Thinner

Chapter Twenty-two. Ginelli's Story

He spoke at first in quick bursts, falling silent for a few moments after each to consider what came next. Ginelli's energy seemed really low for the first time since he had turned up at the Bar Harbor Motor Inn on Monday afternoon. He did not seem much hurt – his wounds were really only deep scratches – but Billy believed he was badly shaken.

All the same, that crazy glow eventually began to dawn in his eyes again, at first stuttering on and off like a neon sign just after you turn the switch at dusk, then glowing steadily. He pulled a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and dumped a capful of Chivas into his coffee.. He offered Billy the flask. Billy declined – he didn't know what the booze might do to his heart.

Ginelli sat up straighter, brushed the hair off his forehead, and began to talk in a more normal rhythm.

At three o'clock on Tuesday morning, Ginelli had parked on a woods road which branched off from Route 37-A near the Gypsies' camp. He fiddled with the steaks for a while and then walked back to the highway carrying the shopping bag. High clouds were sliding across the halfmoon like shutters. He waited for them to clear off, and when they did for a moment he was able to spot the circle of vehicles. He crossed the road and set off cross-country in that direction.

'I'm a city boy, but my sense of direction ain't as bad as it could be,' he said. 'I can trust it in a pinch. And I didn't want to go in the same way you did, William.'

He cut through a couple of fields and a thin copse of woods; splashed through one boggy place that smelled, he said, like twenty pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag. He also caught the seat of his pants in some very old barbed wire that had been all but invisible in the moonless dark.

'If all that is country living, William, the rubes can have it,' he said.

He had not expected any trouble from the camp hounds; Billy was a case in point. They hadn't bothered to make a sound until he actually stepped into the circle of the campfire, although they surely must have caught his scent before then.

'You'd expect Gypsies to have better watchdogs than that,' Billy commented. 'At least that's the image.'

'Nah,' Ginelli said. 'People can find all kinds of reasons to roust Gypsies without the Gyps themselves giving them more.'

'Like dogs that bark all night long?'

'Yeah, like that. You got much smarter, William, and people are gonna think you're Italian.'

Still, Ginelli had taken no chances – he moved slowly along the backs of the parked vehicles, skipping the vans and campers where people would be sleeping and only looking in the cars and station wagons. He saw what he wanted after checking only two or three vehicles: an old suit coat crumpled up on the seat of a Pontiac station wagon.

'Car wasn't locked,' he said. 'Jacket wasn't a bad fit, but it smelled like a weasel died in each pocket. I seen a pair of old sneakers on the floor in the back. They was a little tight, but I crammed 'em on just the same. Two cars later I found a hat that looked like something left over from a kidney transplant and put that on.'

He had wanted to smell like one of the Gypsies, Ginelli explained, but not just as insurance against a bunch of worthless mutts sleeping by the embers of the campfire it was the other bunch of dogs that interested him. The valuable dogs. The pit-bulls.

Three-quarters of the way around the circle, he spotted a camper with a small rear window that had been covered with wire mesh instead of glass. He peered in and saw nothing at all – the back of the camper was completely bare.

'But it smelled of dog, William,' Ginelli said. 'Then I looked the other way and risked a quick poke on the penlight I brought. The hay-grass was all broken down in a path going away from the back of that camper. You didn't have to be Dan'l Boone to see it. They took the fucking dogs out of the rolling kennel and stashed them somewhere else so the local dog warden or humane-society babe wouldn't find them if someone blabbed. Only they left a path even a city boy could pick up with one quick poke of his flashlight. Stupid. That's when I really started to believe we could put some blocks to them.'

Ginelli followed the path over a knoll and to the edge of another small wooded area.

'I lost the path,' he said. 'I just stood there for a minute or two wondering what to do next. And then I heard it, William. I heard it loud and clear. Sometimes the gods give you a break.'

'What did you hear?'

'A dog farting,' Ginelli said. 'Good and loud. Sounded like someone blowing a trumpet with a mute on it.'

Less than twenty feet into the woods he had found a rough corral in a clearing. It was no more than a circle of thick branches driven into the ground and then laced up with barbed wire. Inside were seven pit-bulls. Five were fast asleep. The other two were looking dopily at Ginelli.

They looked dopy because they were dopy. 'I thought they'd be stoned, although it wasn't safe to count on it. Once you train dogs to fight, they become a pain in the ass – they will fight with each other and wreck your investment unless you're careful. You either put them in separate cages or you dope them. Dope is cheaper and it's easy to hide. And if they had been straight, a rinky-dink piece of work like that dog corral wouldn't have held them. The ones getting their asses chewed would have busted out even if it meant leaving half their hides hanging on the wires behind them. They were only sobering them up when the betting line got heavy enough to justify the risk. First the dope, then the show, then more dope.' Ginelli laughed.

'See? Pit-bulls are just like fucking rock stars. It wears them out quick, but as long as you stay in the black, you can always find more pit-bulls. They didn't even have a guard. '

Ginelli opened his shopping bag and took out the steaks. After parking on the woods road, he had taken them out of their store shrink-wrap and injected a hypo of what he called Ginelli's Pit-Bull Cocktail into each: a mixture of Mexican brown heroin and strychnine. Now he waved them in the air and watched the sleeping dogs come slowly to life. One of them uttered a thick bark that sounded like the snore of a man with serious nasal problems.

'Shut up or no dinner,' Ginelli said mildly. The dog that had barked sat down. It immediately developed a fairly serious starboard list and began to go back to sleep.

Ginelli tossed one of the steaks into the enclosure. A second. A third. And the last. The dogs squabbled over them in listless fashion. There was some barking, but it had that same thick, snory quality, and Ginelli felt he could live with it. Besides, anyone coming from the camp to check on the makeshift kennel would be carrying a flashlight, and he would have plenty of time to fade back into the woods. But no one had come.

Billy listened with horrified fascination as Ginelli told him calmly how he had sat nearby, dry-smoking a Camel and watching the pit-bulls die. Most of them had gone very quietly, he reported (was there the faintest tinge of regret in his voice? Billy wondered uneasily) – probably because of the dope they had already been fed. Two of them had very mild convulsions. That was all. All in all, Ginelli felt, the dogs were not so badly off; the Gypsies had had worse things planned for them. It was over in a little less than an hour.

When he was sure they were all dead or at least deeply unconscious, he had taken a dollar bill from his wallet and a pen from his breast pocket. On the dollar bill he wrote:

NEXT TIME IT COULD BE YOUR GRANDCHILDREN, OLD MAN. WILLIAM HALLECK SAYS TO TAKE IT OFF. The pit-bulls had worn twists of clothesrope for collars. Ginelli tucked the bill under one of them. He hung the foul-smelling coat on one of the corral posts and put the hat on top of it. He removed the sneakers and took his own shoes from his hip pockets. He put them on and left.

Coming back, he said, he had gotten lost for a while and had ended up taking a header in the bad-smelling boggy place. Finally, however, he had seen farmhouse lights and gotten himself oriented. He found the woods road, got into his car, and started back toward Bar Harbor.

He was halfway there, he said, when the car started to feel not right to him. He couldn't put it any better or make it any clearer – it just didn't seem right anymore. It wasn't that it looked different or smelled different; it just didn't seem right. He had had such feelings before, and on most occasions they had meant nothing at all. But on a couple …

'I decided I wanted to ditch it,' Ginelli said. 'I didn't want to take even a little chance that one of them. might have had insomnia, been walking around, seen it. I didn't want them to know what I was driving, because then they could fan out, look for me, find me. Find you. See? I do take them serious. I look at you, William, and I got to.'

So he had parked the car on another deserted side road, pulling the distributor cap, and had walked the three miles back into town. When he got there, dawn was breaking.

After leaving Billy in his new Northeast Harbor quarters, Ginelli had cabbed back toward Bar Harbor, telling the driver to go slow because he was looking for something.

'What is it?' the driver asked. 'Maybe I know where it is.'

'That's all right,' Ginelli replied. 'I'll know it when I see it.'

And so he had – about two miles out of Northeast Harbor he had seen a Nova with a For Sale sign in the windshield sitting beside a small farmhouse. He checked to make sure the owner was home, paid off the cab, and made a cash deal on the spot. For an extra twenty the owner – a young fellow, Ginelli said, who looked like he might have more head lice than IQ points – had agreed to leave his Maine plates on the Nova, accepting Ginelli's promise to send them back in a week.

'I might even do it, too,' Ginelli said thoughtfully. 'If we're still alive, that is.'

Billy looked at him sharply, but Ginelli only resumed his story.

He had driven back toward Bar Harbor, skirting the town itself and heading out along 37-A toward the Gypsy camp. He had stopped long enough to call a person he would only identify to Billy as a 'business associate.' He told the 'business associate' to be at a certain pay-telephone kiosk in midtown New York at twelve-thirty P.M. – this was a kiosk Ginelli used often, and due to his influence it was one of the few in New York that was rarely out of order.

He drove by the encampment, saw signs of activity, turned around about a mile up the road, and cruised back. A makeshift road had been carved through the hayfield from 37-A to the camp, and there was a car heading up it to 37-A.

'A Porsche turbo,' Ginelli said. 'Rich kid's toy. Decal in the back window that said Brown University. Two kids in the front, three more in the back. I pulled up and asked the kid driving if they were Gypsies down there, like I'd heard. He said they were, but if I'd been meaning to get my fortune read, I was out of luck. The kids had gone there to get theirs read, but all they got was a quick here's-your-hat, what's-your-hurry routine. They were moving out. After the pit-bulls, I wasn't surprised.

'I headed back toward Bar Harbor and pulled into a gas station – that Nova gobbles gas like you wouldn't believe, William, but it can walk and talk if you put the go to the mat. I also grabbed me a Coke and dropped a couple of bennies because by then I was starting to feel a little bit low.'

Ginelli had called his 'business associate' and had arranged to meet him at the Bar Harbor airport that evening at five o'clock. Then he had driven back to Bar Harbor. He parked the Nova in a public lot and walked around town for a while, looking for the man.

'What man?' Billy asked.

'The man,' Ginelli repeated patiently, as if speaking to an idiot. 'This guy, William, you always know him when you see him. He looks like all the other summer dudes, like he could take you for a ride on his daddy's sloop or drop ten grams of good cocaine on you or just decide to split the Bar Harbor scene and drive to Aspen for the Summerfest in his Trans Am. But he is not the same as they are, and there are two quick ways to find it out. You look at his shoes, that's one. This guy's shoes are bad shoes. They are shined, but they are bad shoes. They have no class, and you can tell by the way he walks that they hurt his feet. Then you look at his eyes. That's big number two. These guys, it seems like they never wear the Ferrari sunglasses and you can always see their eyes. It's like some guys got to advertise what they are just like some guys have got to pull jobs and then confess to the cops. Their eyes say, “Where's the next meal coming from? Where's the next joint coming from? Where's the guy I wanted to connect with when I came here?” Do you dig me?'

'Yes, I think I do.'

'Mostly what the eyes say is, “How do I score?” What did you say the old man in Old Orchard called the pushers and the quick-buck artists?'

'Drift trade,' Billy said.

'Yeah!' Ginelli kindled. The light in his eyes whirled. 'Drift trade, right good! The man I was looking for is high-class drift trade. These guys in resort towns float around like whores looking for steady customers. They rarely fall for big stuff, they move on all the time, and they are fairly smart … except for their shoes. They got J. Press shirts and Paul Stuart sport coats and designer jeans … but then you look at their feet and their fucking loafers say "Caldor's, nineteen-ninety-five.' Their loafers say "I can be had, I'll do a job for you." With whores it's the blouses. Always rayon blouses. You have to train them out of it.

'But finally I saw the man, you know? So I, like, engaged him in conversation. We sat on a bench down by the public library – pretty place – and worked it all out. I had to pay a little more because I didn't have time to, you know, finesse him, but he was hungry enough and I thought he'd be trustworthy, Over the short haul, anyway. For these guys, the long haul doesn't fucking exist. They think the long haul is the place they used to walk through to get from American History to Algebra II.'

'How much did you pay him?'

Ginelli waved his hand.

'I am costing you money,' Billy said. Unconsciously he had fallen into Ginelli's rhythm of speech.

'You're a friend,' Ginelli said, a bit touchily. 'We can square it up later, but only if you want. I am having fun. This has been one weird detour, William. “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” if you can dig on that one time. Now can I tell this? My mouth is getting dry and I got a long way to go and we got a lot to do later on.'

'Go ahead.'

The fellow Ginelli had picked out was Frank Spurton. He said he was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado on vacation, but to Ginelli he had looked to be about twenty-five – a pretty old undergrad. Not that it mattered. Ginelli wanted him to go out to the woods road where he had left the rental Ford and then follow the Gypsies when they took off. Spurton was to call the Bar Harbor Motor Inn when he was sure they had alighted for the night. Ginelli didn't think they would go too far. The name Spurton was to ask for when he called the motel was John Tree. Spurton wrote it down. Money changed hands – sixty percent of the total amount promised. The ignition keys and the distributor cap for the Ford also changed hands. Ginelli asked Spurton if he could put it on the distributor all right, and Spurton, with a car thief's smile, said he thought he could manage.

'Did you give him a ride out there?' Billy asked.

'For the money I was paying him, William, he could thumb.'

Ginelli drove back to the Bar Harbor Motor Inn instead and registered under the John Tree name. Although it was only two in the afternoon, he snagged the last room available for the night – the clerk handed him the key with the air of one conferring a great favor. The summer season was getting into high gear. Ginelli went to the room, set the alarm clock on the night table for four-thirty, and dozed until it went off. Then he got up and went to the airport.

At ten minutes past five, a small private plane – perhaps the same one that had ferried Fander up from Connecticut – landed. The 'business associate' deplaned, and packages, a large one and three small ones, were unloaded from the plane's cargo bay. Ginelli and the 'business associate' loaded the larger package into the Nova's backseat and the small packages into the trunk. Then the 'business associate' went back to the plane. Ginelli didn't wait to see it take off, but returned to the motel, where he slept until eight o'clock, when the phone woke him.

It was Frank Spurton. He was calling from a Texaco station in the town of Bankerton, forty miles northwest of Bar Harbor. Around seven, Spurton said, the Gypsy caravan had turned into a field just outside of town everything had been arranged in advance, it seemed.

'Probably Starbird,' Billy commented. 'He's their front man.'

Spurton had sounded uneasy … jumpy. 'He thought they had made him,' Ginelli said. 'He was loafing way back, and that was a mistake. Some of them turned off for gas or something. He didn't see them. He's doing about forty, just goofing along, and all of a sudden two old station wagons and a camper pass him, bang-boom-bang. That's the first he knows that he's all of a sudden in the middle of the fucking wagon train instead of behind it. He looks out his side window as the camper goes by, and he sees this old guy with no nose in the passenger seat, staring at him and waggling his fingers – not like he's waving but like he's throwing a spell. I'm not putting words in this guy's mouth, William; that's what he said to me on the phone. "Waggling his fingers like he was throwing a spell.`

'Jesus,' Billy muttered.

'You want a shot in your coffee?'

'No … yes.'

Ginelli dumped a capful of Chivas in Billy's cup and went on. He asked Spurton if the camper had had a picture on the side. It had. Girl and unicorn.

'Jesus,' Billy said again. 'You really think they recognized the car? That they looked around after they found the dogs and saw it on that road where you left it?'

'I know they did,' Ginelli said grimly. 'He gave me the name of the road they were on – Finson Road – and the number of the state road they turned off to get there. Then he asked me to leave the rest of his money in an envelope with his name on it in the motel safe. “I want to boogie” is what he said, and I didn't blame him much.'

Ginelli left the motel in the Nova at eight-fifteen. He passed the town-line marker between Bucksport and Bankerton at nine-thirty. Ten minutes later he passed a Texaco station that was closed for the night. There were a bunch of cars parked in a dirt lot to one side of it, some waiting for repair, some for sale. At the end of the row he saw the rental Ford. He drove on up the road, turned around, and drove back the other way.

'I did that twice more,' he said. 'I didn't get any of that feeling like before,' he said, 'so I went on up the road a little way and parked the heap on the shoulder. Then I walked back.'

'And?'

'Spurton was in the car,' Ginelli said. 'Behind the wheel. Dead. Hole in his forehead, just above the right eye. Not much blood. Might have been a forty-five, but I don't think so. No blood on the seat behind him. Whatever killed him didn't go all the way through. A forty-five slug would have gone through and left a hole in back the size of a Campbell's soup can. I think someone shot him with a ball bearing in a slingshot, just like the girl shot you. Maybe it was even her that did it.'

Ginelli paused, ruminating.

'There was a dead chicken in his lap. Cut open. One word written on Spurton's forehead, in blood. Chicken blood is my guess, but I didn't exactly have time to give it the full crime-lab analysis, if you can dig that.'

'What word?' Billy asked, but he knew it before Ginelli said it.

“' NEVER.”'

'Christ,' Billy said, and groped for the laced coffee. He got the cup to his mouth and then set it back down again.

If he drank any of that, he was going to vomit. He couldn't afford to vomit. In his mind's eye he could see Spurton sitting behind the Ford's wheel, head tilted back, a dark hole over one eye, a ball of white feathers in his lap. This vision was clear enough so he could even see the bird's yellow beak, frozen half-open, its glazed black eyes …

The world swam in tones of gray … and then there was a flat hard smacking sound and dull heat in his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw Ginelli settling back into his seat.

'Sorry, William, but it's like that commercial for aftershave says – you needed that. I think you are getting the guilts, over this fellow Spurton, and I want you to just quit it, you hear?' Ginelli's tone was mild, but his eyes were angry. 'You keep getting things all twisted around, like these bleeding-heart judges who want to blame everybody right up to the President of the United States for how some junkie knifed an old woman and stole her Social Security check – everyone, that is, but the junkie asshole who did it and is right now standing in front of him and waiting for a suspended sentence so he can go out and do it again.'

'That doesn't make any sense at all!' Billy began, but Ginelli cut him off.

'Fuck it doesn't,' he said. 'You didn't kill Spurton, William. Some Gypsy did, and whichever one it was, it was the old man at the bottom of it and we both know it. No one twisted Spurton's arm, either. He was doing a job for pay, that's all. A simple job. He got too far back and they boxed him. Now, tell me, William – do you want it taken off or not.'

Billy sighed heavily. His cheek still tingled warmly where Ginelli had slapped him. 'Yes,' he said. 'I still want it taken off.'

'All right, then, let's drop it.'

'Okay.' He let Ginelli speak on uninterrupted to the end of his tale. He was, in truth, too amazed by it to think much of interrupting.

Ginelli walked behind the gas station and sat down on a pile of old tires. He wanted to get his mind serene, he said, and so he sat there for the next twenty minutes or so, looking up at the night sky – the last glow of daylight had just faded out of the west – and thinking serene thoughts. When he felt he had his mind right, he went back to the Nova. He backed down to the Texaco station without turning on the lights. Then he dragged Spurton's body out of the rental Ford and put it into the Nova's trunk.

'They wanted to leave me a message, maybe, or maybe just hang me up by the heels when the guy who runs that station found a body in a car with my name on the rental papers in the glove compartment.' But it was stupid, William, because if the guy was shot with a ball bearing instead of a bullet, the cops would take one quick sniff in my direction and then turn on them – the girl does a slingshot target-shooting act, for God's sake.

'Under other circumstances, I'd love to see the people I was after paint themselves into a corner like that, but this is a funny situation – this is something we got to work out by ourselves. Also, I expected the cops to be out talking to the Gypsies the next day about something else entirely, if things went the way I expected, and Spurton would only complicate things. So I took the body. Thank God that station was just sitting there by its lonesome on a country road, or I couldn't have done it.'

With the body of Spurton in the trunk, curled around the smaller trio of boxes the 'business associate' had delivered that afternoon, Ginelli drove on. He found Finson Road less than half a mile farther up. On Route 37-A, a good secondary road leading west from Bar Harbor, the Gypsies had been clearly open for business. Finson Road unpaved, potholed, and overgrown – was clearly a different proposition. They had gone to earth.

'It made things a little tougher, just like having to clean up after them down at the gas station, but in some ways I was absolutely delighted, William. I wanted to scare them, and they were behaving like people who were scared. Once people are scared, it gets easier and easier to keep them scared.'

Ginelli killed the Nova's headlights and drove a quarter of a mile down the Finson Road. He saw a turnout which led into an abandoned gravel pit. 'Couldn't have been more perfect if I'd ordered it,' he said.

He opened the trunk, removed Spurton's body, and pawed loose gravel over it. The body buried, he went back to the Nova, took two more bennies, and then unwrapped the big package which had been in the backseat. WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA was stamped on the box. Inside was a Kalishnikov AK-47 assault rifle and four hundred rounds of ammunition, a spring-loaded knife, a lady's draw-string leather evening bag loaded with lead shot, a dispenser of Scotch strapping tape, and jar of lampblack.

Ginelli blacked his face and hands, then taped the knife to the fat part of his calf. He stuck the tape in his pocket and headed off.

'I left the sap,' he said. 'I already felt enough like a superhero out of some fucking comic book.'

Spurton had said the Gypsies were camped in a field two miles up the road. Ginelli went into the woods and followed the road in that direction. He didn't dare lose sight of the road, he said, because he was afraid of getting lost.

'It was slow going,' he said. 'I kept stepping on sticks and running into branches. I hope I didn't walk through no fucking poison ivy. I'm very susceptible to poison ivy.'

After two hours spent struggling through the tangled second growth along the east side of Finson Road, Ginelli had seen a dark shape on the road's narrow shoulder. At first he thought it was a road sign or some sort of post. A moment later he realized it was a man.

'He was standing there just as cool as a butcher in a meat cooler, but I believed he had to be shitting me, William, I mean. I was trying to be quiet, but I hang out in New York City. Fucking. Hiawatha I am not, if you can dig that. So I figured he was pretending not to hear me so he could get a fix on me. And when he had it he'd turn around and start chopping. I could have blown him out his socks where he stood, but it would have waked up everyone within a mile and a half, and besides; I promised you that I wouldn't hurt anyone.

'So I stood there and stood there. Fifteen minutes I stood there, thinking that if I move I'm gonna step on another stick and then the fun will begin. Then he moves from the side of the road into the ditch to take a piss, and I can't believe what I am seeing. I don't know where this guy took lessons in sentry duty, but it sure wasn't Fort Bragg. He's carrying the oldest shotgun I've seen in twenty years – what the Corsicans call a loup. And, William, he is wearing a pair of Walkman earphones! I could have walked up behind him, put my hands in my shirt, and armpit-farted out “Hail, Columbia” – he never would have moved.'

Ginelli laughed. 'I tell you one thing – I bet that old man didn't know the guy was rock and rolling while he was supposed to be watching for me.'

When the sentry moved back to his former place, Ginelli walked toward him on the sentry's blind side, no longer making much of an effort to be silent. He removed his belt as he walked. Something warned the sentry – something glimpsed out of the corner of his eye – at the last moment. The last moment is not always too late, but this time it was. Ginelli slipped the belt around his neck and pulled it tight. There was a short struggle. The young Gypsy dropped his shotgun and clawed at the belt. The earphones slid down his cheeks and Ginelli could hear the Rolling Stones, sounding lost between the stars, singing 'Under My Thumb.'

The young man began to make choked gargling noises. His struggles weakened, then stopped entirely. Ginelli kept the pressure on for another twenty seconds, then relaxed it ('I didn't want to make him foolish,' he explained seriously to Billy) and dragged him up the hill and into the underbush. He was a good-looking, well-muscled man of perhaps twenty-two, wearing jeans and Dingo boots. Ginelli guessed from Billy's description that it was Samuel Lemke, and Billy agreed. Ginelli found a good-sized tree and used strapping tape to bind him to it.

'It sounds stupid, saying you taped somebody to a tree, but only if you never had it done to you. Enough of that shit wound around you, and you might as well forget it. Strapping tape is strong. You're going to be where you are until someone comes along and cuts you loose.

You can't break it and you sure as shit can't untie it.'

Ginelli cut off the bottom half of Lemke's T-shirt, stuffed it into his mouth, and taped it in place.

'Then I turned over the cassette in his machine and stuck the phones back on his head. I didn't want him to be too bored when he woke up.'

Ginelli now walked up the side of the road. He and Lemke were of similar height, and he was willing to take the risk that he would be able to stroll right up to another sentry before being challenged. Besides, it was getting late and he'd had no sleep but two short naps in the last forty-eight hours. 'Miss enough sleep and you goof up,' he said. 'If you're playing Monopoly, that's all right. But if you're dealing with fuckers that shoot people and then write discouraging words on their foreheads in chicken blood, you're apt to die. As it happens, I did make a mistake. I was just lucky enough to get away with it. Sometimes God forgives.'

This mistake was not seeing the second sentry until he was walking past him. It happened because the second man was well back in the shadows instead of standing at the edge of the road, as Lemke had been doing. Luckily for Ginelli, the reason was not concealment but comfort. 'This one wasn't just listening to a Walkman,' Ginelli said. 'This one was fast asleep. Lousy guards, but about what you expect from civilians. Also, they hadn't made up their minds that I was serious long-term trouble for them yet. If you think someone is seriously on the prod for your ass, that keeps you awake. Man, that keeps you awake even when you want to go to sleep.'

Ginelli walked over to the sleeping guard, picked his spot on the guard's skull, and then applied the butt of the Kalishnikov to that spot with a fair amount of force. There was a thud like the sound of a limp hand striking a mahogany table. The guard, who had been propped comfortably against a tree, fell over in the grass. Ginelli bent and felt for a pulse. It was there, slow but not erratic. He pressed on.

Five minutes later he came to the top of a low hill. A sloping field opened out and down on the left, Ginelli could see the dark circle of vehicles parked about two hundred yards from the road. No campfire tonight. Dim, curtainscreened lights in a few of the campers, but that was all.

Ginelli worked his way halfway down the hill on his belly and his elbows, holding the assault rifle out in front of him. He found a rock outcropping that allowed him to both seat the stock firmly and to sight down the hill to the encampment.

'The moon was just coming up but I wasn't going to wait for it. Besides, I could see well enough for what I had to do – by then I was no more than seventy-five yards from them. And it wasn't as if I had to do any fine work. Kalishnikov's no good for that anyway. Might as well try to take out a guy's appendix with a chain saw. Kalishnikov's good to scare people with. I scared them, all right. I bet just about all of them made lemonade in the sheets. But not the old man. He's as tough as they come, William.'

With the automatic rifle firmly set, Ginelli pulled in a deep breath and sighted on the front tire of the unicorn camper. There was the sound of crickets and a small stream babbling somewhere close by. A whippoorwill cried out once across the dark field. Halfway through its second verse, Ginelli opened fire.

The Kalishnikov's thunder ripped the night in two. Fire hung around the end of the barrel in a corona as the clip – thirty .30-caliber bullets, each in a casing almost as long as a king-size cigarette, each powered with a hundred and forty grains of powder – ran out. The unicorn camper's front tire did not just blow; it exploded. Ginelli raked the bellowing gun the length of the camper – but low. 'Didn't put a single goddamn hole in the body,' he said. 'Tore the hell out of the ground beneath it. Didn't even cut it close, because of the gas tank. Ever see a camper blow? It's like what happens when you light a firecracker and put a can over it. I saw it happen once, on the New Jersey turnpike.'

The camper's back tire blew. Ginelli popped the first clip and slammed another one in. The uproar was beginning below. Voices yelled back and forth, some angry, most just scared. A woman screamed.

Some of them – how many of the total number, Ginelli had no way of telling – were spilling out of the backs of campers, most in pajamas and nightgowns, all looking confused and scared, all trying to stare in five different directions at the same time. And then Ginelli saw Taduz Lemke for the first time. The old man looked almost comic in his billowing nightshirt. Straggles of hair were escaping from beneath his tasseled nightcap. He came around the front of the unicorn van, took one look at the flattened, twisted tires, and then looked directly up toward where Ginelli was lying. He told Billy that there was nothing comic in that burning glance.

'I knew he couldn't see me,' he said. 'The moon wasn't up, I had lampblack on my face and hands, I was just another shadow in a whole field of them. But … I think he did see, me, William, and it cooled off my heart.'

The old man turned toward his people, who were beginning to drift in his direction, still babbling and waving their hands. He shouted at them in Rom and swept an arm at the caravan. Ginelli didn't understand the language, but the gesture was clear enough: Get under cover, you fools.

'Too late, William,' Ginelli said smugly.

He had loosed the second burst directly into the air over their heads. Now a lot of people were screaming – men as well as women. Some hit the ground and began to crawl, most of them with their heads down and their butts waving in the air. The rest ran, breaking in all directions but the one from which the fire had come.

Lemke stood his ground, bellowing at them, bullthroated. His nightcap fell off. The runners went on running, the crawlers crawling. Lemke might ordinarily rule them with an iron hand, but Ginelli had panicked them.

The Pontiac station wagon from which he had taken the coat and sneakers the night before was parked next to the van, nose out. Ginelli slammed a third clip into the AK-47 and opened fire again.

'There wasn't anyone in it last night, and the way it smelled, I guessed no one would be in it tonight, either. I killed that station wagon – I mean, I annihilated that motherfucker.

'An AK-47 is a very mean gun, William. People who have only seen war movies think that when you use a machine gun or an automatic rifle you end up with this neat little line of holes, but it ain't like that. It's messy, it's hard, and it happens fast. The windshield of that old Bonneville blew in. The hood popped up a little. Then the bullets caught it and tore it right off. The headlights blew. The tires blew. The grille fell off. I couldn't see the water spraying out of the radiator, it was too dark for that, but when the clip ran out I could sure hear it. When the clip ran out that son of a bitch looked like it had run into a brick wall. And during all of it, while the glass and chrome were flying, that old man never moved. Just looked for the muzzle flash so he could send the troops after me if I was stupid and waited for him to get his troops together. I decided to split before he could.'

Ginelli ran for the road, bent over low like a World War II soldier advancing under fire. Once there, he straightened up and sprinted. He passed the inner-perimeter sentry the one he had used the gun butt on – with hardly a glance. But when he reached the spot where he had taken Mr Walkman, he stopped, catching his breath.

'Finding him wasn't hard, even in the dark,' Ginelli said. 'I could hear the underbrush shaking and crackling. When I got a little closer I could hear him, too – unth, unth, oooth, oooth, galump, galump.'

Lemke had actually worked his way a quarter of the way around the tree he had been taped to – the net result being that he was more tightly bound than ever. The earphones had fallen off and were dangling around his neck by their wires. When he saw Ginelli he stopped struggling and just looked.

'I saw in his eyes that he thought I was going to kill him, and that he was good and fucking scared,' Ginelli said. 'That suited me just fine. The old dude wasn't scared, but I'll tell you, that kid wishes sincerely that they had never fucked with you, William. Unfortunately, I couldn't really make him sweat – there wasn't time.'

He knelt down by Lemke and held up the AK-47 so Lemke could see what it was. Lemke's eyes showed that he knew perfectly well.

'I don't have much time, asshole, so listen good,' Ginelli said. 'You tell the old man that next time I won't be shooting high or low or at empty cars. Tell him William Halleck says to take it off. You got that?'

Lemke nodded as much as the tape would allow. Ginelli tore it off his mouth and pulled the ball of shirting free.

'It's going to get busy around here,' Ginelli said. 'You yell, they'll find you. Remember the message.'

He turned to go.

'You don't understand,' Lemke said hoarsely. 'He'll never take it off. He's the last of the great Magyar chiefs – his heart is a brick. Please, mister, I'll remember, but he'll never take it off.'

On the road a pickup truck went bucketing by toward the Gypsy camp. Ginelli glanced in that direction and then back at Lemke.

'Bricks can be crushed,' he said. 'Tell him that, too.'

Ginelli broke out to the road again, crossed it, and jogged back toward the gravel pit. Another pickup truck passed him, then three cars in a line. These people, understandably curious about who had been firing an automatic weapon in their little town in the dead of night, presented no real problem for Ginelli. The glow of the approaching headlights allowed him plenty of time to fade back into the woods each time. He heard an approaching siren just as he ducked into the gravel pit.

He started the Nova up and rolled it dark to the end of the short access lane. A Chevrolet with a blue bubble on the dashboard roared by.

'After it was gone, I wiped the crap off my face and hands and followed it,' Ginelli said.

'Followed it?' Billy broke in.

'Safer. If there's shooting, innocent people break their legs getting to it so they can see some blood before the cops come and hose it off the sidewalk. People going in another direction are suspicious. Lots of times they are leaving because they've got guns in their pockets.'

By the time he reached the field again there were half a dozen cars parked along the shoulder of the road. Headlight beams crisscrossed each other. People were running back and forth and yelling. The constable's car was parked near the spot where Ginelli had sapped the second young man; the bubble light on the dash whipped flickers of blue across the trees. Ginelli unrolled the Nova's window. 'What's up, officer?'

'Nothing you need to worry about. Move along.' And just in case the fellow in the Nova might speak English but only understand Russian, the constable whipped his flashlight impatiently in the direction Finson Road was going.

Ginelli rolled slowly on up the road, threading his way between the parked vehicles – the ones that belonged to the local folks, he guessed. It was maybe harder for you to move along gawkers who were your neighbors, he told Billy. There were two distinct knots of people in front of the station wagon Ginelli had shot up. One comprised Gypsy men in pajamas and nightshirts. They were talking among themselves, some of them gesticulating extravagantly. The other comprised town men. They stood silently, hands in pockets, gazing at the wreck of the station wagon. Each group ignored the other.

Finson Road continued on for six miles, and Ginelli almost ditched the car not once but twice as people came barreling along what was little more than a dirt track at high speed.

'Just guys out in the middle of the night hoping to see a little blood before the cops hosed it off the sidewalk, William. Or off the grass, in this case.'

He connected with a feeder road that took him into Bucksport, and from there he turned north. He was back in the John Tree motel room by two in the morning. He set the alarm for seven-thirty and turned in.

Billy stared at him. 'You mean that all the time I was worrying that you were dead you were sleeping in the same motel we left?'

'Well, yeah.' Ginelli looked ashamed of himself for a moment, and then he grinned and shrugged at the same time. 'Put it down to inexperience, William. I am not used to people worrying about me. Except my momma, of course, and that is different.'

'You must have overslept – you didn't get here until nine or so.'

'No – I was up as soon as the alarm went off. I made a call and then walked downtown. Rented another car. From Avis this time. I don't have such good luck with Hertz.'

'You're going to be in trouble about that Hertz car, aren't you?' Billy asked.

'Nope. All's well. It could have been hairy, though. That's what the call was about – the Hertz car. I got that “business associate” of mine to fly back up from New York. There's a little airport in Ellsworth, and he came in there. Then the pilot hopped down to Bangor to wait for him. My associate thumbed over to Bankerton. He -'

'This thing is escalating,' Billy said. 'You know that? It's turning into Vietnam.'

'Fuck, no – don't be dumb, William.'

'Only the housekeeper flew up from New York.'

'Well, yeah. I don't know anyone in Maine, and the one connection I made here got his ass killed. Anyway, there was no problem. I got a full report last night. My associate got to Bankerton around noon yesterday, and the only guy at the station was this kid who looked like he was quite a few bricks short of a full load. Kid would pump gas when someone came, but mostly he was dicking around in one of the bays, lubing a car or something. While he was in there, my friend hot-wired the Ford and drove it away. Went right past the garage bay. Kid never even turned around. My associate drove to Bangor International Airport and parked the Ford car in one of the Hertz stalls. I told him to check for bloodstains, and when I talked to him on the phone he said he found some blood in the middle of the front seat – that was chicken blood, almost for sure – and cleaned it up with one of those Wet-Nap things. Then he filled in the information on the flap of the folder, dropped it into the Express Return box, and flew back to the Apple.'

'What about the keys? You said he hot-wired it.'

'Well,' Ginelli said, 'the keys were really the problem all along. That was another mistake. I chalk it up to short sleep, same as the other one, but maybe it really is old age creeping up. They were in Spurton's pocket and I forgot to get them when, I laid him to rest. But now . . .' Ginelli took out a pair of keys on a bright yellow Hertz tab. He jingled them. 'Ta-da!'

'You went back,' Billy said, his voice a little hoarse. 'Good Christ, you went back and dug him up to get the keys.'

'Well, sooner or later the woodchucks or the bears would have found him and dragged him around,' Ginelli said reasonably, 'or hunters would have found him. Probably in bird season, when they go out with their dogs. I mean, it's no more than a minor annoyance to the Hertz people to get an express envelope without the keys – people are always forgetting to return keys to rental cars and hotel rooms. Sometimes they send them back, sometimes they don't bother. The service manager just dials an eight-hundred number, reads off the car's VIN, number, and the guy at the other end – from Ford or GM or Chrysler – gives him the key pattern. Presto! New keys. But if someone found a body in a gravel pit with a steel ball-bearing in his head and a set of car keys in his pocket that could be traced to me … bad. Very bad news. You get me?'

'Yes.'

'Besides, I had to go back out there anyway, you know,' Ginelli said mildly. 'And I couldn't go in the Nova.'

'Why not? They hadn't seen it.'

'I got to tell it in order, William. Then you'll see. Another shot?'

Billy shook his head. Ginelli helped himself.

'Okay. Early Tuesday morning, the dogs. Later Tuesday morning, the Nova. Tuesday night, the heavy firepower.'

Wednesday morning, early, the second rental car. You got all this?'

'I think so.'

'Now we're talking about a Buick sedan. The Avis guy wanted to give me an Aries K, said it was all he had left and I was lucky to get that, but an Aries K wasn't right. Had to be a sedan. Unobtrusive, but fairly big. Took twenty bucks to change his mind, but I finally got the car I wanted. I drove it back to the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, parked it, and made a couple more calls to make sure everything was happening the way I'd set it up. Then I drove over here in the Nova. I like that Nova, Billy – it looks like a mongrel and it smells like cowshit inside, but it's got bones.

'So I get here and finally set your mind at rest. By then I'm ready to crash again, and I'm too tired to even think about going back to Bar Harbor, and I spent the whole day in your bed.'

'You could have called me, you know, and saved at least one trip,' Billy said quietly.

Ginelli smiled at him. 'Yeah, I could have phoned, but fuck that. A phone call wouldn't have shown me how you were, William. You haven't been the only one worried.'

Billy lowered his head a little and swallowed with some difficulty. Almost crying again. Lately he was always almost crying, it seemed.

'So! Ginelli arises, refreshed and without too much of an amphetamine hangover. He showers, jumps into the Nova, which smells more like cowshit than ever after a day in the sun, and heads back to Bar Harbor. Once there, he takes the smaller packages out of the Nova's trunk and opens them in his room. There's a thirty-eight Colt Woodsman and a shoulder holster in one of them. The stuff in the other two packages fits into his sport-coat pockets. He then leaves the room and swaps the Nova for the Buick. He thinks for a minute that if there were two of him he wouldn't have had to spend half so much time shuffling cars like a parking-lot valet at a swanky Los Angeles restaurant. Then he heads out to scenic Bankerton for what he hopes will be the last fucking time. He makes just one stop along the way, at a supermarket. He goes in and buys two things: one of those Ball jars women put up preserves in and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi. He arrives in Bankerton just as twilight is starting to get really deep. He drives to the gravel pit and goes right in, knowing that being coy won't make a difference at this point – if the body has been found because of the excitement last night, he's going to be in the soup anyway. But no one is there, and there are no signs that anyone has been there. So he digs down to Spurton, feels around a little, and comes up with the prize. Just like in the Cracker Jack box.'

Ginelli's voice was perfectly expressionless, but Billy found this part of it unreeling in his mind like a movie not a particularly pleasant one. Ginelli squatting down, pushing aside the gravel with his hands, finding Spurton's shirt … his belt … his pocket. Reaching in. Fumbling through sandy change that would never be spent. And underneath the pocket, chilly flesh that was stiffened into rigor mortis. At last, the keys, and the hasty reinterment.

'Bruh,' Billy said, and shivered.

'It is all a matter of perspective, William,' Ginelli said calmly. 'Believe me, it is.'

I think that's what scared me about it, Billy thought, and then listened with growing amazement as Ginelli finished the tale of his remarkable adventures.

Hertz keys in his pocket, Ginelli returned to the Avis Buick. He opened the Pepsi-Cola, poured it into the Ball jar, then closed the jar with the wire cap. That done, he drove up to the Gypsy camp.

'I knew they'd still be there,' he said. 'Not because they wanted to still be there, but because the State Bears would have damn well told them to stay put until the investigation was over. Here's a bunch of, well, nomads, you might as well call them, strangers in a hick town like Bankerton to be sure, and some other stranger or strangers come along in the middle of the night and shoot up the place. The cops tend to get interested in stuff like that.'

They were interested, all right. There was a Maine State Police cruiser and two unmarked Plymouths parked at the edge of the field. Ginelli parked between the Plymouths, got out of his car, and started down the hill to the camp. The dead station wagon had been hauled away, presumably to a place where the crime-lab people could go over it.

Halfway down the hill, Ginelli met a uniformed State Bear headed back up.

'You don't have any business here, sir,' the Bear said. 'You'll have to move along.'

'I convinced him that I did have a spot of business there,' Ginelli told Billy, grinning.

'How did you do that?'

'Showed him this.'

Ginelli reached into his back pocket and tossed Billy a leather folder. He opened it. He knew what he was looking at immediately; he had seen a couple of these in the course of his career as a lawyer. He supposed he would have seen a lot more of them if he had specialized in criminal cases. It was a laminated FBI identification card with Ginelli's picture on it. In the photo Ginelli looked five years younger. His hair was very short, almost brush-cut. The card identified him as Special Agent Ellis Stoner.

Everything suddenly clicked together in Billy's mind.

He looked up from the ID. 'You wanted the Buick because it looked more like -'

'Like a government car, sure. Big unobtrusive sedan. I didn't want to show up in the rolling tuna-fish can the Avis guy tried to give me, and I surely didn't want to show up in Farmer John's drive-in fuck-machine.'

'This – one of the things your associate brought up on his second trip?'

'Yes.'

Billy tossed it back. 'It looks almost real.'

Ginelli's smile faded. 'Except for the picture,' he said softly, 'it is.'

For a moment there was silence as Billy tried to grope his way around that one without thinking too much about what might have happened to Special Agent Stoner, and if he might have had kids.

Finally he said, 'You parked between two police cars and flipped that ID at a state cop five minutes after you finished digging a set of car keys out of a corpse's pocket in a gravel pit.'

'Nah,' Ginelli said, 'it was more like ten.'

As he made his way into the camp, he could see two guys, casually dressed but obviously cops, on their knees behind the unicorn camper. Each of them had a small garden trowel. A third stood, shining down a powerful flashlight while they dug through the earth.

'Wait, wait, here's another one,' one of them said . He picked a slug out of the dirt on his trowel and dropped it into a nearby bucket. Blonk! Two Gypsy children, obviously brothers, stood nearby watching this operation.

Ginelli was actually glad the cops were there. No one knew what he looked like here, and Samuel Lemke had seen only a dark smear of lampblack. Also, it was entirely plausible that an FBI agent would show up as a result of a shooting incident featuring a Russian automatic weapon. But he had developed a deep respect for Taduz Lemke. It was more than that word written on Spurton's forehead; it was the way Lemke had stood his ground in the face of those .30-caliber bullets coming at him out of the dark. And, of course, there was the thing, that was happening to William. He felt it was just possible that the old man might know who he was. He might see it in Ginelli's eyes, or smell it on his skin, somehow.

Under no circumstances did he intend to let the old man with the rotten nose touch him.

It was the girl he wanted.

He crossed the inner circle and knocked on the door of one cif the campers at random. He had to knock again before it was opened by a middle-aged woman with frightened, distrustful eyes.

'Whatever you want, we haven't got it for you,' she said. 'We've got troubles here. We're closed. Sorry.'

Ginelli flashed the folder. 'Special Agent Stoner, ma'am. FBI.'

Her eyes widened. She crossed herself rapidly and said something in Romany. Then she said, 'Oh, God, what next? Nothing is right anymore. Since Susanna died it's like we've been cursed. Or -'

She was pushed aside by her husband, who told her to shut up.

'Special Agent Stoner,' Ginelli began again.

'Yeah, I heard what you said.' He worked his way out. Ginelli guessed he was forty-five but he looked older, an extremely tall man who slumped so badly that he looked almost deformed. He wore a Disney World T-shirt and huge baggy Bermuda shorts. He smelled of Thunderbird wine and vomit waiting to happen. He looked like the sort of man to whom it happened fairly often. Like three and four times a week. Ginelli thought he recognized him from the night before -it had either been this guy or there was another Gypsy around here who went six-four or six-five. He had been one of those bounding away with all the grace of a blind epileptic having a heart attack, he told Billy.

'What do you want? We've had cops on our asses all day. We always got cops on our asses, but this is just . . .fucking … ridiculous. P He spoke in an ugly, hectoring tone, and his wife spoke to him agitatedly in Rom.

He turned his head toward her. 'Det krigiska jag-haller,' he said, and added for good measure: 'Shut up, bitch.' The woman retreated. The man in the Disney shirt turned back to Ginelli. 'What do you want? Why don't you go talk to your buddies if you want something?' He nodded toward the crime-lab people.

'Could I have your name, please?' Ginelli asked with the same blank-faced politeness.

'Why don't you get it from them?' He crossed slabby, flabby arms truculently. Under his shirt his large breasts jiggled. 'We gave them our names, we gave them our statements. Someone took a few shots at us in the middle of the night, that's all any of us know. We just want to be let loose. We want to get out of Maine, out of New England, off the fucking East Coast.' In a slightly lower voice he added, 'And never come back.' The index and pinky fingers of his left hand popped out in a gesture Ginelli knew well from his mother and grandmother – it was the sign against the evil eye. He didn't believe this man was even aware he had done it.

'This can go one of two ways,' Ginelli said, still playing the ultrapolite FBI man to the hilt. 'You can give me a bit of information, sir, or you can end up in the State Detention Center pending a recommendation on whether or not to charge you with the obstruction of justice. If convicted of obstruction, you would face five years in jail and a fine of five thousand dollars.'

Another flood of Rom from the camper, this one nearly hysterical.

'Enkelt!' the man yelled hoarsely, but when he turned back to Ginelli again, his face had paled noticeably. 'You're nuts.'

'No, sir,' Ginelli said. 'It wasn't a matter of a few shots. It was at least three bursts fired from an automatic rifle. Private ownership of machine guns and rapid-fire automatic weapons is against the law in the United States. The FBI is involved in this case and I must sincerely advise you that you are currently waist-deep in shit, it's getting deeper, and I don't think you know how to swim.'

The man looked at him sullenly for a moment longer and then said, 'My name's Heilig. Trey Heilig. You coulda gotten it from those guys.' He nodded.

'They've got their jobs to do, I've got mine. Now, are you going to talk to me?' The big man nodded resignedly.

He put Trey Heilig through an account of what had happened the night before. Halfway through it, one of the state detectives wandered over to see who he was. He glanced at Ginelli's ID and then left quickly, looking both impressed and a little worried.

Heilig claimed he had burst out of his camper at the sound of the first shots, had spotted the gun flashes, and had headed up the hill to the left, hoping to flank the shooter. But in the dark he had stumbled over a tree or something, hit his head on a rock, and blacked out for a while – otherwise he surely would have had the bastard. In support of his story he pointed to a fading bruise, at least three days old and probably incurred in a drunken stumble, and his left temple. Uh-huh, Ginelli thought, and turned to another page in his notebook. Enough of the hocus-pocus; it was time to get down to business.

'Thank you very much, Mr Heilig, you've been a great help.'

Telling the tale seemed to have mollified the man. 'Well … that's okay. I'm sorry I jumped on you like that. But if you were us' He shrugged.

'Cops,' his wife said from behind him. She was looking 'I out the door of the camper like a very old, very tired badger looking out of her hole to see how many dogs are around, and how vicious they look. 'Always cops, wherever we go. That's usual. But this is worse. People are scared.'

'Enkelt, Mamma,' Heilig said, but more gently now.

'I've got to talk to two more people, if you can direct me,' he said, and looked at a blank page in his notebook. 'Mr Taduz Lemke and a Mrs Angelina Lemke.'

'Taduz is asleep in there,' Heilig said, and pointed at the unicorn camper. Ginelli found this to be excellent news indeed, if it was true. 'He's very old and all of this has tired him out real bad. I think Gina's in her camper over there – she ain't a missus, though.'

He pointed a dirty finger at a small green Toyota with a neat wooden cap on the back.

'Thank you very much.' He closed the notebook and tucked it into his back pocket.

Heilig retreated to his camper (and his bottle, presumably), looking relieved. Ginelli walked across the inner circle again in the growing gloom, this time to the girl's camper. His heart, he told Billy, was beating high and hard and fast. He drew a deep breath and knocked on the door.

There was no immediate answer. He was raising his hand to knock again when it was opened. William had said she was lovely, but he was not prepared for the depth of her loveliness -the dark, direct eyes with corneas so white they were faintly bluish, the clean olive skin that glowed faintly pink deep down. He looked for a moment at her hands and saw that they were strong and corded. There was no polish in the nails, which were clean but clipped as bluntly close as the fingernails of a farmer. In one of those hands she held a book called Statistical Sociology.

'Yes?'

'Special Agent Ellis Stoner, Miss Lemke,' he said, and immediately that clear, lucent quality left her eyes – it was as if a shutter had fallen over them. 'FBI.'

'Yes?' she repeated, but. with no more life than a telephone-answering machine.

'We're investigating the shooting incident that took place here last night.'

'You and half the world,' she said. 'Well, investigate away, but if I don't get my correspondence-course lessons in the mail by tomorrow morning I'm going to get grades taken off for lateness. So if you'll excuse me -'

'We've reason to believe that a man named William Halleck may have been behind it,' Ginelli said. 'Does that name mean anything to you?' Of course it did; for a moment her eyes opened wide and simply blazed. Ginelli had thought her lovely almost beyond believing. He still did, but he now also believed this girl really could have been the one who killed Frank Spurton.

'That pig!' she spat. 'Han satte sig pa en av stolarna! Han sneglade pa nytt mot hyllorna i vild! Vild!'

'I have a number of pictures of a man we believe to be Halleck,' Ginelli said mildly. 'They were taken in Bar Harbor by an agent using a telephoto lens -'

'Of course it's Halleck!' she said. 'That pig killed my tantenyjad – my grandmother! But he won't bother us long. He . . .' She bit her full lower lip, bit it hard, and stopped the words. If Ginelli had been the man he was claiming to be she would already have assured herself of an extremely deep and detailed interrogation. Ginelli, however, affected not to notice.

'In one of the photographs, money appears to be passing between the two men. If one of the men is Halleck, then the other one is probably the shooter who visited your camp last night. I'd like you and your grandfather to identify Halleck positively if you can.'

'He's my great-grandfather,' she said absently. 'I think he's asleep. My brother is with him. I hate to wake him.' She paused. 'I hate to upset him with this. The last few days have been dreadfully hard on him.'

'Well, suppose we do this,' Ginelli said. 'You look through the photos, and if you can positively identify the man as Halleck, we won't need to bother the elder Mr Lemke.'

'That would be fine. If you catch this Halleck pig, you will arrest him?'

'Oh, yes. I have a federal John Doe warrant with me.'

That convinced her. As she swung out of the camper with a swirl of skirt and a heartbreaking flash of tanned leg, she said something that chilled Ginelli's heart: 'There won't be much of him to arrest, I don't think.'

They walked past the cops still sifting dirt in the deepening gloom. They passed several Gypsies, including the two brothers, now dressed for bed in identical pairs of camouflage pajamas. Gina nodded at several of them and they nodded back but steered clear – the tall Italian-looking man with Gina was FBI, and it was best not to meddle in such business.

They passed out of the circle and walked up the hill toward Ginelli's car, and the evening shadows swallowed them.

'It was just as easy as pie, William,' Ginelli said. 'Third night in a row, and it was still as easy as pie … why not? The place was crawling with cops. Was the guy who shot them up just going to come back and do something else while the cops were there? They didn't think so … but they were stupid, William. I expected it of the rest of them, but not of the old man – you don't spend your whole life learning how to hate and distrust the cops and then just suddenly decide they're gonna protect you from whoever has been biting on your ass. But the old man was sleeping. He's worn out. That's good. We may just take him, William. We may just.'

They walked back to the Buick. Ginelli opened the driver's-side door while the girl stood there. And as he leaned in, taking the .38 out of the shoulder holster with one hand and pushing the wire lid-holder off the Ball jar with the other, he felt the girl's mood abruptly change from bitter exultation to one of sudden wariness. Ginelli himself was pumped up, his emotions and intuitions turned outward and tuned to an almost exquisite degree. He seemed to sense her first awareness of the crickets, the surrounding darkness, the ease with which she had been split off from the others, by a man she had never seen before, at a time when she should have known better than to trust any man she'd never seen before. For the first time she was wondering why 'Ellis Stoner' hadn't brought the papers down to the camp with him if he was so hot to get an ID on Halleck. But it was all too late. He had mentioned the one name guaranteed to cause a knee-jerk spasm and hate and to blind her with eagerness.

'Here we are,' Ginelli said, and turned back to her with the gun in one hand and the glass Ball jar in the other.

Her eyes widened again. Her breasts heaved as she opened her mouth and drew in breath.

'You can start to scream,' Ginelli said, 'but I guarantee it will be the last sound you ever hear yourself make, Gina.'

For a moment he thought she would do it anyway … and then she let the breath out in a long sigh.

'You're the one working for that pig,' she said. 'Hans satte sig pa -'

'Talk English, whore,' he said almost casually, and she recoiled as if slapped.

'You don't call me a whore,' she whispered. 'No one is going to call me a whore.' Her hands – those strong hands – arched and hooked into claws.

'You call my friend William a pig, I call you a whore, your mother a whore, your father an asshole-licking toilet hound,' Ginelli said. He saw her lips draw back from her teeth in a snarl and he grinned. Something in that grin made her falter. She did not exactly look afraid – Ginelli told Billy later that he wasn't sure then if it was in her to look afraid but some reason seemed to surface through her hot fury, some sense of who and what she was dealing with.

'What do you think this is, a game?' he asked her. 'You throw a curse onto someone with a wife and a kid, you think it is a game? You think he hit that woman, your gramma, on purpose? You think he had a contract on her? You think the Mafia had a contract put out on your old grandmother? Shit!'

The girl was now crying with rage and hate. 'He was getting a jerk-off job from his woman and he ran her down in the street! And then they … they han tog in pojken whitewash him off -but we got him fixed. And you will be next, you friend of pigs. It don't matter what -'

He pushed the glass cap off the top of the wide-mouthed jar with his thumb. Her eyes went to the jar for the first time. That was just where he wanted them.

'Acid, whore,' Ginelli said, and threw it in her face. 'See how many people you shoot with that slingshot of yours when you're blind.'

She made a high, windy screeching sound and clapped her hands over her eyes, too late. She fell to the ground. Ginelli put a foot on her neck.

'You scream and I'll kill you. You and the first three of your friends to make it up here.' He took the foot away. 'It was Pepsi-Cola.'

She got to her knees, staring at him through her spread fingers, and with those same exquisitely tuned, almost telepathic senses, Ginelli knew that she hadn't needed him to tell her it wasn't acid. She knew, had known almost at once in spite of the stinging. An instant later – barely in time – he knew she was going to go for his balls.

As she sprang at him, smooth as a cat, he sidestepped and kicked her in the side. The back of her head struck the chrome edging of the open driver's-side door with a loud crunch and she fell in a heap, blood flowing down one flawless cheek.

Ginelli bent toward her, sure she was unconscious, and she was at him, hissing. One hand tore across his forehead, opening a long cut there. The other ripped through the arm of his turtleneck and drew more blood.

Ginelli snarled and pushed her back down. He jammed the pistol against her nose. 'Come on, you want to go for it? You want to? Go for it, whore! Go on! You spoiled my face! I'd love for you to go for it!'

She lay still, staring at him with eyes now as dark as death.

'You'd do it,' he said. 'If it was just you, you'd come at me again. But it would just about kill him, wouldn't it? The old man?'

She said nothing, but a dim light seemed to flicker momentarily across the darkness of those eyes.

'Well, you think what it would do to him if that really had been acid I threw in your face. Think what it would do to him if instead of you I decided to throw it in the faces of those two kids in the GI Joe pajamas. I could do it, whore. I could do it and then go back home and eat a good dinner. You look into my face and you are gonna know I could.'

Now at last he saw confusion and a dawning of something that could have been fear – but not for herself.

'He cursed you,' he said. 'I was the curse.'

'Fuck his curse, that pig,' she whispered, and wiped blood from her face with a contemptuous flick of her fingers.

'He tells me not to hurt anyone,' Ginelli went on, as if she had not spoken. 'I haven't. But that ends tonight. I don't know how many times your old gramps has gotten away with this before, but he ain't going to get away with it this time. You tell him to take it off. You tell him it's the last time I ask. Here. Take this.'

He pressed a scrap of paper into her hand. On it he had Written the telephone number of the 'safe kiosk' in New York.

'You gonna call this number by midnight tonight and tell me what that old man says. If you need to hear back from me, you call that number again two hours later. You can pick up your message … if there is one. And that's it. One way or another, the door is gonna be closed. No one at that number is gonna know what the fuck you are talking about after two o'clock tomorrow morning.-'

'He'll never take it off.'

'Well, maybe he won't,' he said, 'because that is the same thing your brother said last night. But that's not your business. You just play square with him and let him make up his own mind what he's gonna do – make sure you explain to him that if he says no, that's when the boogiewoogie really starts. You go first, then the two kids, then anybody else I can get my hands on. Tell him that. Now, get in the car.'

'No. I*

Ginelli rolled his eyes. 'Will you wise up? I just want to make sure I have time to get out of here without twelve cops on my tail. If I had wanted to kill you, I wouldn't have given you a message to deliver.'

The girl got up. She was a little wobbly, but she made it. She got in behind the wheel and then slid across the seat.

'Not far enough.' Ginelli wiped blood off his forehead and showed it to her on his fingers. 'After this, I want to see you crouched up against that door over there like a wallflower on her first date.'

She slid against the door. 'Good,' Ginelli said, getting in. 'Now, stay there.'

He backed out to Finson Road without turning on his lights – the Buick's wheels spun a little on the dry timothy grass. He shifted to drive with his gun hand, saw her twitch, and pointed the gun at her again.

'Wrong,' he said. 'Don't move. Don't move at all. You understand?'

'I understand.'

'Good.'

He drove back the way he had come, holding the gun on her.

'Always it's this way,' she said bitterly. 'For even a little justice we are asked to pay so much. He is your friend, this pig Halleck?'

'I told you, don't call him that. He's no pig.'

'He cursed us,' she said, and there was a kind of wondering contempt in her voice. 'Tell him for me, mister, that God cursed us long before him or any of his tribe ever were,'

'Save it for the social worker, babe.'

She fell silent.

A quarter of a mile before the gravel pit where Frank Spurton rested, Ginelli stopped the car.

'Okay, this is far enough. Get out.'

'Sure.' She looked at him steadily with those unfathomable eyes. 'But there is one thing you should know, mister – our paths will cross again. And when they do, I will kill you.'

'No,' he said. 'You won't. Because you owe me your life tonight. And if that ain't enough for you, you ungrateful bitch, you can add in your brother's life last night. You talk, but you still don't understand the way things are, or why you ain't home-free on this, or why you ain't never gonna be home-free on this until you quit. I got a friend you could fly like a kite if you hooked up some twine to his belt. What have you got? I'll tell you what you got. You got an old man with no nose who put a curse on my friend and then ran away in the night like a hyena.'

Now she was crying, and crying hard. The tears ran down her face in streams.

'Are you saying God is on your side?' she asked him, her voice so thick the words were almost unintelligible. 'Is that what I hear you saying? You should burn in hell for such! blasphemy. Are we hyenas? If we are, it was people like your friend who made us so, My great-grandfather says there are no curses, only mirrors you hold up to the souls of men and women.'

'Get out,' he said. 'We can't talk. We can't even hear each other.'

'That's right.'

She opened the door and got out. As he pulled away she screamed: 'Your friend is a pig and he'll die thin!'

'But I don't think you will,' Ginelli said.

'What do you mean?'

Ginelli looked at his watch. It was after three o'clock. 'Tell you in the car,' he said. 'You've got an appointment at seven o'clock.'

Billy felt that sharp, hollow needle of fear in his belly again. 'With him?'

'That's right. Let's go.'

As Billy got to his feet there was another arrhythmic episode this the longest one yet. He closed his eyes and grasped at his chest, What remained of his chest. Ginelli grabbed him. 'William, are you okay?'

He looked in the mirror and saw Ginelli holding a grotesque sideshow freak in flapping clothes. The arrhythmia passed and was replaced by an even more familiar sensation – that milky, curdled rage that was directed at the old man … and at Heidi.

'I'm okay,' he said. 'Where are we going,?

'Bangor,' Ginelli said.