Manuel's wife. But do I have to tell the state police? Do I have to report this to the county supervisors? What is the chain of command here? What's the procedure? Who's going to know if I'm doing a decent job of investigation or poking the pooch?"

"Call Pee Wee. He'll know what to do. He's bound to have come across something like this."

"Something like this?" Robert shook his head. ""I don't think so."

"I don't mean something exactly like this, I mean a murder. He was chief for thirty years. I think he's handled murders before." Rich glanced again into the arroyo, his eye drawn to the shriveled bony body and its halo of empty animals. "I don't think anyone's come across something like this."

"I don't think so either." The breeze kicked up again, ruffling Robert's thinning hair. He said nothing for a moment. ""What do you think happened here?" he asked

Rich blinked against the warm wind, still felt cold. He cleared his throat. "I don't know," he said. "It's... it's not like something real. It's like something out of a damn movie, you know?"

Robert nodded. "I know." He spit, then ground the wet spot into the sand with the toe of his boot. He motioned toward the deputies and the coroner. "Come on," he said. "It's getting late. We've dicked around enough here. It's time to go down."

Rich nodded, saying nothing.

The two of them walked in silence toward the cars.

Brad Woods had performed autopsies on a lot of bodies in his time. Men and women who had died of old age, children who had succumbed to illness, even victims of mining accidents and car crashes. Some had been more heartbreaking than others, some had been more gruesome than others, but all had been within the range of normalcy. None of the bodies had ever scared him.

Until now.

He stared down at the form of Manuel Torres, laid out on the table in the center of the room. Naked, the old man's body looked even more inhuman than it had when enveloped within the too-large clothes. Lying on the sand, Manuel had seemed so shriveled and shrunken that he'd resembled a predatory stick insect that had crawled into the clothing of a human being. But here, on the table in the cold glare of the operating lights, the unbelievable distortion of the ordinary was even more frightening. Now Brad could clearly see that the in sectile limbs of the body were severely attenuated human arms and legs, that the sunken body cavity and strangely shriveled genitals were the products of acute emaciation, that the fright-mask face was the result of dehydration without decay.

He reached out and poked a tentative finger into the body's stomach region. He could feel the dryness even through the gloves, and in the silence of the room, against only the low hum of the lights, the skin made a Sound like that of a newspaper being crumpled.

He pulled back, nervous despite himself. The old man's bones were broken in several spots, his rib cage crushed, and in these places the skin had cracked open. None of the dermal layers had retained enough moisture to maintain flexibility. No blood had escaped from any of the openings.

What could have drained the body of all fluids so completely?

And in a single night. According to Chief Carter, Troy had said that Manuel worked until five o'clock yesterday evening.

I In the arroyo, Brad had given the body a cursory examination, visually inspecting the corpse for obvious signs of violence. That had been difficult enough. Surrounded by other people, by the police and the press, he had still not wanted to handle the body, still had to force himself to touch the old man. But now, here, alone, he was finding it almost impossible to begin his work.

Brad felt goose bumps on his arms and on the back of his neck. The bodies of the animals were in bags at the back of the room, and those he would examine later with

Ed Durham, the vet.

But Manuel Torres was his and his alone.

He turned on the tape recorder, picked up the scalpel, took a deep breath, then turned off the tape recorder, put down the scalpel, and took a drink of water from the squeeze bottle on the tray next to him.

He didn't want to do this autopsy. That's what it came down to. He'd been procrastinating for over a quarter of an hour, laying out instruments, testing his tape recorder, performing the ordinary prep duties that should have taken no more than five minutes. He wished he had an assistant or a coworker to help him. He wished he'd called Kim, his secretary, and told her to come in, although there was nothing she could do to help with the procedure.

He wished there was someone in the building besides himself.

He glanced around the room. Though it was empty and well lit, though there were no shadows, there was something about the room that put him on edge, that made him feel more than a little uneasy. He had never been one of those people who were afraid of death, or who considered a lifeless body something sacred to be left reverentially alone. To him, dignity and dissection were not mutually exclusive. The idea of cutting open a dead person had never bothered him, which was why he had not had any problem deciding upon his chosen profession. To him, a corpse had always been the shed husk of an individual, what was left after the soul had departed. A body had value only in its ability to shed knowledge upon death. Its sole function was to impart medical or criminal information to those qualified to look for it.

But Manuel Torres's body did not seem to him like a shed husk. Despite the fact that it was physically the most husk like corpse he had ever come across, it did not feel to him like an abandoned vessel, and he could not help thinking that the soul of Manuel Torres, whatever that spark might be that made a person a person, was still alive in this dried form and had not been able or allowed to escape.

It was a silly thought but one he could not shake. And it was why he could not seem to bring himself to cut into the body, why he kept postponing that first incision. It felt too much like murder. Each time he picked up the scalpel and looked at the body, preplanning the cuts and crosscuts he would make to open up the chest and abdominal cavities, he saw in his mind a scenario in which Manuel suddenly sat up and started screaming, howls of agony escaping from between those flattened lips as shriveled disintegrating organs fell out through the flaps of dried skin.

Brad's gaze darted quickly toward the old man's left foot. Had he seen a toe wiggle? He stared at the foot for a moment, but the pinkish toes remained stubbornly unmoving against the background of the silver steel table.

What frightened him the most was the fact that he kept expecting the body to move.

It was stupid, and he knew it was stupid. The reaction of a child who'd been watching too many fright flicks. But the feeling would not go away. He had opened up a hundred bodies in this room. Two hundred maybe. He'd worked mornings and nights, weekdays and weekends, but he had never experienced anything like this.

What the hell was the matter with him?

He told himself to maintain his professionalism, to simply go by the book and, step by step, objectively perform each of the simple medical procedures required for a legal autopsy. Again he turned on the tape recorder, again he picked up the scalpel. He breathed deeply, through his nose, in a conscious effort to calm himself. He looked again at Manuel Torres. He could see bone beneath the wrinkled translucent parchment skin, the white bone of skull and skeleton, and that was something he knew, that was something he could handle. There was no monster here, only a dead man. A body built around a structure of bone. The condition of the corpse might be unusual, but its composition was not.

It was time for him to put aside his foolishness and get to work.

This time, he used the scalpel to make an incision in the chest, and his chill abated, superstitious dread replaced by the familiar and welcome feeling of dispassionate competence.

He described each "procedure as it was performed, documenting the entire process on tape. The body was indeed dehydrated, and to an unbelievable degree, but this fact did not now seem as horrifying as it had only a few moments ago. He was again the coroner, doing his job, recording his findings, and while afterward he might again be affected by emotions, he was now on autopilot, observing and chronicling the facts as he encountered them.

He turned the body over to examine its lateral and posterior segments.

He adjusted the corpse, then blinked, staring down at Manuel Torres's neck. There was an open gash directly below the base of the head, a large missing chunk of flesh.

How could he have missed such an obvious wound in his preliminary examination?

He shook his head, embarrassed by his oversight, and described the wound in detail, carefully measuring its width and length. There was a dried residue around the opening, a crusty pinkish substance that he carefully excised and placed on a slide, setting it aside for later examination.

He already knew the makeup of the substance. He had seen the combination before, on the lips of people who had had seizures, dried on tongues that had been bitten. Blood and saliva.

He frowned. The combination might not be that unique, but a wound on the back of the neck was a very unusual place to find saliva in a concentration so large. Very unusual.

He looked more carefully at the wound. The skin around it was so dry that no specific finding could be verified as completely accurate, but he thought he could see the imprint of teeth on the epidermis.

Human teeth. His own mouth felt suddenly dry. Blood and saliva.

The chili was back, the fear, and he quicken cutting more quickly, talking faster, hastening the procedure. He knew it was important that he discover the true cause of Manuel Torres's death, but right now he just wanted to get this damn thing over with.

And he wanted to make sure he was out of the building before nightfall.

The buildings surrounding the church were run down almost to the point of condemnation. Entire painting histories were revealed in chipped layers on the peeling stucco walls of the tiny houses. The hard dirt ground was littered with the sparkling shards of broken bottles. In the building next door, a sagging wooden structure with wire mesh over the windows and a faded sign above the door identifying it as the

"South Phoenix Social Club," several black men wearing white T-shirts and gang colors stood in the doorway unmoving.

Pastor Wheeler did not notice the neighborhood or its inhabitants. His attention was concentrated solely on the church in front of him, which was remarkabl well preserved for its age and for this part of town. It wasn't the most beautiful church he'd ever seen---with its flat roof, squat structure, and lack of stained glass, it looked more like a government office than a house of worship but it could easily be moved, and its design could readily accommodate additions. The church was currently owned by the First Southern Baptists, but the land was owned by a developer out of Seattle, and the developer wanted to raze the whole block and put up an apartment complex. Despite all the pleas, pyers, and petitions, the developer had given the Baptists only two months to find a new home for the church. An impossible task.

Although many South Phoenix residents were Baptist, very few of them could afford to donate the kind of money required to save the building, and the pastor of the church had approached the Arizona Church Construction Council with the offer to give the building away to any congregation able to afford moving costs. The pastor had reached an agreement with the Methodists, who were going to allow him to give his sermons ha their chapel on Sunday afternoons, after their services were over, but he stir wanted his old church to be saved. And Pastor

Wheeler was here to save it.

Praise the Lord.

Wheeler had received a call yesterday from the chair man of the ACCC, who'd told him about the church. He had filed a request for assistance from the coundl over a year ago, before he had independently worked out his deal with the Rio Verde Presbyterians, and he'd heard nothing from them until now. He'd assumed that the council had rejected his proposal and forgotten about him.

It was the hand of God, Wheeler realized. The Lord was working to ensure that His house of worship would be completed on time and in the manner He desired. God wanted him to have this building.

And the church was perfect. Certainly it was ugly, but its nondescript flatness would complement the small town homeyness of his Rio Verde chapel, and the two of them together would blend into the background and form the foundation of the new house of the Lord that Jesus had told him to build.

He looked at Paul Davis, the restoration coordinator for the ACCC who had accompanied him to the site. "It's perfect," he said. "We want it."

"Don't you even want to look inside?" Davis asked. Wheeler smiled.

"No."

"Suit yourself. I've already been in, to examine the structure, and I don't think the moving itself will pose much of a problem. This thing was built in the fifties, and it was done sectionally. We'll take it apart the same way and transport it in two segments on flatbeds. The only possible setback will be your lack of a foundation at the Rio Verde site. This here's resting on a flat reinforced concrete base, and you really should have something similar ready for it, as well as plumbing hookups in the proper locations."

Wheeler continued to smile. "We Will arrange the building to our satisfaction once it's in place. We'll take care of everything. All you have to do is move it."

Davis nodded, though he looked more than a little uncomfortable. "If you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do with two churches out there? Your congregation can't be very big in a town that small."

"I mind you asking," Wheeler said. He turned away from Davis, and now he glanced around at the neighborhood surrounding the church. He saw about him graffiti, garbage, and other familiar, unmistakable signs of a slum. He knew this place. He had begun his evangelical career in a neighborhood not unlike this, in the poor part of Dallas, although there the ethnic makeup had been heavily Hispanic rather than black.

Not that it made any difference. They were all trash in the eyes of the Lord.

He had come to Dallas at the tender age of twenty-two, unschooled, untried, and inexperienced, and he had learned by doing, preaching at first from the bus stop bench of a street corner, then from a portable podium of his own making. He had attracted auention as an object of curiosity, had become an object, of ridicule, and had graduated to an object of interest. People began to listen to what he had to say, and he preached to them, converting many to the teachings of the Lord, though, truth be told, he had never liked any of his followers. He had often wondered why. It was not a question that had kept him up nights--he knew his purpose was to ducate, not befriend--yet he wondered why he took no joy in the conversion of these heathens. Why did he not enjoy bringing a new soul into the fold? He truly did not care one way or the other, did not care if these people believed or disbelieved, although he would never show that in public. Indeed, he became quite adept at hiding his true emotions while in the pulpit, at masking his disgust for these dirty, ignorant savages.

He prayed on it, and he came to 'realize that these people were merely practice subjects, that the Lord had provided him with warm bodies so that he might hone his skills and develop his talents before moving on to the truly worthy.

Most of his current flock Were worthy. Oh, there were a few who would not be joining the rest of them in the kingdom of heaven. Taz Penneman, for all of his do-goo ding was an unrepentant heathen. And he didn't like Mary Gale, who always looked lustily at him with her harlot's eyes. She'd burn in hell. Marge Howe' What you looking at, motherfucker?"

Wheeler blinked, focused. A large overweight black man was staring belligerently at him from the doorway of the adjacent house, a small wooden structure painted shocking pink. He had not been aware that he'd been looking at the man, and he glanced quickly away.

"Motherfuckerl" the man yelled.

Wheeler smiled, said nothing. This entire section of the city would be destroyed when the Lord Jesus Christ established His kingdom on earth.

It would be leveled and weeded, then seeded with goodness and populated by the righteous, people who understood the ways of the Lord and had a healthy fear of God.

That was the root of the problem, he knew. Not enough people had been instilled with the fear of God. Even many so-called Christians these days seemed to see God as some sort of benevolent hippie, kindly smiling down on all of their humanistic endeavors. Those men and women had strayed far from the scriptures, had let their conceptions of the Lord be influenced by the ungodly secular interpretadons of mealymouthed liberal atheists, yet they still dared to say they believed. They'd forgotten that the Lord was a great and terrible God capable of exacting a steep toll for transgressions. They'd been raised to think like Catholics, to believe that the Lord forgave all, that they could steal, murder, whore, and blaspheme, then apologize and all would be forgotten.

He had been raised differently.

He was glad of it now, though he had not been at the time. He had been swayed as a youth by false companions and had wanted to share their simple easy rationalizations, had wanted to believe that he could confess his sins to the Lord and be forgiven, or that the Lord was not concerned with the petty misdeeds of youth at all. But his father had set him straight, and had lectured him and beaten into him the fear of God. His father had understood that the Lord would accept no losers, no sinners, no transgressors, that He had provided His son to the world as an example, to show that it was possible to live on earth as a perfect, unblemished human being, and the old man had made sure that Wheeler understood that as well.

Even if that meant using The Scourge.

His father had also made sure that Wheeler knew, from the beginning, the truth about his mother. So while he had never known his mother, he had always known of her. He had known exactly what she was. His father had told him. Many times his father had told him.

His mother was a harlot, a strumpet, a brazen wanton woman. A whore

One of the wicked. : : .... She'd always been that way, his father had explained even when he'd first met her--but he'd foolishly thought he would be able to convert her, to make her change. He'd been seduced by her striking beauty, her soft voice, her even temperament and easy ways. It had been the sole mistake of an otherwise exemplary life, and it may very well have cost him entrance to Heaven. But if it was the last thing he did, he was going to make sure that his son did not follow in his footsteps.

Wheeler had grown up knowing that his mother was damned to hell. Then again, most women were going to hell. His father made him realize that. Most women were wicked. All they wanted was sex. All they wanted was to feed that unquenchable fire between their legs. Like animals, they were, slaves to the lusts of their bodies.

Wheeler had not seen a photograph of his mother until after his father's death, and when he finally did see what she looked like, he was surprised to discover that she did not resemble the evil temptress he had imagined at all. He'd always thought she would look like a vamp, one of those pouty, slutty women who hung around outside the bars on Seventh Street, a painted lady with enormous breasts and tight dresses that outlined the curves of her slatternly body. But instead, she looked like a mousy librarian, a plain, average, slightly underweight woman of approximately middle age.

He'd burned the photograph after he'd looked at it, throwing it into the fireplace along with a rubber-banded stack of old letters he'd found in his father's dresser.

You could never tell. That was one thing his father had taught him.

You could never tell what lay beneath appearances, what hid behind people's outer masks, what they were really like inside. That was something only God could see.

But Wheeler had found out later that he could tell, that he could somehow see behind the mask and into a person's soul, that he could see through the facade to the truth beneath. It was a gift God had given him, a reward for his achievement in spreading the word of the Lord.

And now Jesus had seen fit to visit him personally. There was a new day coming.

Wheeler looked again at the church, then at Davis next to him. The restoration coordinator was one of those false Christians, all piety and obsequiousness on the outside, all bleeding heart humanist on the inside. Wheeler smiled to himself, felt warmed. The man would soon find out on which side his bread was buttered.

Davis finished making calculations in a small handheld notebook and looked up. "The earliest we can have it moved is next Friday," he said.

Wheeler nodded. "That will be fine," he said, smiling. He continued to nod. "Next Friday will be fine."

The restaurant was closed on Monday. Even workaholics like her parents needed a day of rest, a day to themselves, and since they couldn't very well take off on Saturday or Sunday the two busiest days of the weekD they closed the restaurant on Monday, taking their weekend a day late and a day short.

This was the day Sue allowed herself to sleep in.

She lay in bed now, curled on her side, staring at the bottom right corner of the framed Sargent print on the wall. John was already up, getting ready for school. She could hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Farther off, in the kitchen, she heard the rattling of pots and the rhythmic staccato sound of her mother's attempts to sing along with a commercial on the radio.

Usually, she liked to stay in bed for a while after she awoke, enjoying that peaceful transition between sleep and wakefulness, her mind thinking clearly and without distraction while her body still enjoyed the comforts of slumber. But today she felt restless, constitutionally unable to remain inert beneath the covers. She sat up and stretched.

Sue glanced around her room, at the Impressionist prints on the walls, at the carved antique dresser, at the small nightstand covered with lace. More than anything else, her room symbolized the difference between herself and the rest of her family. She had decorated the room according to her own independently acquired aesthetic standards, with ideas obtained from books, taste molded by movies. The rest of the house was filled with gaudy throw rugs and pillows, fake jade carvings and tacky Buddha figurines, the cheap bastardizations of Chinese culture sold in curio shops and originally meant for American tourists but embraced wholeheartedly by her parents.

Her room was different.

If there was anything to reincarnation, she thought, she'd been a Victorian Englishwoman in a previous life.

Getting out of bed, she walked across the room to her closet. She did not know what she was going to do today. It seemed to her that she had had something planned--at least it felt that wayMbut she could not for the life of her remember what it was.

She took her robe from its hook inside the closet door and put it on.

Her parents usually used this day to shop for supplies, to work around the house. Sue read, watched TV, or did her own shopping, although she invariably felt guilty that she was not doing something more productive. In the two years she'd been out of school, she had still not adjusted to the fact that her free time was truly free, that there was no homework hanging over her head, no assignments or projects due.

She kept wanting to work on something, and she'd considered trying to write, trying to paint, trying to do something creative, but instead she'd let herself become lazy, doing nothing with her days except hanging out.

Was this what life was like for most people? Drifting, merely existing? It all seemed so pointless and purposeless. She'd worked so hard to do well in school, to learn, to get good grades, and where had it gotten her?

In Cantonese, her mother yelled for John to come to breakfast.

Sue, too, headed down the hall toward the kitchen, bumping into her brother along the way.

"Watch it, retard," he said, bumping her with his hip in return.

"Die," she told him.

They walked into the dining room. Three bowls were already set on the table. Her mother, who had obviously assumed that Sue would sleep in today, was surprised to see her but hurriedly returned to the kitchen and brought out another bowl.

"What about Grandmother?" Sue asked in CantOnese. "Isn't she eating?"

"She is not feeling well," her mother said as she placed the bowl on the table She did not elaborate but returned immediately to the kitchen. That worried Sue. Usually, if her grandmother was ill, her mother would describe in detail the predse nature of her malady, whether it be toh se or tao tung. Her mother's silence made Sue feel uneasy, and she could not help thinking of what her grandmother had muttered last night before settling painfully into bed. Wai.

Badness.

She had not been sure at the time whether her grand mother meant sickness or evil, and she had not asked. She had not wanted to know.

But she had a suspicion that her grandmother was not referring to physical illness. For the past few days, ever since the mechanic had been found in the arroyo, her grandmother had seemed worried and preoccupied, had spent more time than usual in her room, and when she'd spoken to the family at all, her conversation had been peppered with thinly veiled hints of signs and omens. While Sue often scoffed at the super stitiousness of the old woman, she was also more than a little afraid of what her grandmother called D/ Lo Ling Gum, the sixth sense.

She had never been able to satisfactorily explain to herself how her grandmother was able to tell when it was going to rain when even the weathermen did not know, or how she could predict with amazing accuracy the deaths of relatives who lived far away. She liked even less her grandmother's references to spirits and tse mog, demons, She remained standing as John sat down. Her father was already sitting at the head of the table but he had not yet spoken, and neither she nor John dared address him. He was not a morning person, and though he always awoke early, he seldom spoke before breakfast and never before his first cup of tea. He preferred to sit in undisturbed silence and listen to the news on the radio or, on Thursday, read the newspaper.

Looking at him now, at the way he stared crossly at nothing, she wondered if he even spoke to her mother before breakfast, or if the two of them simply woke up when the alarm went off, got out of bed silently, and got dressed without speaking.

It was a depressing thought, and she pushed it out of her mind.

John began drumming on the table with his spoon and fork as he waited for breakfast, pounding out the rhythm to some rock or rap song running through his mind. Sue walked into the kitchen to see if her mother needed help with the food. Her mother was just finishing scooping fried rice from the wok onto a plate, and she told Sue to get the teapot from the stove. Sue picked up the teapot, her mother picked up the plate, and the two of them walked into the dining room.

John looked up as they entered. He frowned when his mother put the plate on the table He put down his fork and spoon. "How come we never have breakfast food for breakfast?" he asked in English ..... His father glared at him. "Eat!

"I want pancakes or something. I don't want rice. We have rice every day. I'm sick of it"

"John .... " Sue warned.

But the argument had already started, her mother joining her father in lecturing John on nutrition, telling him that he was ungrateful and disrespectful. The argument was bilingual, her parents speaking in Cantonese, her brother speaking in English in order to annoy his parents.

"When I'm eighteen," John said finally, "I'm getting an earring."

"You are not. Be quiet and eat your food."

John lapsed into silence, slumping down in his seat. Sue said nothing but scooped some fried rice onto her plate. She worried about her brother. Right now he was still young, and he still showed his parents some respect, but he was much more Americanized than even she was and much more than her parents understood. Her parents were going to have a very tough time with him in the next few years. He was going to want to do the same things his friends did, and he was going to chafe and right against the restrictions her parents would place on him. That's what concerned her. John was easily swayed, too concerned with fitting in, too worried about what his peers thought of him. She, too, had been torn between the two cultures, not feeling fully a part of either, but she had had enough self-confidence that she had done what she thought was right and had never succumbed to peer pressure. John was different.

"That's it," he muttered under his breath. "When I'm eighteen, I'm hitting the road."

Neither of her parents heard his remark, and Sue just let it lie. She didn't want to inflame the situation even further.

John finished eating quickly and, without waiting to be excused, pushed his chair away from the table "I gotta catch the bus," he said. He ran down the hall to his bed room to get his books, and a moment later yelled, "ByeI"

The door slammed behind him.

"Tieu pei, "her father said, more to himself than anyone else.

Her mother finished eating, and she took her own and John's bowl to the kitchen. A few seconds later, the phone rang, and Sue heard her mother answer it. " "Lo?" There was a short moment of silence "Sue?"

"Coming!" She pushed back her chair and hurried into the kitchen, taking the receiver from her mother. "Yes"

"Sue, it's me."

"Janine?"

"Yeah. My car died again this morning, and I have to be at work in five minutes" Her friend's words were rushed, her voice on the edge of panic "I called Shelly, but her mom says she's not home Do you think you could get your dad's car and pick me up?"

"Sure. I'll be there in a few minutes. Where are you?

Home?" - :

"Yeah." ........ "Okay, I'll be right over."

She asked her parents if she could borrow the car to take Janine to work. Her father said okay, but her mother said no, they had shopping to do. She explained that she'd be back in ten minutes, two hours before the grocery store even opened.

"The keys are on the dresser," her father said. :

Before her mother could disagree, Sue hurried into her bedroom, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed the keys from her parents' room, and hurried out to the garage.

Janine worked at The Rocking D, a dude ranch situated at the foot of Poundcake Hill that catered to young rich couples from the Valley and out of state who liked to pre tend for a week or a weekend that they were living in the

Old West.

The Old West with swimming pools and cable TV.

The ranch was Rio Verde's sole claim to fame. A four star resort, it had been built in the 1950s by a hotel mogul from back East who had been suckered into buying investment land in Rio Verde sight unseen.

Determined to turn a lemon into lemonade, the mogul had built the Rocking D and had then proceeded to place advertisements for his "guest ranch" in such unconventional places as National Geographic and Modern Equestrian magazines. His strategy had worked, and while Rio Verde had been too far from civilization to ever make it a resort mecca, the Rocking D did generate a consistent profit. Ads for the ranch still appeared periodically on TBS and other cable stations, although, like the rest of the town, the ranch had lately fallen on hard times and had seen much of its business defect to Scottsdale and Laughlin.

Janine was waiting in front of her house in her cowgirl uniform, nervously banging her purse against her thigh, when Sue pulled up. She had the passenger door opened and was inside almost before Sue had stopped the car.

"What's the hurry? We'll make it."

"Yeah, but I have to be there on time. I was already late once last week, and let's just say my supervisor is not exactly my best friend."

. Sue turned around at the end of the cul-de-sac and headed back toward the highway. They passed a corner where three raggedy-looking elementary schoolchildren waited for the bus.

"Did you get that schedule for Pueblo College?" Sue asked.

Janine shrugged. "I think so."

"I'm thinking of taking a few classes this semester. Classes start next week."

"You're driving all the way to Globe?"

"Of course not. They have extension classes at the high school here on weeknights. Didn't you read the schedule?" :

Janine shook her head. "No. But it doesn't matter. I wouldn't go back to school anyway. I'm over, done, and through with that crap. I promised myself on the day I graduated that I would never set foot in another classroom again." Sue smiled but said nothing. Her friend's attitude was not entirely foreign to her--it was an attitude shared by most of her ex-classmates---but she still thought it terribly shortsighted. Credits from the extension courses were accepted at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and most of the community colleges throughout the state. There weren't many classes being offered right now, but there would be, and she knew that she could earn nearly enough credits to get an AA degree without leaving Rio Verde.

Of course, she had always planned on going to college. Her parents had wanted her to go to college too, but there simply hadn't been enough money. She'd received two partial scholarships based on her academic achievement and SAT scores, one from ASU and one from Pitzer College in California, but the key word had been "partial." Each of the scholarships would have paid for half of her tuition, but she would have had to come up with the other half herself, as well as money for books, food, lodging, and transportation. On the advice of her high school counselor, she had applied for a student loan, but for the past few years both the state and federal governments had been cutting back on the number of loans made available, and her application was rejected. When she'd called the Financial Aid Office at ASU to ask why, she was told that her parents had too much equity. They owned both their house and their restaurant, and although her family barely managed to eke out a living each month, on paper they had assets in excess of $100"O00--which made her ineligible for financial aid.

She had been doing everything she could over the past two years to save money for college: living at home, working full time, allowing herself only an occasional movie for entertainment. But while she still wanted to go to college to learn, her parents' priorities had shifted a bit.

They now thought of college as a place where she could look for a good husband.

Janine looked at her. "Night classes, though..." Her voice trailed off.

"I don't want to think about it," Sue said quickly.

Janine shivered. "They said his body was totally drained of blood.

Like a vampire got him or something."

"That's a cheerful thought first thing in the morning." "Well, you brought it up."

"No, I didn't. You did. I just said I might take some classes."

"Well, that's why I have to get there on time. I don't want to get transferred to the night shift. I may have to do some brown-nosing for a while, but I don't want to work all alone at that counter in the middle of the night. Not with some loony running around."

Sue turned off Highway 370 onto Rocking D Road, glancing at the dashboard clock. Janine might be a minute or so late, but that was all. "Do you need a ride home this afternoon?" she asked her friend.

Janine shook her head. "I'll catch a ride with somebody."

"You sure."

"Yeah. Thanks for the lift, though. You saved me." Sue pulled to a stop in the parking lot in front of the ranch house that served as a lobby. She looked from the western-style buildings to the fake boulders surrounding the two sculpted swimming pools. It always amazed her that people from other cities were willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to spend a few nights here in Rio Verde.

She would pay money not to spend a few nights in Rio Verde.

"What are you doing Friday?" Janine said as she got out of the car.

"No plans yet. Why?"

"Let's do something then. Catch a movie, maybe." "Sounds good," Sue said. "Give me a. call." "Okay. Later."

Sue watched her friend walk up the porch steps of the ranch house, then turned around, put the car into gear, and headed toward home.

There was plenty of used underwear at the Goodwill, and Sophocles Johnson bought it all.

Ordinarily, they sorted the clothes by color here, put ting blues with blues, whites with whites, browns with browns. But the underwear they lumped all together, regardless of the color or style, and he gathered up the rows of hangers from the rack without bothering to check the undergarments. Many of the panties and girdles were probably, soiled and worn through, most of the men's briefs were probably stained, but he didn't care. He piled them high on his arms, made his way down the aisle past an overweight woman who smelled of yesterday's sweat, and dumped the underwear on the taped cracked glass of the checkout counter. The old woman working at the cash register eyed him strangely, seemed even to be a little frightened of him, but he refused to give her any reassurance or any hint as to why he wanted the underclothes, and he stood silently, watching the numbers ring up on the electronic cash register.

"Nineteen-fifty," the woman said.

He paid the money, watched mutely as the clerk placed the undergarments in an oversize plastic bag, then carried his purchase out the door and to his car. Grinning, feeling proud of himself, he drove through town and back to the bank. He was latemthe lunch hour had officially ended twenty minutes ago--but it didn't matter. That was one of the perks of presidency. He got to make rules and didn't necessarily have to follow them.

Sophocles parked at the side of the bank, near the instant teller machine, and took the bag from the passenger seat. The top of the bag had opened during the ride, and he could smell the undergarments inside, the fragrance at once acrid and somehow comforting. He got out of the car, slammed shut the door, and flung the bag over his shoulder, giggling because the act made him feel so damn much like Santa Claus.

And he was going to be like Santa, in a way. At least to his underlings.

No, his subjects. If he was the president' hey were his subjects.

He walked through the front door of the bank and across the lobby, the bag still slung over his shoulder.

He nodded to Susan Richman, the customer service of ricer, and said hello to Tammette Walker, the teller on duty. He was still grinning, unable to keep from smiling.

He felt so damn good, so proud of himself, so excited, so happy. It was hard to keep his plan a secret, hard not to blurt it out to everyone in the entire building, but he managed to restrain himself, and made it to his office without spilling either the beans or the bag. He closed and locked the door behind him. Pressing the intercom button on his phone, he told Marge Norson, his secretary, to hold all calls and fend off all corners, he was not to be disturbed.

He breathed deeply. This was a project. It would take him several days, maybe the entire week, but he would see it through, he would get it done.

He dumped the contents of the bag on the floor of his office, took the sewing kit from the bottom right drawer of his desk, and got right to work.

He sewed the underwear together himself, making uniforms for the tellers and the loan arranger and everyone else who worked at the bank.

He neither washed the underwear nor dyed it a different color, but sewed the material together as it was, rayon to cotton to silk. While he called the clothes he made "uniforms," they were, in reality, nothing of the sort. If there were similarities between any two garments, it was strictly coincidental. He sewed without any plan or pattern but according to the dictates of the underclothes he found. The results, he had to admit, were spectacular. Before this, he had never picked up a needle or thread in his life, and he found himself imagining what he could have accomplished had he received formal training and guidance.

He placed the completed uniforms on hangers, which he hooked over the nails he'd pounded into the wall behind his desk. Bob Mackie could not have done any better. The uniforms were marvels of style over substance, each retaining the essence of the bras, briefs, or panties from which it was designed, yet somehow transcending its humble origins to become a unique and stylish customized bank outfit.

Sophocles had no idea whether or not the uniforms he was creating corresponded to the body sizes of his employees, but he didn't care.

That did not matter. The workers could adjust their sizes to fit the clothesgain or lose weight as necessary, wear platform shoes or flat sandals-and if they were not able or willing to. do so, then new workers would be found.

Anything was possible. Anything could happen. Anything. He had learned that the other night. When he had been out in the desert with his telescope, waiting for the meteor shower.

When he had seen Jesus.

When he had seen Jesus kissing Manuel Torres.

He looked up from the uniform he was working on, feeling suddenly uneasy. An uncomfortable sensation came over him, and he had the feeling that he had forgotten something or had done something wrong. He frowned, trying to think, to remember. Then he saw his handiwork hanging from the hangers on the wall, and he relaxed as, once again, all seemed right with the world.

It was dark outside, and the clock above the desk said it was ten-thirty, but he was not yet tired. He grabbed a pair of skivvies from the pile. He could continue sewing for hours. He could work through midnight with no problem. Maybe until dawn.

He grinned. With any luck, he would be finished with the uniforms by Friday.

The door to the town council chambers was open When he walked by, and Robert stopped for a second to peek inside. The room was dark, save for the line of dim ceiling lights above the council members' seats, and the gallery was shadowed, the aisles next to the walls bathed in gloom. There was something creepy about the pard al illumination of those, empty chairs behind the raised circular desk, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He hurried on, not looking back.

He had passed by the council chambers a hundred times before on evenings such as this and had never thought anything of it, but tonight was different. Tonight everything seemed creepy.

Part of it was that damned autopsy report. That thing had been haunting him now for two days, ever since he'd first received it.

Woods had declared the official cause of death to be, in layman's terms, exsanguination--loss of blood--but the circumstances surrounding that blood loss were truly frightening. For it was not only blood that had been removed from Manuel Torres's corpse, it was water, spinal fluid, saliva, semen, bile every liquid that the human body produced or retained. And all of these fluids had been sucked out through a single hole bitten into the mechanic's neck.

That was the word they had tiptoed around, had been afraid to say. It was ludicrous, of course, but it was also scary as hell. He had quizzed the coroner on the findings, asking if it would be physically possible for a deranged individual to suck out all of those fluids by placing his or her mouth on the wound. He knew from seeing Manuel's shriveled body that such an idea was absurd, but Woods had replied seriously that, yes, it would be possible with the aid of a pump strong enough to collapse inter organ membrane walls but not so strong as to significantly damage the organs themselves--although the coroner had to admit that he had never heard of the existence of such a device, and he didn't know how such a device could do exactly the same thing to the infinitely more fragile body structures of the animals found next to the corpse.

The truth was, neither of them had any idea how it had happened. The only theory that offered any explanation was vampirism.

But there were no such things as vampires.

Robert felt cold, though the night was not particularly chilly. The short peach-fuzz hairs on the back of his neck prickled. He was glad that Ted was on duty tonight. He would not have wanted to be alone in the police office right now. Pussy, he told himself.

He shook his head, smiling wryly as he pushed open the glass door.

Robert Carter. Pussy shit face Might be a good title for his autobiography.

He walked inside, nodding at Ted, who was sitting behind the front counter. "How's it going tonight?" "It's not." "Good."

Ted stood, stretched, held his back. "Mary Beth Vigil called again, though. She says Mike's still missing." Robert frowned. "What'd you tell her?"

"I told her she had to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing persons report. She said it's been twelve hours already."

"Shit." :

Mary Beth had phoned earlier in the afternoon to tell them that her father had not returned from a fig run to Casa Grande. He'd called her from the Gasa Grande Dairy Queen before heading back to Rio Verde and had told her that he'd be home in two hours, but when three and a half hours had passed and he still hadn't arrived, Mary Beth had called them. They'd contacted the Department of Public Safety to see if there'd been any accidents on the highway, but none had been reported, and they'd assumed that Mike had stopped off at a truck stop for a piece of pie, or maybe just stopped off for a piece. He had been known to frequent Nicole's and was not above picking up hitchhikers in his more desperate moments.

Now Robert was not so sure. It wasn't like Mike to disappear for this long without letting anyone know where he was, particularly once he'd called and specifically said he was coming home.

"Did you call DPS again?" he asked Ted.

The deputy nodded. "No accidents, no stalls. Their helicopter flew the route an hour or so before sundown."

Robert felt the chill return. It was probably unrelated he hoped to Christ it was unrelated--but he could not help thinking that whoever had killed Manuel Torres was still at large.

He imagined Mike lying at the bottom of the arroyo, his body shriveled and shrinking and dry.

The worry must have shown on his face, because Ted looked at him sympathetically. "You seem pretty worn out."

"Yeah," he admitted.

"Go home then. Get some rest." ,

He shook his head. "We have to come up with some leads on this murder." :::

"Tonight? There's nothing we can do tonight. Go home."

Robert ran a hand through his hair. He looked at the deputy, felt the sting of tiredness, and was forced to rub his eyes. "You're right," he said. He reached over the counter and picked up a rubber-banded stack of forms. "I'll take the answering machine off so I can hear the phone. If DPS calls or anything else comes up, give me a ring."

"Will do."

It was late, and the streets were empty as Robert drove home. He passed Rich's house and was going to give his usual shave-and-a-haircut honk as he drove by, but he saw that all of the lights were off and figured his brother and the family were already asleep. He turned onto Sagebrush, feeling slightly lonely. The moon was out, reflected in the front windows of all the homes on the right side of the street, and its dim bluish glow made the street look vacant and abandoned, like part of a ghost town.

The road curved at the foot of the hill, winding out toward the desert.

The houses here were farther apart, with stretches of sand in between.

In his parents' time, this had really been the boonies, and the school bus had had to make a special trip out this way just to pick up him and Rich. More homes had been built since then, but this was still the least populated section of Rio Verde, and cactus here still far outnumbered people. Most of the time he liked it this way--it meant he could crank up his stereo to maximum volume without disturbing his neighbors; it meant he could target practice in the desert behind his house without fear of hitting anything but rocks but sometimes he felt isolated from the rest of the town, from the rest of the world, and at those times he wished that, instead of buying Rich out, he had sold the old homestead and both of them had moved closer to town.

He swung the car next to his mailbox, rolled down the window, and checked to see if he'd gotten any mail. Pulling out three bills, he tossed them on the passenger seat next to him, then drove over the old boards that covered the culvert, and pulled to a stop on the dirt driveway in front of the toolshed.

As always, the house was empty, the living room dark and silent as he walked through the door. He had been alone longer than he'd been married, but somehow he'd gotten used to certain aspects of married life and had never been able to wean himself of them.

One was coming home to a warm lighted house.

He threw his keys on the coffee table and turned on the lights in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The house seemed quieter than usual, and he walked over to the TV and turned it on, grateful for some noise. On HBO, a police detective was inviting a pretty young woman back to his apartment.

He went into the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the television. He could not remember the last time he'd invited a woman over. There had been a few after Julie, one-night sluts he'd corralled in the roper bars, but those he'd brought home more for spite than pleasure, as ammunition to use as return fire in case he and Julie ever got back together again.

They never had gotten back together, though, had never even seen each other after, that last court appearance, and he had gradually stopped bagging the bimbos, realizing that there was no point to it.

The frightening thing was that he did not really miss them. Sex had just sort of drifted out of his life, and he had not even cared. He could not even remember the last time he'd beat off.

He sat down on the couch, feeling depressed.

Sometimes he wondered if he wasn't just wasting his life in Rio Verde.

He had never lived anywhere else, had never even been out of Arizona for more than a few days at a time, and he wondered what it would be like to move to a different state. Rich often told him he was lucky not to have made the mistakes he himself had made in moving away, but Robert wondered. Rich was different, always had been. Rich could be happy in prison if he had enough books to read. He, on the other hand, lived in the real world more than in his mind, and he needed physical, material things to make him happy.

Periodically, he toyed with the idea of running away: packing a suitcase and taking off, not telling anyone, not looking back. It was a nice dream, but that's all it was. The idea was romantic enough to appeal to him, but he was practical enough to know that it could never be anything more than a fantasy. He had responsibilities here. He wasn't some nobody who would not be missed, He was the damn police chief.

And there was a murderer at large.

A vampire.

He finished off the beer and dropped the can into the wastebasket. He remembered that he'd told Ted he would turn off the answering machine.

Reaching over the arm of the couch, he switched the phone over to manual. He put his feet up on the coffee table and tried to watch TV for a few minutes, but he felt restless, fidgety, and he kept flipping the channels, unable to concentrate on anything. Finally he stood up and walked outside.

The night was warm, the slight chill that had infiltrated the past few evenings gone. He stood at the edge of the porch, leaning on the railing, and looked up at the stars. Venus was visible, and the Big Dipper, and the belt of Orion, but the light of the moon had forced many of the minor stars to fade into blackness. His eyes moved from the sky to the ground. To the north, he saw an army of multi armed saguaro silhouetted in front of the faint glow of town lights. He shifted his weight, and a porch board creaked, scaring the cicadas into silence. From the area out toward ppache Peak came the faint howl of a far-off coyote, a lonely eerie sound that, even after a lifetime of desert living, he still associated with horror movies. Vampires.

The chill returned, and as he glanced around, he realized that because of the lay of the land, he could not even see the lights of his neighbors' houses from the porch. The coyote howled again, its cry low but clear even above the buzzing of the restarted cicadas.

Shivering, Robert walked back inside the house, locking the door behind him.

Corrie dropped Anna off at preschool, then stopped by the video store to return the tapes they'd rented over the weekend. She was supposed to have dropped the tapes off yesterday, but she hadn't felt like doing it, and they'd sat in the backseat of the car until now. She'd been low and kind of melancholy for the past few days, and, truth be told, hadn't felt like doing much of anything. Usually, when she felt down, she was able to cheer herself up by reading or exercising or playing with Anna, but lately her mood seemed to remain constant no matter what she did, and she could not figure out why. She'd thought originally that it might be PMS, but she'd checked her calendar and that was still a week and a half away.

It was Rich, she decided. It was their relationship. They were drifting apart.

Or rather, she was drifting. :;

Rich was staying exactly where he'd always been, anchored securely in place.

The problem was that she did not seem to be drifting toward anything.

She had toyed with the idea of going back to school to get her Master's. She had even halfheartedly considered having an affair. But nothing sounded good, nothing seemed right. Rich, of course, was oblivious to it all. He was as happy as ever, puttering around with his little paper, writing feature stories on ranchers who were making methane gas from steer manure and little old ladies who had once dated the cousins of B-movie actors. She didn't know if he actually thought his job was important, but she knew that he was content with it. He had no desire to do anything more ambitious, no desire to be anything more than the unread chronicler of these unlived small-town lives. And there was nowhere he would rather be than Rio Verde.

She wanted more. She'd known that from the beginning, from the first time he'd brought her back to this town to meet his brother. She'd tried to make a go of it for Rich's sake. She could see how much this meant to him, she knew how much he'd hated California, and she'd wanted him to be happy. But, damn it, she deserved to be happy too, and perhaps it was time for him to do a little sacrificing for her.

And for Anna.

She was not sure what she wanted for their daughter.

She wasn't sure Rich was either. She could see his point about the crime and the drugs and the gangs in the cities, but she knew that he could see her point about the intellectual disadvantages of small-town life as well.

She sighed. Great parents they were turning out to be. The bottom line was that she was not happy. It was time for a change. Even if she didn't know what that change was. Something in her life had to be altered. She was feeling stifled, smothered, though by what she didn't know. She did know that if something was not modified soon, she was liable to crack under the pressure.

It had occurred to her more than once recently that she should try to find another job, get away from Rich and the paper and do something separate, on her own. She had not mentioned this to Rich, but the more she thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed to her. A new job might not solve all of her problems, but it might be a step in the right direction.

She stopped at the crosswalk by the post office, waiting for an old cowboy to cross the road, and looked past the end of the street to the flat desert beyond. To the right, she could see into the unfenced backyards of houses on the next street over: colored shirts and ragged white underwear hanging on crooked clotheslines, rusted cars and parts of cars sinking into sandy lots, discarded bikes and Big Wheels strewn carelessly about depressingly under grown lawns.

God, this was an ugly town ..... An ugly dying town. Despite the influx of Phoenicians on summer weekends, despite the presence of the Rocking D, Rio Verde was slowly but surely turning ghost. It had never been a thriving business community or cultural showplace, but with the closing of the mine in the late eighties and the loss of jobs, what little economic stability the town possessed had been decimated. Rio Verde could not survive on tourism alone, particularly not the kind of weekend recreational tourism attracted to this area of the state, and gradu!!y businesses had started to bite the dust as people began to look elsewhere for work. In the past year alone, three stores had closed, and there were now six empty buildings in the two-mile stretch that constituted the downtown business district

The old cowboy reached the curb, and Corrie applied pressure to the gas, moving forward. She turned left at the next corner, onto Center, and slowed down in front of the care, pulling into the parking lot of the newspaper office.

She was conscious of another feeling beneath the vague discontent and dissatisfaction. read. A murky, intuitive premonition that disaster was on its way. Her mind skittered over the emotion, preferring not to dwell on it. The feeling was strange and darkly alien, having nothing to do with Rich or herself or their relationship but with something bigger, something on the order of an earthquake or a war, and though it scared her to even consider the source of such a strong but undefined impression, she could not help but wonder if this feeling of dread was somehow contributing to her own personal sense of un She turned off the ignition and grabbed her purse from the seat next to her, getting out of the car, locking it, and walking around the side of the building to the front entrance. She nodded to the receptionist as she entered.

"How are you today, Carole?"

The older woman smiled. "It's still too early to tell. Ask me again after lunch." ,

""Ah, one of those days." Corrie smiled at the receptionist and walked around the modular office divider that separated Carole's desk from the newsroom. Rich, as usual, was on the phone, scribbling furiously on a scratch pad he had somehow managed to find amidst the mountain of paper before him, and he waved good morning to her as she dropped her purse on the desk against the opposite wall. Ordinarily, she would have sat down and sorted through her mail to see if there were any items of local interest that she could put in one of the columns she edited, but today she simply leaned against the desk and waited for Rich to get off the phone.

She found herself looking around the newsroom, at the paste up tables at the far end, at the printer, waxer, and dryer, and she realized for the first time how truly sick she was of this place. She stared at the wall decorations-one Pena print, an aerial photograph of the town, and two framed issues of the paper that had won minor awards in the Arizona Press Association's annual newspaper competition-and wondered why she had never put her own stamp on this room, why she had never attempted to decorate even her own desk area.

Perhaps because she had never considered it hers.

There was a crackle of static from the police scanner on the shelf above Rich's desk, and he automatically reached up to increase the volume as he continued speaking on the phone. The police dispatcher recited a list of garbled numbers, then fell silent. Rich once again turned down the volume.

A moment later he hung up the phone, and she walked over to his desk.

"We need to talk," she said, sitting down in the chair opposite him.

He frowned. "What's wrong? .... She looked at him, sighed, and shook her head.

"Rich," she said, "I want to get a job."

"What do you mean? You have a job."

"No, a real job. One where I get paid. I'm tired of having to scrimp and save for every little thing. I'm tired of only eating food that we can get on double coupons."

"But I need someone to help me paste up and type out the columns. If you get another job, I'll just have to find someone else to take your place, and that'll cost us even more."

"No, it won't. I'll get a full-time job, you hire a part-time person.

You only need someone one or two days a week.

Besides, you'll be teaching. That'll bring in some extra cash."

"But what about Anna?"

"She gets off school at noon. You can pick her up and let her hang around the paper with you. Or we'll see. It depends on my hours." ;"

:

He shook his head. "Well, what kind of job are you thinking of getting? The economy in Rio Verde is not exactly booming. You think there's actually an opening in this town for a woman who got her degree in Liberal Studies?"

She met his gaze. "That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

"I want another job. Away from you. Away from the paper."

"Why?"

"Because if I don't," she said, "I'll go crazy."

They stared at each other across the desk. Rich broke the stalemate first, shrugging, picking up his pen. "Fine." His voice was resigned, his attitude dismissive, and though he sounded as though he was too weary to continue arguing with her, she knew from experience that this meant he was going to emotionally cut himself off from the rest of the family for the next week or so, speaking only when spoken to, spending most of his time alone in the den, hiding. Pouting.

Right now, that suited her fine.

She stood. Part of her wanted to make an effort to ex plain things more clearly to him, to try to make him understand what she was going through, even though she didn't really understand herself, but another part just wanted to take the path of least resistance and that was the part that won out. "I guess I'd better start looking then." .. "Let me know if you find anything."

She nodded. "I will. And I'll pick up Anna after school." She walked over to her desk and picked up her purse. She was about to walk out and throw a short "good bye" over her shoulder, but something made her stop. She tried to smile at him. "We'll talk about this later, okay?"

Rich was already writing on his scratch pad and did not even look up.

"Fine. Whatever you say."

She stood there, waiting for something more, but it was obvious that nothing was forthcoming, and she started walking.

"Good luck!" Carole called out to her as she walked out the door.

"Wait a sec. He just walked in." Steve put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone as Robert stepped into the office. "Chief?

I've got a woman here who thinks she might've seen the guy who killed Torres."

"Who is it?"

"Someone I don't know. She said her name's Donna Sandoval."

Robert's eyebrows raised in surprise. "I know Donna," he said. He walked around the side of the counter and took the phone from the deputy. He'd been half-expecting a crank: a panicked old lady who'd seen an unfamiliar man on her street, one of the small handful of do-goo ding loonies who claimed to know the perpetrator of every crime.

He had not expected to hear from someone like Donna Sandoval, who worked at First Interstate and was, as far as he knew, intelligent, trustworthy, reliable, and utterly devoid of imagination.

A perfect witness.

Maybe he would get some breaks here after all. "Hello?" he said into the receiver.

"Chief Carter? This is Donna Sandoval. I .. . I heard what happened to Mr. Tortes, and I think I might've seen the man who killed him."

"On the level?"

"I saw a man walking with Mr. Tortes that night, just before he was supposed to have been killed."

Robert's pulse began racing. He pressed a button on the phone and another button on the connected tape recorder. "I'm going to record this conversation, Donna. If it's okay with you, I'll take this as your statement, have it transcribed, and you can come down to the station and sign it at your convenience. Would that be acceptable?"

"Sure. Whatever."

"All right. Please state your name and address, then tell me exactly what you saw."

"My name's Donna Sandoval. I live at 55 Gila Lane." She cleared her, throat. "On last Friday evening, around six o'clock, I was driving down Copperhead Road toward home. I'd stopped by the store to buy some groceries after work. The street was empty, but I saw two men walking along the side, away from Troy's Garage. When I got closer, I saw that it was Mr. Torres and another man. Mr. Torres .... I don't know if I should say this, I don't want to impose my own feelings on what I saw--"

"Tell me everything. We'll sort out later what's important and what's not."

"Mr. Tortes seemed nervous. At least to me. That's why

I remembered seeing him. He was .. . sort of moving slowly and looking over his shoulder, like he didn't want to be walking with the other man, like he was looking for a way out of it."

"What did the other man look like? Did you get a good look at him?"

"Yes." She paused. "He was about six feet tall, about 250 pounds, and he was limping. He had a big thick mustache, a walrus mustache, and he was completely bald. He was wearing jeans and no shirt, just a Levi vest."

They were both silent. Robert was aware of the fact that the tape recorder was running, but did not know what to say. He stared down at the top of the desk as the hope he'd held dissipated and disappeared.

Donna had just de scribed Caldwell Burke, the man accused and convicted of molesting her daughter Charlotte in 1979. There was only one problem.

Burke had died five years ago in a knife right in the state prison in Florence.

"Donna," Robert said quietly. "You know who you just described."

She was silent for a moment. "Yes," she said. "Burke's dead." "I know that. I'm just telling you what I saw. I'm not saying it was Burke. I'm just describing the man I saw with Mr. Tortes."

"How dark was it? Maybe you didn't see"

"They were under the streetlight next to the garage. I had my glasses on. I could see perfectly."

There was something in Donna's tone of voice, a believability in her matter-of-fact declaration that caused a subtle chill to caress the back of his neck, an echo of his feelings from last night. He glanced down at Steve, who was looking at him expectantly, trying to follow the conversation from this side. "Did you see where the two of them went?"

"No. They were walking west, away from the" garage, then I drove past them and turned off onto Gila to go home. When I heard what had happened, I thought I'd better call you and tell you what I saw, in case it might help."

"Were they walking toward a car or a truck, or did you see any unfamiliar vehicles parked near the garage?"

"That's all I saw. I've been wracking my brain all morning trying to remember something else, but that's all I could come up with."

"Did you see anyone else on the street or in the general area who also might have seen something?"

"Like I said, the street was empty." She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter. "That really is what the man looked like.

That's why I remember it so clearly."

"What was Mr. Torres wearing?"

""He had on jeans and a dirty T-shirt."

The chill was resurrected. That was exactly what he had been wearing when they'd found the body.

Robert glanced again at Steve, who raised his eyebrows hopefully. He wanted to follow up with more questions, to go over every point of Donna's story in detail, but he sensed from her voice that such an attempt would not be successful right now. He would cruise by later, maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow morning, and talk to her in person. "I think we have enough for now, Donna, but I may need to ask a few additional questions later. Would it be more convenient for you if I contacted you at home or at the bank?" "Either one is fine."

"Thank you for calling, then. I'll have this transcribed into a statement. I may add whatever additional information you can give me later, and then I'll need you to come in and give us your John Hancock, okay?"

He hung up a moment later and walked across the office to his own desl

"Anything there?" asked Steve..... "Hard to tell." :

"Is she reliable?"

"Donna Sandoval doesn't have an imaginative bone in her body." He sighed. "I believe she saw someone, but I don't believe she saw who she thinks she saw." "What's that supposed to mean?" : "Do you remember Caldwell Burke?" Steve shook his head.

"Biggest crime we've had since I've been on the force. He was a child molester, and he was sent to Florence in seventy-nine for molesting Donna's daughter."

"That's who she saw with Tortes?"

"That's who she described. But Burke was cut and killed five years ago in a yard right

"So you think she saw some guy with Tortes, didn't get a look at him, and put the molester's face on him?"

Robert shrugged. "Could be. I don't know." He glanced out the window. There were a few thin white wisps of cloud near the hills on the horizon, but other than that the sky was a deep dark unbroken blue.

It was going to be a hot one. '

"So what's the plan?"

He thought for a moment. This morning he wanted to go over Troy's Garage once more, and then the length of street between the garage and the arroyo, see if he could fred anything they'd passed by on first inspection. He would send Steve, and maybe Ted, to help out the DPS with the search for Mike Vigil. This afternoon, he planned to lead a full and complete search of the arroyo, from beginning to end. They'd examined the area immediately adjoining the segment in which they'd found the body, but little else, and he had a hunch they might've missed something, "Call Jud and Ben," he said. "I need every man out here. I want a full force today."

"But it's their day off."

"They'll get comp time." He looked at Steve. "You don't think a murder and a missing person's enough of a reason to adjust the regular work schedule?"

"I didn't say that."

"I hope not. Or I was going to Suggest you give up police work and try your hand at shoe sales."

Steve grinned sheepishly. :/

"We're going to make a thorough search of the garage, the arroyo, and the area between the two. I want you and Ted to assist the state in looking for Vigil."

"What do we do? just call them up and tell them we're coming over?"

"Basically...... "I don't--" '

"I'll call Finn in Casa Grande and tell him to expect you two around noon."

"Thanks."

"Just don't let those guys push you around. Vigil's our missing person. They're working for us here." "Gotcha."

The phone rang again, and Steve answered it. Robert listened to his deputy's side of the conversation and felt the chill return. He thought of Woods's report. Exsanguination.

Steve hung up. "Man wouldn't give his name, but he says he knows who the vampire is."

"The vampire," Robert repeated.

Steve nodded slowly. "This is getting pretty weird," he said.

"Yeah." Robert put his feet up on the desk and once again looked out the window. "It is."

The temperature in the afternoon was even more unbearable than Robert had expected. He stood in the shade of the west wall of the arroyo and chugged the last half of his canned Coke. When was this damn Indian summer going to end?

He watched the two closest men walk slowly across the arroyo floor.

There was no way that the shifting, loosely packed sand could have held a footprint, but he'd hoped to find something: a thread caught on a jojoba branch, a strand of hair pulled out in a struggle, hell, even a discarded gum wrapper.

But vampires don't chew gum.

Damn it, he had to start taking this seriously

They'd found nothing new at the garage, and the detritus along the side of the road had been impossible to differentiate. He'd called off that search early in order to concentrate efforts down here. He had a gut feeling that they might find some sort of clue in the arroyo. The deliberate placement of the dead animals about Torres's head suggested to him that the mechanic had not been killed and then his body dumped, that most of the action had instead taken place down here, away from any possible witness's line of vision. "Chiefl" " He looked up to see Stu Thiebert hurrying around the curve of the arroyo, his feet pumping furiously in the shifting sand, his body moving forward at an incongruously slow pace, looking almost like a cartoon figure.

"We found something! ..... Robert stepped away from the wall, placing his Coke can on the sand where he could retrieve it on his way out, and headed toward Stu, motioning for Jud to follow. His own feet moved slowly through the sand, but he hardly seemed to notice. "What is it?" he called.

"Mice! Dead desert mice! They're about a hundred yards downt"

Robert stopped walking, frowned. "Mice?"

"They look like they've been drained! You gotta come and see it!"

Robert felt his stomach clench up. He suddenly wished he'd brought Rich along. He followed Stu around the corner, Jud hurrying close behind. Ahead, he could see the other three men in a huddle next to the arroyo's eroded east wall ...... "Here!" Robert, Stu, and Jud reached the spot almost at the same time.

"Ben found them." Stu pointed toward a crack in the arroyo wall. "In there."

Robert's gaze followed his deputy's pointing finger. On the floor of the upward sloping fissure, reaching all the way o the surface, were twenty or thirty desert mice. They had indeed been drained of blood and fluids. Their bodies looked like deflated sacs of fur, their heads like- hairy eyeless skulls, i Surrounding the top half of each mouse was a semicircle of shriveled, dried black beetles.

"Mother of shit," Jud breathed. The other men were silent. He looked at Robert. "What do you think this means?"

The knot in his stomach tightened. "I don't know," Robert said. "But go up and get the camera. And radio for Woods. I want him to see this."

He stared for a moment at the dead mice and their halos of bee des then turned away.

After shutting off the lights, closing the blinds, and locking up the office, Rich walked around to the rear of the building, sorting through his overstuffed ring for the keys to the pickup. The sun had almost set, was little more than an orange half circle on the flat border of the cloudless western horizon, and the ground, the cactus, the buildings, and the mesas behind were all bathed in a muted amber glow that lent the town a fake, cinematic quality.

He stood next to the pickup, fingers on the door handle, watching the sun's slow descent, knowing that if he stood here long enough he would see the sky directly above shift from white across the red spectrum to purple. This was his favorite time of day, this hour of dusk between daylight and dark. He breathed deeply.

God, he loved this land.

Especially the horizon. He loved the horizon. Standing here in his parking lot, he could see the curve of the earth, a gentle rounding of the corners between north and west and south that somehow dwarfed the entire landscape. There were desert mountain ranges in the distance, and isolated mesas, but they were like bumps on a log, noticeable but not large enough to affect the totality. What he liked most was the open space. There was room to breathe here, the vistas were spectacular, the air was clear, and the sky covered three-fourths of the world.

That was one thing he'd noticed when they'd lived for that first year with Corrie's parents in California: The sky had seemed so small. It had been white there instead of blue and was revealed only in small segments between buildings and houses and trees. Even in the flatter areas of Los Angeles, the sky had still seemed low, claustrophobically close, not wide and expansive as it was in Arizona. He had never said so to Corrie, but it was that smallness of space, that feeling that he didn't have enough room to stretch even in the open air, which as much as anything had made him want to return to Rio Verde. It was a stupid reason for returning, he supposed, an immature attachment to the emotions of place. But strange as it might sound when articulated, it felt right, and he had never regretted coming back.

He opened the pickup door and slid onto the seat. He'd wanted to call Robert this afternoon, but things had been so busy with Corrie gone that he just hadn't had the time. Something had been nagging him. He should talk to his brother and find out what was going on with the investigation, but he'd rationalized his inertia by telling himself that if anything important happened, Robert would call. Besides, the scanner had been silent the end re time he'd been in the office.

He would phone Robert when he got home.. Rich looked at the clock on the dashboard as he turned the key in the ignition and the truck roared to muffierless life. Six-forty. His new class started at seven. That gave him only twenty minutes to grab some chow and dig through the pile of papers on the seat next to him for the lesson plan he'd roughed out last weekend.

Buford's Burgers was on the way, and while it wasn't a drive-thru, it was the closest thing to it. He could sort through his papers in the pickup while he waited for his order.

He threw the truck into reverse, pulled out of the parking lot, then jammed it into gear and took off down Center, slowing only for a moment at the corner, then speeding down 370 toward Buford's.

He passed the small brick American Legion hall and saw that both the U.S. and Arizona flags were at half-mast, their colors altered and darkened by the setting sun and the growing twilight.

The obit for Manuel Torres he'd written this afternoon had been pitifully inadequate. He had spoken to Troy and Manuel's other coworkers at the garage, but they had not been very articulate in their expression of grief. Manuel's widow had not wanted to talk to him at all, and he had respected that, leaving her alone. He'd done the best he could under the circumstances, but he had not really known the man himself, and that distance, combined with the bizarre circumstances of his death, had cast an almost tabloid air of sensationalism over everything he'd tried to write.

Maybe he would go over the obit tomorrow, try it one more time before putting it permanently to bed.

He found himself thinking about the autopsy report and what Robert had told him. It had not been a surprise, really. But somehow the written confirmation--typed, dated, and signed in triplicate on official county forms-gave it an air of authenticity and turned what had been merely a suspicion into frightening fact. He'd been right when he'd told his brother that it was like being in a horror movie.

The coroner, he knew, had pressured Mrs. Torres into having the body cremated, and although, as a devout Catholic, she had wanted to see her husband decently buried, she had reluctantly agreed to the cremation, electing to bury the ashes afterward in a traditional cemetery plot instead of having them interred. This capitulation of faith worried Rich because he knew the impetus behind it. He had heard all day the whispers, the thinly veiled references. He knew the word in everyone's mind. Vampire.

It was a belief that such a creature really could exist which had led Woods to suggest cremation and Mrs. Torres to agree to this otherwise unsatisfactory burial alternative.

Cremation was insurance that Manuel Tortes would not rise from the dead.

Rich wanted to be angry at this superstitious regression on the part of what would seem to be rational people, but he too had seen the body, he too had seen the halo of animals, and he could not drum up as much anger as he would have liked. The shriveled and empty form of the old man had frightened him far more than he would have thought possible.

He was equally frightened at the prospect of mass hysteria and paranoid panic. Deep down, he did not believe in vampires. Not really.

Something strange had happened to Manuel Torres, but he had no doubt that once the murderer was found, a rational explanation for the death would be forthcoming.

He drove into the dirt parking lot of Buford's, pulling next to a dusty Jeep with a round NRA sticker on the corroded back bumper. He turned off the ignition and got out. Reading the lighted menu, he realized that he was hungrier than usual. Tonight he wanted more than just his usual hamburger and medium Coke.

Stress always made him hungry.

It was Corrie's fault as well. She could have waited until things calmed down a little before bailing out on him. He told himself not to be so harsh on her, not to be so unsympathetic; he was her husband, not just her editor; he should be able to understand her side. But, as she never tired of pointing out, that was one of his chronic problems He was too selfish and insensitive to sympathize with her feelings. :

But, damn it, she should've given him warning.

She'd already found a job. That surprised him. She'd been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and she was now the secretary for the Church of the Holy Trinity. That was okay, he supposed, but the fact that she was going to be working for Pastor Wheeler bothered him a little. He did not know the pastor, had had no real contact with the man aside from a few short phone conversations regarding events for the "Church Notes" column of the paper, but he'd always had the impression that Wheeler was something of a sleaze and a charlatan, a man who aspired to and was perfectly suited for televangelism. He didn't like Wheeler, and he didn't like his wife working for Wheeler, but at this point it was probably wiser for him to say nothing about it.

He was not sure if he could bring himself to be supportive, though.

Buford himself, a blond crew cut ex-Marine gone only slightly to seed, stepped up to the window. "Whatcha want today?"

"I'll take a double cheeseburger, large fries, and an extra-large, super-thick chocolate shake." Buford grinned. "Bad day, huh?" "And it's not over yet." "That'll be four forty-five."

Rich broke out his wallet and handed him a five-dollar bill.

Buford gave him back two quarters and a nickel. "So, do you think there really is a vampire?" "What?" Rich stared at him.

Buford shrugged. "Rumors." "There're no such things as vampires."

"Well, even if there are, I've got enough garlic in here to hold them at bay until dawn." Buford laughed.

Rich forced himself to smile. ""Look, I have a few things to do, so when my food's ready, give me a holler. I'll be in the truck."

"Will do."

Rich walked slowly back to the pickup. Even Buford was talking about vampires.

He would call Robert tonight when he got home. The two of them had a lot to discuss.

Sue stood next to the gym, looking down the hallway.

It felt strange being back here again. She had not re turned to the high school since graduation, and although it had only been two years and she had not, to her knowledge, grown, everything seemed smaller: doors, drinking fountains, lockers. It was like visiting a school built for munchkins. : I It also seem el somewhat threatening, and that was not something she would have thought possible. For her, school had always been a refuge, a haven where even the uncivilized were forced to behave in a civilized manner. The micro society created by teachers, administrators, and the other adults in authority had created for her a very pleasant environment, a sharp contrast to the rougher and more chaotic world outside the school boundaries.

But everything had changed. That familiar society had shut off for the night and left in its wake this scaled-down and darkly alien travesty of her old stomping grounds. She glanced to her right at the door to the girl's restroom and was thrown off by its surprisingly diminutive stature. It was probably just her imagination, but, like everything else, the doors in the buildings looked as though they had shrunk and been reduced to dimensions more appropriate to a junior high school.

She stared straight ahead. The hallways had not shrunk, however. They seemed to have grown much longer.

And darker.

She shivered, turning around, and looked back toward the parking lot, but hers was still the only car in sight. Orce again, she faced the hallway. It looked like a runnel or a cave, the staggered shadows forming stalactites, stalagmites, d outcroppings of stone. The shadows overlapped, created shapes where there weren't shapes, darkened areas that were already dark. There were lights on, but they were few and far between, and Sue wondered if perhaps she'd misread the class schedule and come on the wrong day. The only illumination seemed to come from downward trained vandal lights on the corners of each building and from single bulbs housed in protective mesh which hung down from the ceilings of the hallway at long intervals. The lights near the lockers were off, and the windows in all of the classrooms were black.

She peered down at the schedule in her hand, trying to read in the gloom. No, today was the fourth. The class was supposed to start today.

So why was the school so empty? Why was no one else here?

And why was she afraid to walk down the hall? Silence.

That was the primary reason she kept standing here. The silence. Not a sound disrupted the complete quie rode of this place, not a voice or footstep disturbed the perfect noiseless ness It was like being in a vacuum, or a tomb. Even outside sounds from the other parts of town did not appear able to penetrate the invisible sonic barrier which seemed to surround the school.

This was stupid. She was just being dumb. The reason everything was dark and silent was because night classes were all held on the other side of the school. Out of habit, she'd parked in the student lot on the south side of campus. She should're parked in the faculty lot on the north side. All she had to do was walk down the hallway, past the lockers, and through senior corner to get where she was supposed to be.

But she didn't want to walk down the hallway.

She peered into the dimness. Was it her imagination, or were the hall's irregularly spaced lights less bright than they had been just a moment before? And had the shadows shifted? She cleared her throat, and the noise was like a gunshot in the stillness. Why couldn't she hear any noise from the other side of campus?

Then something moved at the far end of the hallway. Her heart lurched in her chest. A black amorphous shape had passed through a patch of dull light, moving from one shadow to another. She thought she could still see it, darker than its surroundings--jet against charcoal--but the specifics of its form were so vague that she could not be sure.

Sue took a deep breath. She was not afraid of the dark, had never been plagued by that traditional childhood fear. But she could not shake the feeling that someone--s0something--was waiting for her at the far end of the hall. She had an impression of size. And tremendous age.

It was the vast age that frightened her the most.

Her mouth was dry, her hands shaking. She turned around and hurried back out to the parking lot, to the car. She fumbled with her keys, trying to open the door, certain that if she turned around she would see, coming up behind her, that ancient black shape, large and getting larger.

She found the right key and unlocked the door, banging her knee on the metal as she pulled it open. She scrambled into the car as quickly as she could, locking the door before daring to look where she'd been.

There was nothing there. The parking lot was empty. Still hyper consciously aware of the fact that she was alone out here, that if something happened there would be no one to hear her scream, she slipped the key into the ignition, started the engine, and peeled out.

She did not know why she'd been so stupid, why she hadn't realized immediately that the parking lot was empty because night classes were held on the other side of the school. She'd told Janine and promised her parents that she would be careful, and instead she'd behaved like a complete idiot.

She thought of Manuel Tortes, tried to imagine what a man would look like who'd been totally drained of blood.

She drove down the small dirt road around the school to the faculty lot. Here there were lights, and other vehicles, and small groups of people walking toward their classrooms. She pulled into a parking space next to a Dodge van. The terror and the panic subsided somewhat.

A moment before she'd been half ready to run screaming through a group of strangers, warning that the monsters were coming. But now, though the fear was still strong within her, though when she looked toward the darkened southern haft of the school she could still see in her mind that black and shifting shape, the idea that some sort of... monster lay crouched and waiting within the confines of the campus seemed absurd and melodramatic, the product of an overactive imagination.

Still, she could not shake the feeling that she had been in very real danger.

Maybe she would tell her teacher that she'd seen someone suspicious lurking in the hallways and let him find someone to check it out She walked toward the office, following two old women armed with paintbrushes and sketch pads who were obviously here to attend an art class. Outside the office, they parted ways, the two women heading toward the multipurpose rooms to the left, Sue going toward the right.

She found room 211, her old sophomore English classroom, easily enough and entered. Again, everything seemed smaller than she remembered: the desks, the blackboards, the room itself. So far, she was the only student here. The teacher, a clean-shaven man in his early to midthirties who looked vaguely familiar, stood next to the front blackboard at the head of the rows of empty desks and smiled at her.

Both of them glanced up at the wall clock at the same time.

"Five minutes to go," the teacher said. "I don't think we're going to have a very big class."

Sue smiled politely back at him and sat down at a des in the middle of the room.

He looked down at the roll sheet in his hand. "You're Susan Wing?"

"Yes." She nodded. "Sue."

- "Well, you're the only one who's actually signed up for: the course.

I did have two other people on the list, but they both cancelled. I was hoping I'd get some walk-it registrants, but I don't think so." He gave her a wry grin

"Journalism's not the hot draw it was after Watergate." "What if no one else shows up?" she asked,

"Then the class is cancelled. We need at least six people to keep a class open." He looked again at the clock. Three minutes to seven.

"By the way, my name's Rich CarteJ I'm the editor of the R/0 Verde C, azetU. You can call me, Rich."

Sighing, Sue looked down at her desktop. "I real[ wanted to take this class."

"I really wanted to teach this class. I need the extI money."

"I need the credits. I'm trying to get some of my get eral ed done at Pueblo before I transfer to ASU, but n that many applicable courses are offered."

Rich walked down the middle aisle, stuck his 'head Of the door, looked both ways. He glanced back up at the clock. "Seven. I don't think anyone else is coming."

Sue stood.

"Have your ever taken a journalism class before? Were you on the school newspaper or anything?"

Sue shook her head.

"Well, did you sign up strictly for the GE credits, or are you really interested in journalism?"

"Both."

"The reason I'm asking is because I can give you some real hands-on journalism experience. We'd be able to kill two birds with one stone.

I just lost one of my reporters, and I need a replacement. You'll get to do a little typesetting, a little paste up a little of everything, learn all pects of the newspaper biz. It'll be part time, of course, but I'll pay you. By the hour or by the column inch, whichever is more."

"Will I still get credit for the class?"

He laughed. "Sure. I'll talk to the dean. We'll call it

"Independent Study' or something."

"Thank you." .... "If it's not too presumptuous, may I ask why you're not going to one of the Valley community colleges for your general ed?

It seems kind of backward to just wait around until Pueblo offers transferable courses. You might have to wait for years."

Sue reddened. "I have no choice. We can't afford anything else."

Rich nodded. "I hear you." He looked at her. "Don't you work at that Chinese restaurant?" "My family owns it," she admitted.

"I thought so." He pulled a piece of paper from the pad beneath his roll sheet and wrote something down. "Here," he said, handing her the paper. "This is the number of the paper. Give me a call tomorrow morning around ten or so, and we'll set something up." "Okay."

"I'll talk to you tomorrow, then."

Sue started toward the door, saw the night outside, black in contrast to the light of the classroom. She turned back toward Rich. "Are you leaving now too?"

He shook his head. "I'm required to stay here until twenty after, just in case someone else shows up."

"Well, I'll see you later, then." She swallowed, her heart pounding, and forced her feet to carry her through the door.

Outside, it wasn't that bad. Other classrooms were lit: and there were plenty of late students and teachers walking around. She hazarded a glance toward the darkened other half of the school, and goose bumps popped up on her arms. It seemed stupid now to tell anyone what she'd seen, or to even hint that she'd seen anything, but the fear was still there.

She ran through the lighted parking lot to the station wagon.

She did not relax until the school was receding in he rearview mirror.

Pastor Wheeler was awake the second time Jesus appeared.

He was locking the door of the vestibule for the evening when he sensed a subtle change in the quality of the air. It seemed suddenly easier to breathe, and his head felt light, open, as though all oppressiveness and negativity had been lifted from his mind, and the full potential of his thoughts was suddenly allowed to flower freely and unrestrained within his brain.

He turned around but saw nothing there, only the empty pews in their parallel rows, the last of the afternoon sun glowing in weak rainbows around the edges of the stained glass windows.

He turned around again

And there was Jesus.

The Savior was standing in front of the altar in all of His glory, gazing up at the cross that hung above the pulpit, the cross that the pastor had found rotting in the desert near Goldfield and had refinished himself. Wheeler held his breath, not daring to move. He gazed, transfixed, at the back of Jesus' head, at His long, gorgeous reddish brown hair. Pride was a sin, Wheeler knew, but he felt proud nevertheless, knowing that the Savior would be pleased with his efforts. The cross had been constructed from discarded railroad ties, and the wood had been weatherworn and faded nearly white when he'd found it outside the ghost town, the whorled grain dried and raised by exposure into ridges. He had dragged the cross over his shoulder, as Jesus had, only through the desert to his car instead of through the streets to Golgotha. Days and nights he'd spent sanding the cross, finishing it, coating it with the finest oils, and when it was finished, he'd known that it was something special. He'd known that it was good.

He had been preaching in Phoenix at that time, had moved twice since, but the cross had remained a constant in his life and had always accompanied him.

Now Jesus turned to him, smiling, and Wheeler felt an ecstatic pride swell within his breast. "You have created a thing of beauty," Christ said. His voice filled the air of the silent church like music, caressing the empty space between the beams in the peaked roof, falling gracefully down to spread lightly through the lower haft of the chapel.

"Men will volunteer to be crucified on your cross. Women will plead to be allowed to b nailed on such wood." i

"Yes," Wheeler whispered. He stood unmoving as the warmth of rapture flooded through him. The feeling in real life was much stronger than it had been in his vision and much more immediate, a physical sense of extraordinary well-being that spread throughout his body, manifesting itself in his head, in his heart, his fingers and toes. It was a feeling like no other, and he knew with utter certainty that it was not something that could be duplicated by drugs or sex or any human-generated states of euphoria. It could only be found in the presence of the Lord.

"You have heeded my words," Jesus said. "But there is still much that needs to be done."

There was something both great and terrible in the countenance of Christ as He spoke, and though it was sublimated and subdued, translated for his benefit into human terms, Wheeler could, sense the awesome power of God in the arrangement of those familiar features. As before, there were questions he wanted to ask, things he wanted to know. But also as before, the impulse was quashed, and he was intimidated into silence by the Savior's presence.

Jesus nodded His understanding. "All of your questions will be answered," He said. Tears of gratitude filled the pastor's eyes.

"Thank you." Jesus smiled again, and His smile brightened the interior of the darkening church with the light of goodness. He gestured with one graceful hand toward the world outside the stained glass windows.

"This town is home to sin. It is filled with evildoers. It must be cleansed before it can become host to the house of the Lord. It must be cleansed with the blood of the guilty."

Information flooded into Wheeler's brain, the totality of the concepts that Jesus only touched upon with His words, each course of action instantly magnified and clarified. Wheeler saw tortured faces, scarred and scored and bleeding, contributing to the greater glory of God with the pure and exquisite beauty of their deaths. He saw gracefully severed heads and arms, artfully eviscerated torsos, streams of corrupted blood flowing into a river of forgiveness that led straight to Jesus Christ, He saw slaughtered sinners, immolations, decapitations, and crucifixions. He saw the virtuous rejoicing at the passing of the wicked, wielding weapons of pain in the war of the righteous, the pure and the chaste granting welcome release to the tortured souls given them by the Almighty.

Wheeler found himself buoyed by the images, suddenly filled with strength, but still it took all of his courage to raise his head and address Jesus directly. "I bought some things for the church," he said. His voice was little more than a cracked whisper. He turned and fumblingly opened the door to the storeroom behind him to display what he had purchased in Phoenix.

The fetters. The rope. The bear trap. The knives. Jesus smiled, and the radiant glow which always seemed to surround Him grew brighter.

Wheeler sensed in the Savior a hunger, a craving, an almost tangible desire. Christ's gaze took in the assembled instruments of bondage and pain, and He looked upon Wheeler with approval, eyes shining. "You have done well, my son."

Again, the minster was filled with an almost unbearable sense of pride.

His actions had pleased the Lord!

"You have forty days," Jesus said. "Forty days to complete your task."

Wheeler nodded dumbly. Forty was the Lord's favorite number. When he destroyed the earth the first time, wiping the slate clean of wickedness and iniquity with the flood, it had rained for forty days and forty nights. When Christ went alone into the wilderness, he went for forty days and forty nights.

Now Jesus was giving him forty days and forty nights to complete His church.

Woe to him if he failed.

Jesus turned away and, for a brief second, Wheeler thought that the Savior looked like his father. He saw the familiar heavy lantern jaw, the thin delicate nose. A wave of cold washed over him and he shivered, unnerved by. the resemblance. Then his attention was distracted by a black shadow that interrupted the rainbow glow, flitting past the series of stained glass windows.

When he looked back, Jesus was gone: There was only a soft vague luminescence in the air where He had been.

Wheeler's eyes were filled with tears, his heart with joy, and he knelt down to kiss the floor where Jesus had stood before closing the door to the storeroom and locking inside the blessed instruments with which the Lord's will would be done.......... The shell of the Baptist church arrived early Friday morning in twin flatbeds, a third truck with an attached crane carrying the interior fixtures and other nonstructural items in its half van. There were three volunteers from the ACCC in addition to the truck drivers, and Wheeler had engaged two workers from Worthy Construction for the day. Four other men from the parish had volunteered their own time to help reassemble the church.

Wheeler stood next to the crane operator, a burly dark tanned man wearing a CAT hat, as the flatbeds were maneuvered into position on the vacant lot next to the existing church. The crane operator frowned as he watched the proceedings. He turned to the pastor. "Where are we going to put the structure?"

Wheeler pointed to the empty section of property on the north side of the existing church. Ten parish members had spent the better part of the week clearing and leveling the ground. "Right there."

"You got no foundation. You got no hookups." "We're going to put it there."

The crane operator looked around, then turned suspiciously hack toward Wheeler. "You got any permits? Building permits? Structural permits?

Electrical permits?" .::i

"We're going to put it there." Wheeler smiled calmly at the man.

"You can't do this. You have to go through the proper channels. You have to follow the proper procedures. I'm going to talk to Davis. The council can't deliver a church to a location without any permits."

"Talk to Davis," Wheeler said. The permits were all in order, he had obtained them from the county several days ago and had already shown them to the coordinator, but he was not about to tell that to this ignorantly officious nonentity. He watched the crane operator stride across the dirt toward the trucks, then looked slowly around in satisfaction. He saw the town as it had appeared in his vision, the hard desert ground covered with soft grass and beautiful flowers, the dusty, run-down buildings restored better than new with gleaming fresh paint and clean, shining windows. At the center of this new town, at the center of the new world, he saw the Church of the Living Christ, a glorious monument to the greatness of God.

He smiled benignly at the group of onlookers who had gathered in the street to see what all the fuss was about. They would soon be dead, he knew, consigned to the pit of hell by the wrath of the Almighty. No more would they dog his heels with their petty annoyances, intruding into his life with the mundane strictures of their secular world. They would be dealt with by the hand of God. He saw in his mind Lang Crosby flayed alive, his eyes white and bulging bug-like in his bloody red-muscled face. He saw Jane Page with a ragged hole ripped between her legs where the source of her sin originated.

He breathed deeply, feeling good. This was going to be a special day.

" =

A very special day.

Even with the help of the ACCC workers, the church volunteers, and the men from Worthy Construction, it took all morning and most of the afternoon to attach the two sectional halves of the building and get the shell set fled in place. There were a few minor mishapsa window broke when the crane dropped the first sec don too jarringly on the ground, and a small portion of the lower east wall was accidentally damaged when a corner of the flatbed bumped against it--but for the most part things went very smoothly, and by nightfall the reconstructed church, on the outside at least, looked almost the same as it had when he'd viewed it back in Phoenix.

It was after dark before Pastor Wheeler finally told everyone to call it quits. The bulk of the fxtures still remained in the third truck, but the two flatbeds were empty. The first phase of the work would be completed tomorrow. , The ACCC workers were put up in the homes of willing parishioners for the night, and Wheeler saw them to their hosts' houses, giving each his hearty thanks. Afterward, he returned to the church. He picked up his plastic iced tea cup from the hood of one of the trucks and walked into the empty husk of the new addition.

The wooden floor had been placed directly atop the dirt, and while he had been lectured on the disadvantages of such a move by all of the construction workers and ACCC men, it looked good. In the next few weeks, they would tear out a portion of one wall and connect it to the existing church. In his mind, he saw the completed project, the finished Church of the Living Christ, a house of worship so large and unique that it would appear on the desert horizon taller than Apache Peak, more substantial than the surrounding bluffs, acting as a beacon to the multitudes who would come to praise God.

He felt a tingle of excited anticipation course through his body. On Sunday he was going to tell his flock that the Lord Jesus Christ had returned. He was going to tell them what he had seen, what he had been told. He did not know how they would take the good news, but that only contributed to his excitement.

This would separate the wheat from the chaff in his congregation. This would determine the future of his flock.

He took a sip of his iced tea and grimaced as something grainy and foul-tasting rode the wave of liquid over his tongue and down his throat. He pulled off the plastic lid and held the cup toward the refracted light that streamed through the door and windows. On the single floating slice of brown lemon were dozens of small furiously crawling flies, each about the size of a pinhead. More small specks floated in the dark tea between the ice cubes. Some sort of fruit fly, he assumed. He was about to walk outside and toss the contents of the cup on the ground when he realized that, like everything else, this too was part of God's plan.

If Jesus hadn't wanted him to drink the flies, he wouldn't have allowed them into his tea.

Wheeler thought for a moment, then gave a short prayer of thanks, replaced the lid, put the straw to his lips, and drank.

The last hour at the restaurant had been slow, so they'd eaten pork fried rice and an order of chicken chow fun that had been phoned in but not picked up, and had cleaned up early. Sue and John wiped the tables and swept the floor in the dining area, while their mother and grandmother washed dishes. Their father took care of the woks and the cooking area. They left on time for once, and it was only a few minutes after nine when they pulled into their driveway.

Although it was dark out, Chris Chapman and Rod Malvern were standing on the strip of brown grass that separated their properties, talking, and Sue waved at them as she got out of the car. They waved back and returned immediately to their conversation. Neither of them acknowledged her parents at all. She shut the car door and followed her father and mother around the willow tree, up the short walk to the house. Such behavior was something she'd gotten used to over the years, and though she supposed she should be angry about it, she really didn't care. She accepted the situation as part of The Way Things Were.

The Way Things Were.

She told herself that The Way Things Were were that customers did not become overly friendly or overly familiar with shopkeepers, restaurant owners, or other individuals with whom they did business, that there was a wall automatically erected during the establishment of such a business relationship that discouraged more intimate contact. But she knew that wasn't really the case. Mike Fazio, who owned Mike Pizza Place in the Basha's shopping center, seemed to be good friends with many of his customers. Hank and Tara Farrel, who operated the video store, often sodalized with their patrons. It was because her family was Chinese.

She didn't like thinking about that. It made her uncomfortable, and she couldn't help feeling that she was being overly sensitive. On TV, when she saw Asian groups protesting showings of Charlie Chan movies or cartoons with Oriental stereotypes, she always felt uneasy, wanting to agree with the protestors--knowing she should agree with them--but not being able to fully take their side. She had a hard dine convincing herself that, in this day and age, race made any difference at all in the way people were viewed or in how others behaved toward them. After all, the sports heroes of some of the biggest rednecks in town were black football and basketball players. Their kids spent their music money on the tapes of black pop stars. Was it reasonable for her to think that her family was treated differently merely because they were Chinese? Yes. Because, after all these years, her family still did not fit in, were still treated more like outsiders than members of the community. Even the nicest customers, those who joked and laughed with her, who were friendly and respectful toward her parents, seemed awkward and standoffish outside the confines of the restaurant. They would nod, sometimes smile, at the most say a quick "hi," but the relaxed informality of their behavior as customers disappeared when the roles of waitress and patron were no longer in effect. Her family was not shunned, not even actively disliked, it was just that they were treated.. differently.

And it was because they were Chinese.

Sue had never had a problem with prejudice. She'd al ways had a group of close friends, had never been treated unfairly, had never been discriminated against, had always been accepted by her peers and by the kids she'd grown up with. Her parents, though, had no friends in town, had always been socially ostracized. More than the skin color, more than the Oriental eyes, more than any aspect of physical appearance, it was the language that seemed to separate them from everyone else. Their accents and broken English served to emphasize that they were from another country, an alien culture. And when they spoke Cantonese, it actu ally seemed to offend people.

But that was The Way Things Were. ,: The night was warm, without a breeze, and the moon less sky was dark, the stars like tiny prisms against their black backdrop. Sue glanced up as she followed her parents into the house. She noticed that the constellations had changed position since the last time she'd looked, shifting closer to their winter locales, and it made her realize how quickly time was speeding by. Summer had just ended, and soon it would be Christmas.

Then summer again. Then Christmas. Years were now moving by in the time it had once taken seasons to pass.

Inside the doorway, her father took off his shoes and carried the leftover food from the restaurant into the kitchen. John, without pausing, walked into the living room, turned on the television, and immediately draped himself over the couch. Her mother and grandmother took off their own shoes and followed her father into the kitchen. "

Sue stood for a moment in the entryway as she slipped off her sandals, staring at a pink-flowered fan hanging on the walls She was not sure whether she should go to her bedroom or help her parents and grandmother in the kitchen. Instinct told her to go to her room.

Something was not right tonight. She'd felt weird all evening, spooked--though not quite as badly as she had been the other night at the school--and she wanted to go to bed and forget about it. Wai.

Badness.

She heard her grandmother speaking quietly to her parents in the kitchen. All evening her grandmother had been uncharacteristically silent, not even listening to her tapes as she chopped vegetables in the rear of the restaurant. Several times, upon turning around, Sue had caught the old woman staring at her strangely, and she'd seen her grandmother bestow equally cryptic looks upon her brother. Her parents, too, had noticed the change in her grandmother's mood--she could tell by the way that they were polite to each other instead of bickering--but neither of them had said a word about it, and they'd continued about their business as usual.

She looked toward the kitchen, then decided against going there or to her bedroom, opting instead for the coward's way out. She walked over to where John lay sprawled on the couch, his head leaning against one arm rest, his feet pressing against the other. "Move over," she said.

"Let me sit down."

"Mo cho," he told her. ' ,

"Shut up yourself."

"Hit the road. You're blocking my view."

"Fine then." She sat down on top of his legs.

"Heyt" he yelled, trying to wiggle out from under her.

"Knock it off!."

"Tieu pay."

"You're too fat. It hurts!"

"Then move your feet so I can sit down."

"Get up so I can move my legs."

She stood, and he gave her a quick kick in the buttocks before rolling off the couch and out of her way. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure she wasn't going to retaliate, then spread out on the floor in front of the television. He wrinkled his nose. "I can't sit next to you. You reek."

"You're the one who smells," she said. "Take a bath." "Susan." Sue turned her head at the sound of her grandmother's voice. The old woman was standing in the doorway, framed by the light from the kitchen, her frazzled white hair forming a fuzzy penumbra around the silhouetted shape of her face. For a brief second, she looked to Sue like a witch, and an instinctive shiver passed down Sue's spine as the image imprinted itself on her brain. Then her grandmother walked all the way into the room and once again she looked like herself..:

Sue forced herself to smile. "What is it, Grandmother?" she asked in Cantonese.

"Will you come with me to my room? I have something I want to give you."

"Yes." She was puzzled, but it would not be polite to question her grandmother, so she got up from the couch and followed the old woman down the hall. Behind her, John immediately jumped up from the floor to retake his seal

Her grandmother's room smelled, as always, of must and medicine and herbs, the odors of old age. On the small teak nightstand next to her bed were two bottles of ginseng, the source of the room's dominant scent. One of the bottles, the smaller of the two, was filled with dried chopped slivers of the root. In the other, a full root floated in clear liquid, looking like a little man trapped inside the glass with its branching offshoots at arm level and its downward growing rootlet legs.

Sue had always liked going into her grandmother's room. Slightly warmer than the rest of the house, it seemed to her exotic, like a little piece of China trans planted here to Arizona, in stark contrast to the Americanized Chinese decor of her parents. She liked the dark three-paneled screen that separated the sleeping area from the sitting area, the huge hand-painted vase in the corner, the ornately carved furniture. Tonight, though, that exotic, mysterious quality seemed a trifle disquieting, the dark room a little too dark.

Wincing as if in pain, her grandmother sat down awkwxdly on the edge of the bed. Her shoulders slumped as the bed settled beneath her weight, and for the first time she looked old to Sue. Really old. The deeply etched lines surrounding her mouth and eyes, which had remained unchanged for as long as Sue could remember and had always seemed a permanent part of her face, had altered, shifted course, moving downward into her chin, upward into her cheeks and forehead, and were now intersected by newer spiderweb wrinkles that gave her skin an almost mummified look.

Sue looked away, not wanting to see her grandmother in this light, and instead concentrated her attention on the old photographs from Hong Kong that were aligned on the dresser between newer photographs of herself and John. There was a picture of her grandmother and her mother standing in front of a junk in Hong Kong harbor, a picture of her grandfather holding up a live chicken purchased from one of the vendors on the street, a picture of her grandmother and two friends clowning in front of the black steam engine of a train. Hundreds of times over the years, on boring nights, on rainy days, her grandmother had told her the stories behind each of those photos, promising that one day the two of them would visit Hong Kong together, but Sue realized now that the two of them would not be taking any such trips.

The thought depressed her, filling her with a bleak hopelessness and making her feel sadder and more empty than she'd ever felt in her life.

She wished that she'd gone to her bedroom as soon as they'd come home and pretended to be asleep when her grandmother came looking for her.

"Susan."

She looked back toward the bed.

"I want you to have this." Her grandmother withdrew a necklace from the top drawer of her nightstand. She held it forth with two slightly trembling hands. In the stillopen drawer were wads of tissue and small empty bottles of old medicine.

The necklace, with its thin gold chain and small white jade pendant, looked vaguely familiar, and Sue turned it over gingerly in her hands as she took it. She examined the jade. "Is it real?"

Her grandmother nodded. "It is from the K'un Lun Mountains in Khotan.

It was given to me as a wedding present." Sue recognized the necklace now, from the pictures. "I wore it as long as your grandfather was alive, but when he died, I took it off. I was planning to save it, to give it to you as a wedding present, but I have decided to give it to you today."

Sue tried to hand the necklace back. "I'll get married eventually.

Give it to me then."

"No." Her grandmother held up her hands in refusal.

"I want you to have it now."

Sue looked more carefully at the object in her hand.

The jade was white, milky, of the rarest variety. In the shape of a circle, it contained two carved figures, the dragon and the phoenix, joined together, symbolizing the male and female joined together in marriage. "I can't accept this," she said.

"You must. I will not take it back."

:"I'm not getting married yet." .... "I may not be alive when you are married."

Sue stared at her grandmother, realization slowly dawning on her. She felt an unpleasant churning in her store ach. "You're not going to die, are you? You're not giving away all of your stuff because you're--"

Her grandmother smiled. "I'm not dying."

"Then why are you--"

"But I will die one day. I may even die soon." "Grandmother .. ."

The old woman sighed. "I am giving you this necklace for protection. I know you do not hold the same beliefs I do, but I beg you to do me this one small favor. Wear the necklace. It will protect you against evil.

You may not understand now, you may think I am being foolish, but I think one day you will understand and you will be grateful

Evil.

Sue looked at the necklace in a new light. Her eyes saw not the beauty of the intertwined figures but the teeth of the dragon, the claws of the phoenix. Instead of making her feel safe and secure, instead of reassuring her the way it was supposed to, the necklace caused the hair on the back of her neck to prickle, sent a shiver of coldness through her. She might not hold the same beliefs as her grandmother, but she was not the skeptic she aspired to be, and the idea of wearing something that was supposed to have supernatural powers frightened her.

She thought of the strange shadow in the dark hallway of the high school.

Evil.

"Did you put a... spell on this?"

Her grandmother laughed, a tinkling, musical sound. Her eyes were laughing too, and for the first time since entering the room, Sue relaxed a little. Maybe she was overreacting.

"I know no spells. I am not a witch." Her grandmother grinned. "Do you think I am?"

"No," Sue admitted, embarrassed.

"The necklace will protect you because it is jade. Not because of any spell that has been put on it or because it has been treated with herbs or because the carving has symbolic meaning. Anything made from jade will protect you.

"Oh."

"I am giving you this necklace because I was going to give it to you anyway. I have simply decided to give it to you early." Her smile faded. "gut I don't want you to mention this to John or your parents.

This is between you and me. Do you understand?"

Sue nodded.

"Good. And you will wear the necklace?"

"Yes."

"All the time?"

"Even when I'm asleep or taking a shower?"

"All the time."

"For the rest of my life?"

"Until it is safe to take it off." . Sue looked at her grandmother, saw again how old she looked, saw the thinness of her hair, the boniness of her frame. "Yes, Grandmother," she said.

"Good." The old woman smiled. "You are my favorite granddaughter."

Sue smiled. "I'm your only granddaughter."

"Even if you weren't, you would be my favorite." She rubbed her eyes and yawned, realistically, but with more dramatic flair than usual.

"It's getting late now. Go to bed. I will see you tomorrow. We will talk more about this later."

Sue understood that she was being dismissed, and she gave her grandmother a quick hug, noticing as she did so that the old woman was wearing a jade bracelet around her skinny wrinkled wrist. "Thank you," she said, holding forth the necklace. "I will treasure this always."

She said good night and left the bedroom, filled with conflicting feelings, not sure if she was scared or sad, relieved or worried. She was definitely tired, and she wanted to go to bed, but instead she returned to the living room, where John was on the floor again, her parents on the couch.

She stood silently in the doorway, watching, until she found what she was looking for.

John, wearing a white jade ring on the middle finger of his left hand.

Her parents, wearing matching white jade necklaces.

Two pairs of footsteps on the hardwood floor of the hallway. Heavy and light.

Rich set his fingers on the keyboard of the PC and stared intently at the green words on the top half of the screen, as though he'd been doing so all along. He felt Corrie's presence behind him even before seeing the blur of white movement in the glare of the VDT, even before her shadow fell across his papers. He typed a sentence that he had no intention of using but that would seem legitimate if read over his shoulder.

Corrie stood, silent, waiting, trying to force him to be the first to speak, but it was Anna as usual who unwittingly broke the stalemate.

"We're going to church, Daddy." Her small soft hand grabbed his neck.

She kissed his unshaven cheek, giggled at the roughness.

"That's good."

"Are you coming with us?" Corrie asked.

He turned toward her, shook his head, motioned toward the PC. "I have to finish this article. If I don't get it done today, there's going to be a big hole on the front page."

She looked at him blankly, saying nothing. He was embarrassed by the obviousness of his excuse and wanted to look away, but he forced himself to meet her gaze. They'd been playing this game for a long time. When they'd first gotten married, he'd told her that he wasn't a churchgoer, but she'd said that if he really loved her he'd go with her. She said that sometimes she did things she didn't want to do because he wanted to do them, and that he should do the same for her. So he'd gone. Then Anna had come along, and they'd both agreed that it would be good for the child to go to church. But gradually, over the years, he'd begun worming out of his Sunday morning duties, pleading work, fatigue, sickness. He'd started going every other week, but when the pattern had become too obvious he'd varied it, attending two weeks and missing the next, attending one week and missing the next two.

These days, he hardly ever went to church at all.

It had nothing to do with religion, really. It was church itself. He just couldn't help feeling that he was wasting his Sunday mornings by going to services. Sunday mornings were for eating waffles and lying around, reading the

Republic and listening to music. Not sermons.

Not the Pastor Clan Wheeler. '

That was a big part of his refusal this morning. Now that she was Wheeler's secretary, Corrie felt obligated to attend his services It was not an obligation he shared. The Methodist church had been bad enough, but testicle hooks could not drag him to one of Wheeler's sermons. He could think of nothing worse than spending his only real day off sitting on an uncomfortable bench with a bunch of self-righteous strangers listening to a hellfire and-brim stoner tell him that he was damned for eternity. He would rather stay home and work.

"Come with us, Daddy," Anna pleaded. "You haven't to church with us for a long time." gone

"That's okay. He has more important things to do." Corrie took Anna's hand to lead her from the room.

He did not dignify that dig with a response, but smiled and blew Anna a kiss. "Don't worry, sweetie. I'll be here when you get back. And if I finish my article in time, we'll go out for ice cream." - : : ': :

"Yeah! Ice cream!"

Corrie glared at him. "Come on," she said. "We'll be late."

He watched the two of them walk out of the room, Anna bouncing and happy, Gorrie determinedly flat footed and grim. What the hell was wrong with him? He knew Corrie hated it when he wasted money taking Anna out for ice cream: Why had he so purposefully and deliberately baited her? He sighed, staring blankly at the screen. He wasn't sure.

They'd had a right last night, a fairly big one, but when they'd awakened this morning the wounds seemed to have healed. They'd kissed, almost made love, probably would have had Anna not been awake already.

But something had gone wrong during breakfast, something had changed, shifted, something he could not quite put his finger on. He had sunk deeper into the words of the Republids sports section, Corrie had prepared the food in silence, and the two of them had spoken only to Anna, who had continued to chatter away, blissfully unaware of the change in atmosphere.

The front door slammed shut. He saw twin movements of white, big and little, on the porch.

Corrie did look good in her Sunday dress, he had to admit. He felt a twinge of regret that he had not told her so. In the old days, if he'd thought what he was thinking now, he would have acted on it, running outside, dragging her back into the house, throwing her over the back of the couch, flipping up her dress, pulling down her panties, and taking her from behind.

And she would have let him.

But now... :

Now things were different.

He watched through the window as Corrie led Anna across the driveway to her car.

When had it become her car? And his truck? When had they started assigning individual ownership rights to their joint property? Or had they always done so? He couldn't remember.

He watched his wife and daughter get in the car, close their doors, buckle up, and drive away. Anna waved at him as they left. Corrie did not even look in his direction.

He hadn't really lied to Corrie. He did have a lot of work to do. She knew that. He had to coordinate her columns as well as do his usual work. And there'd been a lot of news the past few weeks. He wished she would be a little more sympathetic.

The girl from his journalism class was supposed to come in tomorrow, and that would definitely help out the production side of the paper--she seemed bright, and he had no doubt that she would quickly pick up the technical aspects of typesetting and paste up---but he did not yet know if she could write. When she'd called on Friday, he'd asked her to bring in a writing sample, and she'd said she would try to dig something up, but it sounded to him as though whatever writing experience she'd had had been in high school.

Rich picked up his notepad from the top of the desk and glanced at the notes he'd jotted down. The top story was going to be Mike Vigil. The truck driver was still missing, although his rig had been found on the highway some forty miles out of Casa Grande. Rich just needed to call the DPS for a current status report, and then tap Robert for a few local police quotes.

Robert, he knew, was pissed at him. Although his brother had never before attempted to interfere with the content of the paper, he hadn't wanted Rich to run the story on the dead mice and had actually asked him to pull it. Rich had almost caved in on this one. With all of the vampire talk, he, too, was afraid of starting a panic, and he could definitely see the issue from his brother's point of view. But he hadn't bought the argument that the story would jeopardize the investigation into Manuel Torres's death, and he'd finally decided that it was interesting and offbeat enough to be newsworthy. He'd compromised, placing the article on the second page and treating it as a feature, but Robert still hadn't liked it.

Hell, Rich thought, it was a good story. He stood by his decision to run it. If the paper subscribed to one of the wire services, it probably would're been picked up by now. Besides, despite what Robert had predicted, there'd been no panicmalthough the tourist value of the arroyo had gone up considerably since publication of the article. For the past two days, small groups of people, mostly teenagers, had made pilgrimages to the site and had been combing the surrounding area trying to find their own mysteriously murdered animals.

Rich hadn't spoken to his brother since the paper had come out, had thought it best to wait and let Robert call him first. Now he wondered if he should call Robert at home for a quote, or call him later in the day at the sta He wondered if his brother would give a quote at all.

He put down the notepad and picked up his empty coffee cup, heading into the kitchen for a refill. The front of the house still smelled of breakfast: syrup and peanut butter, buttermilk waffles and jam. Corrie had washed, dried, and put away the dishes, but the waffle iron sat cooling on the counter, drying drips of batter decorating its lower half.

He put the waffle iron in the cupboard beneath the sink and poured himself the last cup of coffee. The house was quiet, the only sounds his own, and for a second he wished he'd accompanied Corrie and Anna to church. Then he reminded himself that he would have had to listen to Wheeler rant for an hour and was instantly reassured that he'd made the right decision.

He walked into the living room, turned on the stereo, put an old Jethro Tun album on the turntable, and went into the bedroom to call Robert.. :

The church was filled, the street outside lined with cars and trucks, the pews inside, nearly all taken. Corrie stood in the entrance, holding tightly to Anna's hand, looking for a place to sit. She was surprised by the size of the congregation. She had not realized that the Church of the Holy Trinity was so popular. She'd come here today because she worked for the church and thought it part of her responsibilities to attend Sunday services. In the back of her mind, she'd also half-thought that she would be doing Pastor Wheeler a favor.

He seemed so... awkward with people, so standoffish, that she found it hard to believe that he had much of a following. It was a shock to discover that there were more people at this single early service than there had been at all the combined services at the Methodist church.

No wonder Wheeler wanted to expand the building. She thought of her old church, of Pastor Franklin giving his benign sermon in his benign way to a half-empty chapel, and she immediately felt guilty. Maybe she should explain to Pastor Franklin why she was now attending the Church of the Holy Trinity. She did not know the pastor well, had never spoken to him on a one-to-one basis except at the obligatory palm-pressing at the end of each service, but he'd always seemed to her to be a kind, gentle, and rather fragile old man, and she felt the need to let him know that she was now attending another church, not because of anything he had done or because of any lack in his sermons but because she had gotten a job as Pastor Wheeler's secretary.

Maybe she should attend services at both churches.

She felt Anna tugging at her sleeve, and she looked down.

"There's a seat, Mommy. See? Next to that fat woman?" "Shhh," she admonished her daughter.

There was indeed a section of empty pew near an overweight elderly woman in a loud floral print dress, and Corrie led Anna down the carpeted aisle. She felt very conspicuous as the two of them walked through the center of the church, almost like an intruder, though she knew that the church was open to everyone. She did not know why she hadn't insisted that Rich come with them. If he had time to take Anna out for ice cream later this afternoon, he had time to go to church now. But that was just like him. He didn't stop to think that this was her first day at a new church and that she might like some moral support, a hand to hold as she entered this building filled with strangers.

She knew that, though. She knew what he was like. And, after all these years, she should have known that if she wanted him to do something, she had to come right out and say it. He never figured it out on his own. He never would ..... That was the main problem with their marriage. Miscommunication. A stubborn unwillingness on both their parts to adapt to each other's ways of doing things.

She could have and should have come right out and asked him to go with her and told him why. She could have brought it up yesterday or last night. He would have come. But some vain, quixotic, and hopelessly idealistic part of her had made her hold out, to see if this time he would volunteer on his own. And another part of her had relished the thought of taking him to task for not doing what she wanted him to do, even though she knew ahead of time that he wouldn't do it.

God, why was everything so complicated?

She sat down next to Anna. There was no hymnal in the rack on the back of the pew in front of them, no book at all, only xeroxed sheets of paper stapled together. She glanced at the people sitting about her.

She recognized a few faces, people she'd seen and did not know, but there was not a single friend or acquaintance in the congregation.

Anna tugged at her sleeve again. "Look at the cross," she whispered, pointing.

Corrie looked. She'd been in the church every day since being hired, but she'd spent her time in the office and had not really taken the opportunity to examine its interior before. Now her gaze strayed to the huge wooden cross displayed on the wall above the pulpit. Far from being merely an ornamental symbol, a sculptural representation of the Crucifixion, the huge wooden cross looked as though it could be instantly pressed into service.

It was nearly twice the size of a man and, though resting on the floor, reached almost to the ceiling. She shivered.

There was something about the cross that didn't seem right, something in the proportion of its sections or the luster of its wood that made her uncomfortable.

She turned her attention away from the cross, to the stained glass windows, finding solace in the familiar normalcy of their colored designs.

"Mommy," Anna whispered, "I think it's starring."

"Yes," Corrie said.

The congregation grew hushed, murmurs fading into whispers, then trailing off into silence as Pastor Wheeler entered through the vestibule. Corrie was unfamiliar with the specific rituals of this denomination, but she'd been to enough Sunday services in enough churches that she knew what to do and when to do it. She and Anna stood with everyone else for the invocation, bowed their heads to pray, stood politely when it was time to sing.,- :

Then Wheeler began his sermon

He stood at the pulpit, Bible in hand, and scanned the faces of his congregation. His eyes passed over Corrie, and he smiled at her. There were a few muffled coughs, the rustling sound of people shifting in their seats.

"I have seen Jesus Christ," he said, and his voice was low and filled with both awe and pride. "He has spoken to me."

Pastor Wheeler paused for a moment to let the import of his words sink in and then began recounting the text of his conversations with Christ.

He told of his dream and of the meeting in the church.

Corrie watched the preacher as he spoke, and she was afraid. She wanted to leave, wanted to rim, but was too scared to do so. There was no doubt in her mind that Wheeler had seen Jesus--the proof was in his face, in his voice, in the aura of rapture which now enveloped him-but the news did not fill her with joy the way it should have. As she looked between the heads of the people, over the backs of the pews, at the preacher's eyes, she was filled with fear and a deep, intense feeling of dread.

What was wrong with her? She had always considered herself a good person and a moderately good Christian. As a child, she had accepted Jesus into her life and had done her best since then to obey His teachings. Her feelings for Christ had always been uniformly positive and unambiguous.

So why was she afraid?

"He has a plan," the preacher continued. He was smiling now, getting into his rhythm. Jesus has a plan. He is going to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and He has chosen our humble town and our humble church as the seed from which this greatness will grow. We have been selected to be the first citizens of the Kingdom of God, and, as foretold by the prophets." Jesus will bring light and right to this troubled chaotic world and the fallen will be fodder for the cannons of Christ..."

Corrie felt Anna grab her hand and squeeze. "Mommy, I'm scared." '

Corrie was scared too, but she gave her daughter a reassuring smile.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," she whispered.

"I want to go home." :: "Shhh." She put an arm around Anna's shoulder and again focused her attention on the pastor. Around her, she could hear the crying and whining of other frightened children, the reassuring whispers of their parents. The fear in the church was almost palpable, though she was not quite sure why the pastor's words should produce such a response.

The sermon continued, a hypnotic intermingling of the pastor's conversations with Jesus, prophecy from the Bible, and personal interpretation of both. Wheeler described in detail his plans for the Church of the Living Christ, and he urged everyone to assist in raising funds and volunteering time to help complete this project, this project that would forever change the course of human destiny.

Wheeler was a stirring speaker. She had to admit that. The fear in the air shifted, changed, metamorphosed into anticipation and excitement as he spoke. Like the other people surrounding her, the men now chanting "Praise God!" the women now yelling "Hallelujah!" Corrie found herself caught up in the emotion of the moment, moved and inspired, despite her fear, by the power of the pastor's words.

Only... Only in the back of her mind, she wondered why Pastor Wheeler needed to resort to mundane pleas for money and volunteer workers if Jesus had really asked him to build this church. Did Jesus, who could cure the sick and resurrect the dead, really have to rely on simplistic evangelical techniques to ensure that His will be done?

The Pastor Clan Wheeler's gaze again fell upon her and Corrie shivered, feeling guilty for even considering such blasphemy. Who was she to question the ways of the Al mighty?

She spent the rest of the sermon concentrating on the back of the pew in front of her, trying not to listen to the preacher's words.

After the service, she and Anna walked quickly out to the car. Anna, usually animated and excessively talkative following the forced silence of church, was quiet and subdued and the two of them walked without speaking. The other members of the congregation were quiet, too, and she heard very little conversation from the other families heading out to their vehicles.

Corrie strode toward the Nissan. She was walking normally holding Anna's hand, a bland, placid expression on her face, but she felt anything but normal inside. She was frightened, deeply and truly frightened, and she felt like a character in a movie she'd once seen who'd known that the end of the world was imminent but had not been able to share the information with any of the blithely happy people around her.

Only why should the Secbnd Coming make her feel this way?

The Second Coming.

She wanted to share this burden with Rich, to tell him what was happening, and have him reassure her that everything was going to be all right. But she knew that Rich would not believe that Jesus was coming. He would put it down to religious fervor, would think that Wheeler was either lying or had had some sort of fanatic's delusion.

She'd probably think that herself if she did not know Wheeler and had not heard for herself the way he'd spoken to his congregation, but there was no way to fake the certainty of that otherworldly elation, that sense of jubilant intimidation that he had so clearly possessed.

And had possessed all week, now that she thought of it..

They reached the car, and Corrie fished her keys out of her purse, opening Anna's door.

"Did Jesus really talk to the pastor?" Anna asked.

No, He didn't, she wanted to say, but she found she could not lie to her daughter.

Why would she want to lie?

"Yes, He did," she said. She walked around to the driver's side of the car. Anna crawled over the seat and unlocked her door.

"Is Jesus scary?" Anna asked.

"Stop asking so many questions."

Anna folded her arms stubbornly over her chest. "Fine. I'll ask Daddy, then."

Corrie sighed. "No Jesus is not scary. Jesus is nice Jesus loves you."

" "Like the song?"

"Yes." Corrie started the car.

"You don't want me to ask Daddy, do you?"

"No. I don't think we should tell Daddy. He has a lot of things to think about right now and .. . I just don't want you to say anything to him about what the pastor told us. I'll tell Daddy when it's time, okay?" "What if he asks me?" "He won't ask you."

"You want me to lie to Daddy?"

"No, I don't want you to lie," she said, exasperated.

"Anna, just button up your seat belt."

"Jesus is scary, isn't He?"

They pulled away from the curb.

"Mommy?"

"I don't know," Corrie admitted. "Maybe He is."

The phone woke Robert in the middle of a dream.

He'd been the only living creature left on earth, and he'd been wandering through an endless desert, stepping over the dead dry bodies of men and women, children and pets, keeping his eyes focused on the flat horizon far in front of him because he knew that if he looked down he would see thousands of empty eye sockets focused on his face.

The ringing of the phone saved him, drawing him out of that hellish world, and he picked up the receiver on the first pause, instantly alert. His eyes found the glowing numerals of the clock in the darkness, registered the time.

Ten-forty. He'd only been asleep for twenty minutes?

"Carter," he said.

"Chief?." It was Stu. ' "

"Yeah. What is it? .... "There's been some vandalism 0er at the cemetery."

;

"For Christ's sake, you woke me up for that?"

"I--"

"You don't have to call me every time some drunk teenager knocks over a tombstone-- ..... "Graves have been dug up."

Robert sat up, kicking off the covers. "Graves? Plural?"

"A lot of them."

"I'll meet you there in five." Robert hung up, put on his pants, slipped into the still-buttoned shirt he'd taken off by pulling over his head, and ran a quick hand through his hair. He pulled on his boots, grabbed his keys and wallet from the dresser, and hurried outside, strapping on his holster. "The night blackness of the desert was obscured in his rearview mirror by the cloud of red taillight-tinted dust kicked up by his tires as he peeled out.

Stu's cruiser was already at the cemetery, parked directly in front of the wrought-iron gate, and Robert knew from radioing the station that Ted was with him. The red and-blues were off, but the twin white spotlights on either side of the patrol car were trained on the graveyard and illuminated everything that faced the entrance, creating an eerie illusion of flatness. In the high-powered halogen beams, the cemetery looked like a painting or a stage set, an exaggeration of reality, all shadows and highlights--though that sharpness of contrast made it virtually impossible to distinguish the extent of the damage through the dusty windshield of the car.

Robert pulled next to Stu's vehicle, opened his door, and stepped out.

"My God," he breathed.

All of the graves had been dug up and desecrated. Not a single plot remained undisturbed. Behind the bars of the fence, the formerly flat and well-maintained lawn was now a jumbled series of irregular holes and hills of dirt. Many of the headstones had been smashed or knocked over, and scattered randomly about were opened coffins and pieces of coffin, bones and decayed body parts lying atop wood, half-buried in dirt, thrown onto stone. One skeletal hand and connecting radius hung from the low branches of the cemetery's lone palo verde tree, looking fake in the sterile light of the halogens.

Robert turned on the twin beams of his own spotlights, adjusting them so they shone on an area to the left of that already lit. There was no movement within the cemetery, no sign of Stu or Ted, and he looked around, spot ting the silhouettes of the two policemen in the lighted doorway of the caretaker's house across the street. Turning his back on the cemetery, he walked over to the house, gravel crunching loudly beneath the heels of his boots. Behind Stu and Ted, he could see Lee Hillman, the care taker, just inside the house. The old man looked worried, and he shifted nervously from one foot to another, his hands traveling unthinkingly up and down the inner molding of the doorsill.