The Bad Place

by Dean R. Koontz

Every eye sees its own special vision; every ear hears a most different
song.  In each man's troubled heart, an incision would reveal a unique,
shameful wrong.

Stranger friends hide here in human guise than reside in the valleys of
Hell.  But goodness, kindness and love arise in the heart of the poor
beast, as well.

-The Book of Counted Sorrows

THE NIGHT was becalmed and curiously silent.  A faint scent of smoke
hung on the motionless air though no smoke was visible.

Sprawled face down on the cold pavement, Frank Pollard did not move when
he regained consciousness; he waited in the hope that his confusion
would dissipate.  He blinked, trying to focus.  Veils seemed to flutter
within his eyes.  He sucked deep breaths of the cool air, tasting the
invisible smoke, grimacing at the acrid tang of it.

Shadows loomed like a convocation of robed figures, crowding around him.
Gradually his vision cleared, but in the yellowish light that came from
far behind him, little was revealed.  A large trash dumpster, six or
eight feet from him, so dimly outlined that for a moment it seemed
strange, as though it were an artifact of an alien civilization.  Frank
stared at it for a while before he realized what it was.  He did not
know where he was or how he had gotten there.  He could not have been
unconscious longer than a few seconds for his heart was pounding as if
he had been running for his life only moments ago.

Fireflies in a windstorm....

That phrase took flight through his mind, but he had no idea what it
meant.  When he tried to concentrate on it and make sense of it, a dull
headache developed above his right eye.

Fireflies in a windstorm....

He groaned softly.

Between him and the dumpster, a shadow among shadows moved, quick and
sinuous.  Small but radiant green eyes regarded him with icy interest.
Frightened, Frank pushed up onto his knees.  A thin, involuntary cry
issued from him, almost less like a human sound than like the muted wail
of a reed instrument.

The green-eyed observer scampered away.  A cat.  Just an ordinary black
cat.

Frank got to his feet, swayed dizzily, and nearly fell over an object
that had been on the blacktop beside him.  Gingerly he bent down and
picked it up: a flight bag made of supple leather, packed full,
surprisingly heavy.  He supposed it was his.  He could not remember.
Carrying the bag, he tottered to the dumpster and leaned against its
rusted flank.

Looking back, he saw that he was between rows of what seemed to be
two-story stucco apartment buildings.  All of the windows were black. On
both sides, the tenants' cars were pulled nose-first into covered
parking stalls.  The queer yellow glow, sour and sulfurous, almost more
like the product of a gas flame than the luminescence of an incandescent
electric bulb, came from a street lamp at the end of the block, too far
away to reveal the details of the alleyway in which he stood.

As his rapid breathing slowed and as his heartbeat decelerated, he
abruptly realized that he did not know who he was.  He knew his
name-Frank Pollard-but that was all.  He did not know how old he was,
what he did for a living, where he had come from, where he was going, or
why.  He was so startled by his predicament that for a moment his breath
caught in his throat; then his heartbeat soared again, and he let his
breath out in a rush.

Fireflies in a windstorm...

What the hell did that mean?

The headache above his right eye corkscrewed across his forehead.

He looked frantically left and right, searching for an object or an
aspect of the scene that he might recognize, anything, an anchor in a
world that was suddenly too strange.  When the night offered nothing to
reassure him, he turned his quest inward, desperately seeking something
familiar in himself, but his own memory was even darker than the
passageway around him.

Gradually he became aware that the scent of smoke had faded, replaced by
a vague but nauseating smell of rotting garbage in the dumpster.  The
stench of decomposition filled him with thoughts of death, which seemed
to trigger a vague recollection that he was on the run from someone-or
something that wanted to kill him.  When he tried to recall why he was
fleeing, and from whom, he could not further illuminate any scrap of
memory; in fact, it seemed more an awareness on instinct than a genuine
recollection.

A puff of wind swirled around him.  Then calm returned as if the dead
night was trying to come back to life but had aged just one shuddering
breath.  A single piece of waste paper, swept up by that suffocating air
clicked along the cement and scraped to a stop against his right shoe.

Then another puff.

The paper whirled away.

Again the night was dead calm.

Something was happening.  Frank sensed that these silent whiffs of wind
had some malevolent source, or meaning.

Irrationally, he was sure that he was about to be crushed by a great
weight.  He looked up into the clear sky, at the empty blackness of
space and at the malignant brilliant of the distant stars.  If something
was descending toward Frank he could not see it.

The night exhaled once more.  Harder this time.  Its breath was sharp
and dank.

He was wearing running shoes, white athletic socks, and a long-sleeved
blue-plaid shirt.  He had no jacket, an could have used one.  The air
was not frigid, just mildly cooling.  But a coldness was in him, too, a
staggering fear, and he shivered uncontrollably between the cool caress
of the night and that inner chill.

The gust of wind died.

Stillness reclaimed the night.

Convinced that he had to get out of there-and fast, he pushed away from
the dumpster.  He staggered along the alley retreating from the end of
the block where the street lamp glowed, into darker realms, with no
destination in mind, directed only by the sense that this place was
dangerous and that was if indeed safety could be found, lay elsewhere.

The wind rose again, and with it, this time, came a whistling, barely
audible, like the distant music of a flute of some strange bone
instrument.

Within a few steps, as Frank became surefooted and as his eyes adapted
to the murky night, he arrived at a confluence of passageways.
Wrought-iron gates in pale stucco arches lay to his left and right.

He tried the gate on the left.  It was unlocked, secured only by a
simple gravity latch.  The hinges squeaked, eliciting a wince from
Frank, who hoped the sound had not been heard by his pursuer.

By now, although no adversary was in sight, Frank had no doubt that he
was the object of a chase.  He knew it was surely as a hare knew when a
fox was in the field.

The wind shuttered again at his back, and the flowerlike music, though
barely audible and lacking a discernible melody, was haunting.  It
pierced him.  It sharpened his fear.

Beyond the black iron gate, flanked by feathery ferns and bushes, a
walkway led between a pair of two-story apartment buildings.  Frank
followed it into a rectangular courtyard somewhat revealed by
low-wattage security lamps at each end.  First-floor apartments opened
onto a covered promenade; the doors of the second-floor units were under
the tile roof of an iron-railed balcony.  Lightless windows faced a
swath of grass, beds of azaleas and a few palms.

A frieze of spiky palm-frond shadows lay across one palely illuminated
wall, as motionless as if they were carved on a stone tablet.  Then the
mysterious flute warbled softly again, the reborn wind huffed harder
than before, and the shadows danced, danced.  Frank's own distorted,
dark reflection whirled briefly over the stucco, among the silhouettes,
as he hurried across the courtyard.  He found another walkway, another
gate, and ultimately the street on which the apartment complex faced.

It was a side street without lampposts.  There, the reign of the night
was undisputed.

The blustery wind lasted longer than before, churned harder.  When the
gust ended abruptly, with an equally abrupt cessation of the unmelodic
flute, the night seemed to have been left in a vacuum, as though the
departing turbulence had taken with it every wisp of breathable air.
Then Frank's ears popped as if from a sudden altitude change; as he
rushed across the deserted street toward the cars parked along the far
curb, air poured in around him again.

He tried four cars before finding one unlocked, a Ford.  Slipping behind
the wheel, he left the door open to provide some light.

He looked back the way he had come.

The apartment complex was dead-of-the-night and Wrapped in darkness.  An
ordinary building yet inexplicably sinister.

No one was in sight.

Nevertheless, Frank knew someone was closing in on him.  He reached
under the dashboard, pulled out a tangle of wires, and hastily
jump-started the engine before realizing such a larcenous skill
suggested a life outside of the law.

he didn't feel like a thief.  He had no sense of guilt and no apathy
for-or fear of-the police.  In fact, at the moment, would have welcomed
a cop to help him deal with whoever or whatever was on his tail.  He
felt not like a criminal, like a man who had been on the run for an
exhaustingly long time, from an implacable and relentless enemy.

As he reached for the handle of the open door, a brief pale blue light
washed over him, and the driver's-side window of the Ford exploded.
Tempered glass showered into the rear seat, gummy and minutely
fragmented.  Since the front door was not closed, that window didn't
spray over him; instead, most of it fell out of the frame, onto the
pavement Yanking the door shut, he glanced through the gap where the
glass had been, toward the gloom-enfolded apartment and saw no one.

Frank threw the Ford in gear, popped the brake, tramped hard on the
accelerator.  Swinging away from the curb, he clipped the rear bumper of
the car parked in front of him.  A brief peal of tortured metal rang
sharply across the night.

But he was still under attack: A scintillant blue light, at one second
in duration, lit up the car; over its entire interior.  The windshield
cracked with thousands of jagged lines, though it had been struck by
nothing he could see.  Frank averted his face and squeezed his eyes shut
just in time to avoid being blinded by flying fragments.  For a moment
he could not remember where he was going, but he didn't let up on the
accelerator preferring the danger of collision to the greater risk of
breaking and giving his unseen enemy time to reach him.  Glass rained
over him, spattered across the top of his bent head; luckily, it was
safety glass, and none of the fragments cut him.

He opened his eyes, squinting into the gale that rushed through the now
empty windshield frame.  He saw that he'd gone half a block and had
reached the intersection.  He whipped the wheel to the right, tapping
the brake pedal only lightly, and turned onto a more brightly lighted
thoroughfare.

Like Saint Elm's fire, sapphire-blue light glimmered on the chrome, and
when the Ford was halfway around the corner, one of the rear tires blew.
He had heard no gunfire.  A fraction of a second later, the other rear
tire blew.

The car rocked, slewed to the left, began to fishtail.

Frank fought the steering wheel.

Both front tires ruptured simultaneously.

The car rocked again, even as it glided sideways, and the sudden
collapse of the front tires compensated for the leftward slide of the
rear end, giving Frank a chance to grapple the spinning steering wheel
into submission.

Again, he had heard no gunfire.  He didn't know why all of,this was
happening-yet he did.

That was the truly frightening part: On some deep subconscious level he
did know what was happening, what strange force was swiftly destroying
the car around him, and he also knew that his chances of escaping were
poor.

A flicker of twilight blue...

The rear window imploded.  Gummy yet prickly wads of safety glass flew
past him.  Some smacked the back of his head, stuck in his hair.

Frank made the corner and kept going on four flats.  The sound of
flapping rubber, already shredded, and the grinding of metal wheel rims
could be heard even above the roar of the wind that buffeted his face.

He glanced at the rear view mirror.  The night was a great black ocean
behind him, relieved only by widely spaced street lamps that dwindled
into the gloom like the lights of a double convoy of ships.

According to the speedometer, he was doing thirty miles an hour just
after coming out of the turn.  He tried to push it up to forty in spite
of the ruined tires, but something clanged and clinked under the hood,
rattled and whined, and the engine coughed, and he could not coax any
more speed out of it.

When he was halfway to the next intersection, the street lamp either
burst or winked out.  Frank couldn't tell which one it was because the
street lamps were widely spaced, he could see enough to drive.

The engine coughed, then again, and the Ford began to gain speed.  He
didn't brake for the stop sign at the next intersection Instead he
pumped the accelerator but to no avail.

Finally the steering failed too.  The wheel spun uselessly in his sweaty
hands.

Evidently the tires had been completely torn apart.  The contact of the
steel wheel rims with the pavement flung up turquoise sparks.

Fireflies in a windstorm....

He still didn't know what that meant.

Now moving about twenty miles an hour, the car headed straight toward
the right-hand curb.  Frank tramped the brakes, but they no longer
functioned.

The car hit the curb, jumped it, grazed a lamppost with a sound of sheet
metal kissing steel, and thudded against the bark of an immense date
palm in front of a white bungalow.  Lights came on in the house even as
the final crash was echoing in the cool night air.

Frank threw the door open, grabbed the leather flight bag from the seat
beside him, and got out, shedding fragments of gummy yet splintery
safety glass.

Though only mildly cool, the air chilled his face because sweat trickled
down from his forehead.  He could taste it when he licked his lips.

A man had opened the front door of the bungalow as he stepped onto the
porch.  Lights flicked on at the house door.

Frank looked back the way he had come.  A thin cloud of luminous
sapphire dust seemed to blow through the street.

As though shattered by a tremendous surge of current, the bulbs in
street lamps exploded along the two blocks behind him, the shards of
glass, glinting like ice, rained on the blacktop.  In resultant gloom,
he thought he saw a tall, shadowy figure more than a block away, coming
after him, but he couldn't be sure.

To Frank's left, the guy from the bungalow was hurrying down the walk
toward the palm tree where the Ford had come to rest.  He was talking,
but Frank wasn't listening to him.

Clutching the leather satchel, Frank turned and ran.  He was not sure
what he was running from, or why he was so afraid, or where he might
hope to find a haven, but he ran nonetheless because he knew that if he
stood there only a few seconds longer, he would be killed.

THE WINDOWLEss rear compartment of the Dodge van was illuminated by tiny
red, blue, green, white, and amber indicator bulbs on banks of
electronic surveillance equipment but primarily by the soft green glow
from the computer screens, which made that claustrophobic space seem
like a chamber in a deep-sea submersible.

Dressed in a pair of Rockport walking shoes, beige coat and a maroon
sweater, Robert Dakota sat on a swivel chair in front of the twin video
display terminals.  He tapped his toes against the floorboards, keeping
time, and with his right hand he happily conducted an unseen orchestra.

Bobby was wearing a headset with stereo ear phones and with a small
microphone suspended an inch or so in front of his lips.  At the moment
he was listening to Benny Goodman's "One O'Clock Jump," the primo
version of Count Basie's swing composition, six and a half minutes of
heaven.  Just as he took up another piano chorus and as Harry James
launched into the brilliant trumpet stint that led to the infamous swing
history of that era.

Bobby was deep into music.  But he was also acutely aware of the
activity on the display terminals.  The one on the right was linked, via
microwave with the computer system at the Decodyne Corporation, in front
of which his van was parked.  It revealed what Tom Rasmussen was up to
in those offices at 1:10 Thursday morning, no good.

One by one, Rasmussen was accessing and copying the files of the
software-design team that had recently completed Decodyne's new and
revolutionary word-processing program "Wizard."

The Wizard files carried out instructions of electronic draw bridges,
moats, and other parts.  Tom Rasmussen was an expert in computer
security, however, and there was no fortress that he could not
penetrate, given enough time.  Indeed, if Wizard had not been developed
on a secure in-house computer system with no links to the outside world,
Rasmussen would have slipped into the files from beyond the walls of
Decodyne, via a modern and telephone line.

Ironically, he had been working as the night security guard at Decodyne
for five weeks, having been hired on the basis of elaborate-and nearly
convincing-false papers.  Tonight he had breached Wizard's final
defenses.  In a while he would walk out of Decodyne with a packet of
floppy diskettes worth a fortune to the company's competitors.

"One O'Clock Jump" ended.

Into the microphone Bobby said, "Music stop."

That vocal command cued his computerized compact-disc system to switch
off, opening the headset for communication with Julie, his wife and
business partner.

"You there, babe?"

From her surveillance position in a car at the farthest end of the
parking lot behind Decodyne, she had been listening to the same music
through her own headset.  She sighed.  "Did Vernon Brown ever play
better trombone than the night of the Carnegie concert?"

"What about Krupa on the drums?"

"Auditory ambrosia.  And an aphrodisiac.  The music makes me want to go
to bed with you."

"Can't.  Not sleepy.  Besides, we're being private detectives,
remember?"

"I like being lovers better."

"We don't earn our daily bread by making love."

"I'd pay you," she said.

"Yeah?  How much?"

"Oh, in daily-bread terms...  half a loaf."

"I'm worth a whole loaf."

Julie said, "Actually, you're worth a whole loaf, two croissants, and a
bran muffin."

She had a pleasing, throaty, and altogether sexy voice that he loved to
listen to, especially through headphones, when she sounded like an angel
whispering in his ears.

She would have been a marvelous big-band singer if she had been around
in the 1930s and '40s-and if she had been able to carry a tune.  She was
a great swing dancer, but she couldn't croon worth a damn; when she was
in the mood to sing along with old recordings by Margaret Whiting or the
Andrews Sisters or Rose mary Clooney or Marion Hutton, Bobby had to
leave the room out of respect for the music.

She said, "What's Rasmussen doing?"

Bobby checked the second video display, to his left, which was linked to
Decodyne's interior security cameras.  Rasmussen thought he had
over-ridden the cameras and was uncertain; but they had been watching
him for the last few weeks, night after night, and recording his every
treachery on video tape.

"Old Tom's still in George Ackroyd's office, at the computer there."

Ackroyd was project director for Wizard.

Bob glanced at the other display, which duplicated what Rasmussen was
seeing on Ackroyd's computer screen.  "He just copied the last Wizard
file onto diskette."

Rasmussen switched off the computer in Ackroyd's office.  Simultaneously
the linked VDT in front of Bobby went blank.

Bobby said, "He's finished.  He's got it all now."

Julie said, "The worm.  He must be feeling smug."

Bobby turned to the display on his left, leaned forward, and watched the
black-and-white image of Rasmussen at Ackroyd's terminal.

"I think he's grinning."

"We'll wipe that grin off his face."

"Let's see what he does next.  Want to make a bet?  On whether he'll
stay in there, finish his shift, and waltz out in the morning or leave
right now?"

"Now," Julie said.

"Or soon.  He won't risk getting caught with the floppies.  He'll leave
while no one else is there."

"No bet.  I think you're right."

The transmitted image on the monitor flickered, rolled, but Rasmussen
did not get out of Ackroyd's chair.  In fact he slumped back, as if
exhausted.  He yawned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"He seems to be resting, gathering his energy," Bobby said

"Let's have another tune while we wait for him to move."

"Good idea."  He gave the CD player the start-up cue "Begin music"-and
was rewarded with Glenn Miller's "In the Mood."

On the monitor, Rasmussen rose from the chair in Ackroyd's dimly lighted
office.  He yawned again, stretched, and crossed the room to the big
windows that looked down on Michaelson Drive, the street on which Bobby
was parked.

If Bobby had slipped forward, out of the rear of the van and into the
driver's compartment, he probably would have been able to see Rasmussen
standing up there at the second-floor window, silhouetted by the glow of
Ackroyd's desk lamp, staring out at the night.

He stayed where he was, however, satisfied with the view on the screen.

Miller's band was playing the famous "In the Mood" riff, again and
again, gradually fading away, almost disappearing entirely but...  now
blasting back at full power to repeat the entire cycle.

In Ackroyd's office, Rasmussen finally turned from the window and looked
up at the security camera that was mounted on the wall near the ceiling.
He seemed to be staring straight at Bobby, as if aware of being watched.
He moved a few steps closer to the camera, smiling.

Bobby said, "Music stop," and the Miller band instantly fell silent.

To Julie, he said, "Something strange here

"Trouble?"

Rasmussen stopped just under the security camera, still grinning up at
it.  From the pocket of his uniform shirt, he withdrew a folded sheet of
typing paper, which he opened and held toward the lens.  A message had
been printed in bold black letters: GOODBYE, ASS HOLE.

"Trouble for sure," Bobby said.

"How bad?"

"I don't know."

An instant later he did know: Automatic weapons fire shattered the
night-he could hear the clatter even with his earphones on-and
armor-piercing slugs tore through the walls of the van.

Julie evidently picked up the gunfire through her headset.

"Bobby, no!"

"Get the hell out of there, babe!  Run!"

Even as he spoke, Bobby tore free of the headset and dived off his
chair, lying as flat against the floorboards as he could.

FRANK Pollard sprinted from street to street from alley to alley,
sometimes cutting across the lawns of the dark houses.  In one back yard
a large black dog with yellow eyes barked and snapped at him all the way
to the board fence briefly snaring one leg of his pants as he clambered
over the barrier.  His heart was pounding painfully, and his throat was
hot and raw because he was sucking in great drafts of the cold dry air
through his open mouth.  His legs ached.  The flight bag pulled on his
right arm, and with the lunging step that he took, pain throbbed in his
wrist and shoulder socket.  But he did not pause and did not glance
back, because he felt as if something monstrous was at his heels, a
creature that never required rest and that would turn him into stone
with its gaze if he dared set eyes upon it.

In time he crossed an avenue, devoid of traffic at that late hour, and
hurried along the entrance walk to another apartment complex.  He went
through a gate into another court yard this one centered by an empty
swimming pool with a crack and canted apron.

The place was lightless, but Frank's vision had adapted to the night,
and he could see well enough to avoid falling in the drained pool.  He
was searching for shelter.  Perhaps there was a communal laundry room
where he could hide.

He had discovered something else about himself as he fled his unknown
pursuer: He was thirty or forty pounds over weight and out of shape.  He
desperately needed to catch his breath-and think.

As he was hurrying past the doors of the ground-floor unit he realized
that a couple of them were standing open, sagging on ruined hinges. Then
he saw that cracks webbed some windows, holes pocked a few, and other
panes were missing altogether.  The grass was dead, too, as crisp as
ancient paper, and the shrubbery was withered; a seared palm tree leaned
at a precarious angle.  The apartment complex was abandoned, awaiting a
wrecking crew.

He came to a set of crumbling concrete stairs at the north end of the
courtyard, glanced back.  Whoever...  whatever was following him was
still not in sight.  Gasping, he climbed to the second-floor balcony and
moved from one apartment to another until he found a door ajar.  It was
warped: the hinges were stiff, but they worked without much noise.  He
slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind him.

The apartment was a well of shadows, oil-black and pooled deep.  Faint
ash-gray light outlined the windows but provided no illumination to the
room.

He listened intently.

The silence and darkness were equal in depth.

Cautiously, Frank inched toward the nearest window, which faced the
balcony and courtyard.  Only a few shards of glass remained in the
frame, but lots of fragments crunched and clinked under his feet.  He
trod carefully, both to avoid cutting a foot and to make as little noise
as possible.

At the window he halted, listened again.

Stillness.

As if it was the gelded ectoplasm of a slothful ghost, a sluggish
current of cold air slid inward across the few jagged points of the
glass that had not already fallen from the frame.

Frank's breath steamed in front of his face, pale ribbons of vapor in
the gloom.

The silence remained unbroken for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a full
minute.

Perhaps he had escaped.

He was just about to turn away from the window when he heard footsteps
outside.  At the far end of the courtyard.  On the walkway that led in
from the street.  Hard-soled shoes rang against the concrete, and each
footfall echoed hollowly off the stucco walls of the surrounding
buildings.

Frank stood motionless and breathed through his mouth, as if the stalker
could be counted on to have the hearing of a jungle cat.

When he entered the courtyard from the entrance walkway, the stranger
halted.  After a long pause he began to move again though the
overlapping echoes made sounds deceptive, seemed to be heading slowly
north along the apron of the porch toward the same stairs by which
Frank, himself, had climb to the second floor of the apartment complex.

Each deliberate, metronomic footfall was like the heavy thud of a
headsman's clock mounted on a guillotine railing, counting off the
seconds until the appointed hour of the blade's descent.

As IF alive, the Dodge van shrieked with every bullet that tore through
its sheet-metal walls, and the wounds were inflicted not one at a time
but by the score, with such relentless fury, the assault had to involve
at least two machine guns.  While Bobby Dakota lay flat on the floor,
trying to catch God's attention with fervent heaven-directed prayers,
fragments of metal rained down on him.  One of the computer screens
imploded, then the other terminal, too, and all the indicator lights
went out, but the interior of the van was not entirely dark; showers of
amber and green and crimson and silver sparks erupted from the damaged
electronic units as one steel jacketed round after another pierced
equipment housings and shattered circuit boards.  Glass fell on him,
too, and splinters of plastic, bits of wood, scraps of paper; the air
was filled with a virtual blizzard of debris.  But the noise was the
worst of it; in his mind he saw himself sealed inside a great iron drum,
while half a dozen big bikers, stoned on PCP, pounded on the outside of
his prison with tire irons, really huge bikers with massive muscles and
thick necks and coarse peltlike beards and wildly colorful Death's-head
tattoos on their arms-hell, tattoos on their faces-guys as big as Thor,
the Viking god, but with blazing, psychotic eyes.

Bobby had a vivid imagination.  He had always thought that was one of
his best qualities, one of his strengths.  But he could not simply
imagine his way out of this mess.

With every passing second, as slugs continued to crash into the van, he
grew more astonished that he had not been hit.  He was pressed to the
floor, as tight as a carpet, and he tried to imagine that his body was
only a quarter of an inch thick, a target with an incredibly low
profile, but he still expected to get his ass shot off.

He had not anticipated the need for a gun; it wasn't that kind of case.
At least it hadn't seemed to be that kind of case.

A.38 revolver was in the van glove box, well beyond his reach which did
not cause him a lot of frustration, actually, because a single handgun
against a pair of automatic weapons was not much use.

The gunfire stopped.

After that cacophony of destruction, the silence was so profound, Bobby
felt as if he had gone deaf.

The air reeked of hot metal, overheated electronic components, scorched
insulation-and gasoline.  Evidently the van's tank had been punctured.
The engine was still chugging, a few sparks spat out of the shattered
equipment surrounding Bobby, and his chances of escaping a flash fire
were a lot worse than his chances of winning fifty million bucks in the
state lottery.

He wanted to get the hell out of there, but if he burst out of the van,
they might be waiting with machine guns to gun him down.  On the other
hand, if he continued to hug the floor in the darkness, counting on them
to give him up for dead without checking on him, the Dodge might flare
like a fire primed with starter fluid, toasting him as crisp as a
marshmallow.

He had no difficulty imagining himself stepping out of the van and being
hit immediately by a score of bullets, jerking and twitching in a
spasmodic death dance across the black street, like a broken marionette
jerked around on tangled strings.  But he found it even easier to
imagine his skin peel off in the fire, flesh bubbling and smoking, hair
whooshing like a torch, eyes melting, teeth turning coal-black as flames
seared his tongue and followed his breath down his throat into his
lungs.

Sometimes a vivid imagination was definitely a curse.

Suddenly the gasoline fumes became so heavy that he had trouble drawing
breath, so he started to get up.

Outside, a car horn began to blare.  He heard a racing engine drawing
rapidly nearer.

Someone shouted, and a machine gun opened fire again.  Bobby hit the
floor, wondering what the hell was going on, but as the car with the
blaring horn drew nearer, he realized what must be happening: Julie.
Julie was happening.  some times she was like a natural force; she
happened the way a storm happened, the way lightning happened, abruptly
crackling down a dark sky.  He had told her to get out of there, to save
herself, but she had not listened to him; he wanted to kick her butt for
being so bullheaded, but he loved her for it too.

Sidling AWAY from the broken window, Frank tried to time his steps to
those of the man in the court yard below, with the hope that any noise
he made, trotting on gravel would be covered by his unseen enemy's
advance.  He figured that he was in the living room of the apartment,
that it was pretty much empty except for whatever debris that had been
left behind by the last tenants or had blown through the missing
windows, and indeed he made it across that chamber and a hallway in
relative silence, without colliding with anything.  He hurriedly felt
his way along the hall, which was as dark as a predator's lair.  It
smelled of mold and mildew and urine.  He passed the entrance to a room,
kept going, turned right through the next doorway, and shuffled to
another broken window.  This one had no splinters of glass left in the
frame, it did not face the courtyard but looked onto a lamplit and empty
street.

Something rustled behind him.

He turned, blinking blindly at the gloom, and almost passed out.

But the sound must have been made by a rat scurrying over the floor,
close to the wall, across dry leaves or bits of debris Just a rat.

Frank listened for footsteps, but if the stalker was still focused on
him, the hollow heel clicks of his approach were completely muffled by
the walls that now intervened.

He looked out the window again.  The dead lawn lay as dry as sand and
twice as brown, offering little cushion.

He dropped the leather flight bag, which landed with a thud.  Wincing at
the prospect of the leap, he climbed onto the window ledge, crouching in
the broken-out window, hands braced against the frame, where for a
moment he hesitated.

A gust of wind ruffled his hair and coolly caressed his face.  But it
was a normal draft, nothing like the natural whiffs of wind that,
earlier, had been accompanied by the unearthly and unmelodic music of a
distant flute.

Suddenly, behind Frank, a blue flash pulsed out of the living room, down
the hall, and through the doorway.  The strange tide of light was
trailed closely by an explosion and a concussion wave that shook the
walls and seemed to churn the air into a more solid substance.  The
front door had been blasted to pieces; he heard chunks of it raining
down on the floor of the apartment a couple of rooms away.

He jumped out of the window, landed on his feet.  But his knees gave
way, and he fell flat on the dead lawn.

At that same moment a large truck turned the corner.  Its cargo bed had
slat sides and a wooden tailgate.  The driver smoothly shifted gears and
drove past the apartment house, apparently unaware of Frank.

He scrambled to his feet, plucked the satchel off the barren lawn, and
ran into the street.  Having just rounded the corner, the truck was not
moving fast, and Frank managed to grab the tailgate and pull himself up,
one-handed, until he was standing on the rear bumper.

As the truck accelerated, Frank looked back at the decaying apartment
complex.  No mysterious blue light glimmered at any of the windows; they
were all as black and empty as the sockets of a skull.

The truck turned right at the next corner, moving away into the sleepy
night.

Exhausted, Frank clung to the tailgate.  He would have been able to hold
on better if he had dropped the leather flight bag, but he held fast to
it because he suspected that its contents might help him to learn who he
was and from where he had come and from what he was running.

CUT AND run!  Bobby actually thought she would cut and run when trouble
struck-"Get the hell out of here"

cut and run?  just because he told her to!  If she was an obedient
little wifey, not a full-fledged partner in the agency, not a damned
good investigator in her own right, just a token backup who couldn't
take the heat when the nice kicked in.  Well, to hell with that.

In her mind she could see his lovable face-merry blue eyes pug nose,
smattering of freckles, generous mouth-framed thick honey-gold hair that
was mussed (as was most often the case) like that of a small boy who had
just gotten up from a nap.  She wanted to bop his pug nose just hard
enough to make his blue eyes water, so he'd have no doubt how the cut-an
run suggestion annoyed her.

She had been on surveillance behind Decodyne, at the end of the
corporate parking lot, in the deep shadows under a massive Indian
laurel.  The moment Bobby signaled trouble she started the Toyota's
engine.  By the time she heard gunfire over the earphones, she had
shifted gears, popped the emergency brake, switched on the headlights,
and jammed the accelerator toward the floor.

At first she kept the headset on, calling Bobby's name, trying to get an
answer from him, hearing only the most god awful ruckus from his end.
Then the set went dead; she couldn't hear anything at all, so she pulled
it off and threw it into the back seat.

Cut and run!  Damn him!

When she reached the end of the last row in the parking lot she let up
on the accelerator with her right foot, simultaneous tapping the brake
pedal with her left foot, finessing the small car into a slide, which
carried it onto the access road that led around the big building.  She
turned the steering wheel into the slide, then gave the heap some gas
again even before the back end had stopped skidding and shuddering.  The
tires barked, and the engine shrieked, and with a rattle-squeak-twang of
tortured metal, the car leaped forward.

They were shooting at Bobby, and Bobby probably wasn't even able to
shoot back, because he was lax about carrying a gun on every job; he
went armed only when it seemed that the current business was likely to
involve violence.  The Decodyne assignment had looked peaceable enough;
sometimes industrial espionage could turn nasty, but the bad guy in this
case was Tom Rasmussen, a computer nerd and a greedy son of a bitch,
clever as a dog reading Shakespeare on a high wire, with a record of
theft via computer but with no blood on his hands.  He was the high-tech
equivalent of a meek, embezzling bank clerk-or so he had seemed.

But Julie was armed on every job.  Bobby was the optimist; she was the
pessimist.  Bobby expected people to act in their own best interests and
be reasonable, but Julie half expected every apparently normal person to
be, in secret, a crazed psychotic.

A Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum was held by a clip to the back of the glove
box lid, and an Uzi-with two spare, thirty-round magazines-lay on the
other front seat.  From what she had heard on the earphones before
they'd gone dead, she was going to need that Uzi.

The Toyota virtually flew past the side of Decodyne, and she wheeled
hard left, onto Michaelson Drive, almost rising onto two wheels, almost
losing control, but not quite.  Ahead, Bobby's Dodge was parked at the
curb in front of the building, and another van-a dark blue Ford-was
stopped in the street, doors open wide.

Two men, who had evidently been in the Ford, were standing four or five
yards from the Dodge, chopping the hell out of it with automatic
weapons, blasting away with such ferocity that they seemed not to be
after the man inside but to have some bizarre personal grudge against
the Dodge itself.  They stopped firing, turned toward her as she came
out of the driveway onto Michaelson, and hurriedly jammed fresh
magazines into their weapons.

Ideally, she would close the hundred-yard gap between herself and the
men, pull the Toyota sideways in the street, slip out, and use the car
as cover to blow out the tires on their van and pin them down until
police arrived.  But she didn't have time for all of that.  They were
already raising the muzzles of their weapons.

She was unnerved at how lonely the night streets looked this hour in the
heart of metropolitan Orange County, bare of traffic, washed by the
urine-yellow light of the sodium-streetlamps.  They were in an area of
banks and office buildings no residences, no restaurants or bars within
a couple of blocks.  It might as well have been a city on the moon, or a
vision of the world after it had been swept by an Apocalyptic disaster
that had left only a handful of survivors.

She didn't have time to handle the two gunmen by the book and she could
not count on help from any quarter, so she would have to do what they
least expected: play kamikaze, use her car as a weapon.

The instant she had the Toyota fully under control, pressing the
accelerator tight to the floorboards and rocketed straight at the two
bastards.  They opened fire, but she was already slipping down in the
seat and leaning sideways a little trying to keep her head below the
dashboard and still hold the wheel relatively steady.  Bullets snapped
and whined off the car.  The windshield burst.  A second later Julie hit
one of the gun men so hard that the impact snapped her head forward,
against the wheel, cutting her forehead, snapping her teeth together
forcefully enough to make her jaw ache; even as pain needled through her
face, she heard the body bounce off the front bumper and slam onto the
hood.

With blood trickling down her forehead and dripping from her right
eyebrow, Julie jabbed at the brakes and sat up at the same time.  She
was confronted by a man's wide-eyed corpse jammed in the frame of the
empty windshield.  His face in front of the steering wheel-teeth
chipped, lips torn, chin slashed, cheek battered, left eye missing-and
one of his broken legs was inside the car, hooked down over the
dashboard.  Julie found the brake pedal and pumped it.  With the sudden
drop in speed, the dead man was dislodged.  His limp body rolled across
the hood, and when the car slid to a shaky halt he vanished over the
front end.

Heart racing, blinking to keep the stinging blood from blue ring the
vision in her right eye, Julie snatched the Uzi from the seat beside
her, shoved open the door, and rolled out, moving fast and staying low.

The other gunman was already in the blue Ford van.  He gave it gas
before remembering to shift out of park, so the tires screamed and
smoked.

Julie squeezed off two short bursts from the Uzi, blowing out both tires
on her side of the van.  But the gunman didn't stop.  He shifted gears
at last and tried to drive past her on two ruined tires.

The guy might have killed Bobby; now he was getting away.  He would
probably never be found if Julie didn't stop him.  Reluctantly she swung
the Uzi higher and emptied the magazine into the side window of the van.

The Ford accelerated, then suddenly slowed and swung to the right, at
steadily diminishing speed, in a long arc that carried it to the far
curb, where it came to a halt with a jolt.

No one got out.

Keeping an eye on the Ford, Julie leaned into her car, plucked a spare
magazine from the seat, and reloaded the Uzi.  She approached the idling
van cautiously and pulled open the door, but caution was not required
because the man behind the wheel was dead.  Feeling a little sick, she
reached in and switched off the engine.

Briefly, as she turned from the Ford and hurried toward the
bullet-riddled Dodge, the only sounds she could hear were the sounds of
a faint breeze in the lush corporate landscaping that flanked the
street, punctuated by the gentle hiss and rattle of palm fronds.  Then
she also heard the idling engine of the Dodge, simultaneously smelled
gasoline, and shouted, "Bobby!"

Before she reached the white van, the back doors creaked open, and Bobby
came out, shedding twists of metal, chunks of plastic, bits of glass,
wood chips, and scraps of paper.  He was gasping, no doubt because the
gasoline fumes had driven most of the breathable air out of the Dodge's
rear quarters.

Sirens rose in the distance.

Together they quickly walked away from the van.  They had gone only a
few steps when orange light flared and flames rose in a wooooosh from
the gasoline pooled on the pavement, enveloping the vehicle in bright
shrouds.  They hurried beyond the corner of intense heat that surrounded
the Dodge and stared for a moment, blinking at the wreckage, then at
each other.

The sirens were drawing nearer.

He said, "You're bleeding."

"Just skinned my forehead a little."

"You sure?"

"It's nothing.  What about you?"

He sucked in a deep breath.  "I'm okay."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"You weren't hit?"

"Unmarked.  It's a miracle."

"Bobby?"

"What?"

"I couldn't handle it if you'd turned up dead in there.

"I'm not dead.  I'm fine."

"Thank God," she said.

Then she kicked his right shin.

"Ow!  What the hell?"

She kicked his left shin.

"Julie, dammit!"

"Don't you ever tell me to cut and run."

"What?"

"I'm a full half of this partnership in every way."

"But-"

"I'm as smart as you, as fast as you-"

He glanced at the dead man on the street, the other on the Ford van,
half visible through the open door, and he said, "That's for sure,
babe."

"-as tough as you-"

"I know, I know.  Don't kick me again."

She said, "What about Rasmussen?"

Bobby looked up at the Decodyne building.  "You think he's still in
there?"

"The only exits from the parking lot are onto Michaelson and he hasn't
come out this way, so unless he fled on foot,"

"In there?"

"all right.  We've got to nail him before he slides out of the trap with
those diskettes."

"Nothing worthwhile on the diskettes anyway," Bobby said.

Decodyne had been on to Rasmussen from the time he applied for the job,
because Dakota & Dakota Investigation which was contracted to handle the
company's security checks-had penetrated the hacker's highly
sophisticated false ID.  Decodyne's management wanted to play along with
Rasmussen long enough to discover to whom he would pass the Wizard files
when he got them; they intended to prosecute the money man who had hired
Rasmussen, for no doubt the hacker's employer was one of Decodyne's
primary competitors.

They had allowed Tom Rasmussen to think he had compromised the security
cameras, when in fact he had been under constant observation.  They also
had allowed him to break down the file codes and access the information
he wanted, but unknown to him they had inserted secret instructions in
the files, which insured that any diskettes he acquired would be full of
trash data of no use to anyone.

Flames roared and crackled, consuming the van.  Julie watched chimeras
of reflected flames slither and caper up the glass walls and across the
roof and coalesce there in the form of gargoyles.

Raising her voice slightly to compete with the fire and with the shriek
of approaching sirens, she said, "Well, we thought he believed he'd
circumvented the videotape records of the security cameras, but
apparently he knew we were on to him."

"Sure did."

"So he also might've been smart enough to search for an anticopying
directive in the files-and find a way around it."

Bobby frowned.  "You're right."

"So he's probably got Wizard, unscrambled, on those diskettes.

"Damn, I don't want to go in there.  I've been shot at enough tonight."

A police cruiser turned the corner two blocks away and sped toward them,
siren screaming, emergency lights casting off alternating waves of blue
and red light.

"Here come the professionals," Julie said.  "Why don't we let them take
over now?"

"We were hired to do the job.  We have an obligation.  honor is a sacred
thing, you know.  What would Sam Spade think of us?"

She said, "Sam Spade can go spit up a rope."

"What would Philip Marlowe think?"

"Philip Marlowe can go spit up a rope."

"What will our client think?"

"Our client can go spit up a rope."

"Dear, 'spit' isn't the popular expression."

"I know, but I'm a lady."

"You certainly are."

As the black-and-white braked in front of them, another police car
turned the corner behind it, siren wailing, and entered Michaelson Drive
from the other direction.

Julie put her Uzi on the pavement and raised her hand to avoid
unfortunate misunderstandings.

"I'm really glad you're alive, Bobby."

"You going to kick me again?"

"Not for a while."

FRANK Pollard hung on to the tailgate and rode the truck nine or ten
blocks, without drawing the attention of the driver.

Along the way he saw a sign welcoming him to the city of Anaheim, so he
figured he was in southern California, although he still didn't know if
this was where he lived or whether he was from out of town.  Judging by
the chill in the air, it was winter-not truly cold but as frigid as it
got in these climates.  He was unnerved to realize that he did not know
the date or even the month.

Shivering, he dropped off the truck when it slowed and turned onto a
service way that led through a warehouse district.  Huge,
corrugated-metal buildings-some newly painted and some streaked with
rust, some dimly lit by security lamps and some not-loomed against the
star spattered sky.

Carrying the flight bag, he walked away from the warehouses.  The
streets in that area were lined with shabby bungalows.  The shrubs and
trees were overgrown in many places: untrimmed palms with full skirts of
dead fronds; bushy hibiscus with half-closed pale blooms glimmering
softly in the gloom; jade hedges and plum-thorn hedges so old they were
more woody than leafy; bougainvillea draped over roofs and fences,
bristling with thousands of untamed, questing trailers.  His soft-soled
shoes made no sound on the sidewalk, and his shadow alternately
stretched ahead of him and then behind, as he approached and then passed
one lamppost after another.

Cars, mostly older models, some rusted and battered, were parked at
curbs and in driveways; keys might have dangled from the ignitions of
some of them, and he could have jump started any he chose.  However, he
noted that the cinder block walls between the properties-as well as the
walls of a decrepit and abandoned house-shimmered with the
spray-painted, ghostly, semi-phosphorescent graffiti of Latino gangs,
and didn't want to tinker with a set of wheels that might belong to one
of their members.  Those guys didn't bother rushing to a phone to call
the police if they caught you trying to steal one of their cars; they
just blew your head off or put a knife in your neck.  Frank had enough
trouble already, even with his head intact and his throat unpunctured,
so he kept walking.

Twelve blocks later, in a neighborhood of well-kept houses and better
cars, he began searching for a set of wheels that would be easy to
boost.  The tenth vehicle he tried was a one year-old green Chevy,
parked near a street lamp, the doors unlocked, the keys tucked under the
driver's seat.

Intent on putting a lot of distance between himself and the deserted
apartment complex where he had last encountered his unknown pursuer,
Frank switched on the Chevy's heater and drove from Anaheim to Santa
Ana, then south on Bristol Avenue toward Costa Mesa, surprised by his
familiarity with the streets.  He seemed to know the area well.  He
recognized buildings, shopping centers, parks, and neighborhoods past
while he drove, though the sight of them did nothing to rekindle his
burnt-out memory.  He still could not recall who he was, where he lived,
what he did for a living, what he was running from or how he had come to
wake up in an alleyway in the middle of the night.

Even at that dead hour-the car clock indicated it2:48-he figured his
chances of encountering a traffic cop was greater on a freeway, so he
stayed on the surface street through Costa Mesa and the eastern and
southern fringes of Newport Beach.  At Corona Del Mar he picked up the
Pacific Coast Highway and followed it all the way to Laguna Beach
encountering a thin fog that gradually thickened as he progressed
southward.

Laguna, a picturesque resort town and artists' colon shelved down a
series of steep hillsides and canyon walls toward the sea, most of it
cloaked now in the thick fog.  Only an occasional car passed him, and
the mist rolling in from the Pacific became sufficiently dense to force
him to reduce his speed to fifteen miles an hour.

Yawning and gritty-eyed, he turned onto a side street east of the
highway and parked at the curb in front of a dark, two story, gabled,
Cape Cod house that looked out of place on these Western slopes.  He
wanted to get a motel room, but before he tried to check in somewhere,
he needed to know if he had any money or credit cards.  For the first
time all night, he had a chance to look for ID, as well.  He searched
the pockets of his jeans, but to no avail.

He switched on the overhead light, pulled the leather flight bag onto
his lap and opened it.  The satchel was filled with tightly banded
stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

THE THIN soup of gray mist was gradually stirring itself into a thicker
stew.  A couple of miles closer to the ocean the night probably was
clotted with fog so dense that it would almost have lumps.

Coatless, protected from the night only by a sweater, but warmed by the
fact that he had narrowly avoided almost certain death, Bobby leaned
against one of the patrol cars in front of Decodyne and watched Julie as
she paced back and forth with her hands in the pockets of her brown
leather jacket.  He never got tired of looking at her.  They had been
married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked an
played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys
at a bar or ball game-partly because it was difficult to find other guys
in their middle thirties who were interested in the things that he cared
about: big-ban music, the arts and pop culture of the '30s and '40s, and
classic Disney comic books.

Julie wasn't a lunch-with-the-girls type either, because not many
thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers
cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training.  In spite of
spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and
she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever
known.

"What's taking them so long?"  she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted
windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.

"Be patient with them, dear, Bobby."

"They don't have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota.  They're just a
humble SWAT team."

Michaelson Drive was blocked off.  Eight police vehicle cars and
vans-were scattered along the street.  The chill night crackled with the
static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios.  An
officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men
were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at
the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for
Rasmussen.  Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner's office were
photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.

"What if he gets away with the diskettes?"  Julie asked.

"He won't."

She nodded.  "Sure, I know what you're thinking-Wizard was developed on
a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne.  But there's
another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn't there?
What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them
out by phone?"

"Can't.  The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different
from the one on which Wizard was developed.  Incompatible."

"Rasmussen is clever."

"There's also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut
down."

"Rasmussen is clever," she repeated.

She continued to pace in front of him.

The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel
when she'd jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it
looked raw and wet.  She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of
dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her
right eye and along her jaw line.  Each time Bobby focused on those
stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him
at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.

Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated
her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious.
Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so
to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his
eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her.  Though it
was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair
was usually thick and lustrous.  She had wide-set eyes as dark as
semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally as toffee ice cream,
and a generous mouth that always taste sweet to him.  Whenever he
watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his
attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image
of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food:
chestnuts, chocolate toffee, cream, sugar, butter.  He found this
amusing, but he always understood the profundity of his choice of
similes: She reminded him of food because she, was more than food, she
sustained him.

Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away at the end
of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie's attention and then Bobby's.
Someone from the SWAT team had closed the doors to report to the guards
stationed there.  A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie
and Bobby to go forward.

When they joined him, he said, "They found this Rasmusen.  You want to
see him, make sure he has the right diskettes?"

"Yeah," Bobby said.

"Definitely," Julie said, and her throaty voice didn't sound at all sexy
now, just tough.

KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running
graveyard-shift patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from
the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him.  He counted
fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds.
He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred
bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with
$140,000.  He had no idea where the money had come from or whether it
belonged to him.

The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded
another surprise-a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but
two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a
California driver's license.  With the wallet was a United States
passport.  The photographs on the passport and license were of the same
man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an
easy smile, and dimples.  Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked
like, he tilted the rear view mirror and was able to see enough of his
face to match it with the one on the ID.  The problem was...  the
license and passport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.

He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found
another Social Security card, passport, and California driver's license.
These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of
Frank.

James Roman meant nothing to him.

George Farris was also meaningless.  And Frank Pollard, whom he believed
himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could
recall.

"What the hell am I tangled up in?"  he said aloud.

He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in
fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for one to which
death had entitled him.

As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night
beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him.

He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere which he could
retreat and be assured of safety.  A man with a past was also a man
without a future.

WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor,
in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom
Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the
wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a
length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together.  He was
pouting.  He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of
dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd's
office he had cold-bloodily given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet
here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught.  His weasel
face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his
yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if
anyone dared to say a cross word.  The mere sight of him infuriated
Julie.  She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into
his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.

The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had
rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place.  Evidently,
standing at Ackroyd's window to watch the fireworks, he had been
surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota.  She had driven the
Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far
back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel,
where no one had spotted her.  Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the
first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who
else was out there.  Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was
to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and
conclude that he had escaped.  With a computer, he was a genius, but
when it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half
as bright as he thought he was.

Two heavily armed cops were watching over him.  But because he was
huddled and shivering and on the verge of tears they were a bit
ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons,
squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.

Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with
the sheriffs department, where Sampson had served before joining the
City of Irvine force.  Either his parents had been present or he had
striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad
and rocklike.  He held a little box that contained four small floppy
diskettes.

He showed it to Julie and said, "Is this what he was after?"

"Could be," she said, accepting the box.

Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, "I'll have to go down one
floor to Ackroyd's office, switch on the computer POP these in, and see
what's on them."

"Go ahead," Sampson said.

"You'll have to accompany me," Bobby said to McGrath the officer who had
brought them up on the elevator.

"keep a watch on me, make sure I don't tamper with the evidence, he
indicated toward Rasmussen.  "We don't want this piece of slime thinking
they were blank disks, saying I framed him copying the real stuff onto
them myself."

As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the
second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen.

"You know who I am?"

Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.

"I'm Bobby Dakota's wife.  Bobby was in that van your goons shot up.  It
was my Bobby you tried to kill."

He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.

She said, "Know what I'd like to do to you?"  She held one of her hands
down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails.

"For starters, I'd like to grab you by the throat hold your head against
the wall, and ram two of these nice sharp fingernails straight through
your eyes, all the way deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and
twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever's messed in
there."

"Jesus, lady," Sampson's partner said.  His name was Burdock.  Beside
anyone but Sampson, he would have been a better man.

"Well," she said, "he's too screwed up to get any help from a prison
psychiatrist."

Sampson said, "Don't do anything foolish, Julie."

Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that
was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be
frightened by it.  A flush of childish embarrassment and temper had
accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale.

To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and querulous to be as tough
as he intended, Rasmussen said, "Keep this crazy bitch away from me."

"She's not actually crazy," Sampson said.  "Not clinically speaking, at
least.  Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I'm
afraid.  Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know.  No, I
wouldn't say she's crazy."

Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, "Thank you so much,
Sam."

"You'll notice I didn't say anything about the other half of his
accusation," Sampson said good-naturedly.

"Yeah, I got your point."

While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.

Everyone harbored a special fear, a private bogeyman built to his own
specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew
what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world.  Not heights.
Not confining spaces.  Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or
darkness.  Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent
weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of
blindness.  In prison, every month with the regularity of a true
obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was
deteriorating, and he'd petitioned to be tested periodically for
syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases that, untreated, could result in
blindness.  When not in prison-and he had been there twice-he had a
standing, monthly appointment with an ophthalmologist in Costa Mesa.

Still squatting in front of Rasmussen, Julie took hold of his chin.  He
flinched.  She twisted his head toward her.  She thrust two fingers of
her other hand at him, raked them down his cheek, making red welts on
his wan skin, but not hard enough to draw blood.

He squealed and tried to strike her with his cuffed hands, but he was
inhibited by both his fear and the chain that tethered his wrists to his
ankles.

"What the hell you think you' doing?"

She spread the same two fingers with which she'd scratched him, and now
she poked them at him, stopping just two inches short of his eyes.

He winced, made a mewling sound, and tried to pull loose of her, but she
held him fast by the chin, forcing a confrontation.

"Me and Bobby have been together eight years, more than seven, and
they've been the best years of my life but you come along and think you
can just squash him the way you'd squash a bug."

She slowly brought her fingertips closer to his eyes.  An inch and a
half.  One inch.

Rasmussen tried to pull back.  His head was against the wall He had
nowhere to go.

The sharp tips of her manicured fingernails were less than half an inch
from his eyes.

"This is police brutality," Rasmussen said.

"I'm not a cop," Julie said.

"They are," he said, rolling his eyes at Sampson and Burdock.  "Better
get this bitch away from me, I'll sue your ass off."

With her fingernails she flicked his eyelashes.

His attention snapped back to her.  He was breathing fast and suddenly
he was sweating too.

She flicked his lashes again, and smiled.

The dark pupils in his yellow-brown eyes were open wide.

"You bastards better hear me, I swear, I'll sue, they'll kick you off
the force-"

She flicked his lashes again.

He closed his eyes tight.

"-they'll take away your god damned uniforms and badges, they'll throw
you in prison, an you know what happens to ex-cops in prison, they get
the shit kicked out of them, broken, killed, raped!"  His voice spiraled
up, cracked on the last word, like the voice of an adolescent boy.

Glancing at Sampson to be sure she had his tacit if not active approval
to carry this just a little further, glancing also at Burdock and seeing
that he was not as placid as Sampson but would probably stay out of it
for a while yet, Julie pressed her fingernails against Rasmussen's
eyelids.

He attempted to squeeze his eyes even more tightly shut.

She pressed harder.

"You tried to take Bobby away from me, so I'll take your eyes away from
you."

"You're nuts!"

She pressed still harder.

"Make her stop," Rasmussen demanded of the two cops.

"If you didn't want me to have my Bobby to look at, why should I let you
look at anything ever again?"

"What do you want?"

Perspiration poured down Rasmussen's face; he looked like a candle in a
bonfire, melting fast.

"Who gave you permission to kill Bobby?"

"Permission?  What do you mean?  Nobody.  I don't need-"

"You wouldn't have tried to touch him if your employer hadn't told you
to do it."

"I knew he was on to me," Rasmussen said frantically, and because she
had not let up the pressure with her nails, thin tears flowed from under
his eyelids.

"I knew he was out there, tumbled to him five or six days ago, even
though he used different vans, trucks, even that orange van with the
county seal on it.  So I had to do something, didn't I?  I couldn't walk
away from the job, too much money at stake.  I couldn't just let him
nail me when I finally got Wizard, so I had to do something.  Listen,
Jesus, it was as simple as that."

"You're just a computer freak, a hired hacker-morally bent, sleazy, but
you're no tough guy.  You're soft, squishy-soft.  You wouldn't plan a
hit on your own.  Your boss told you to do it."

"I don't have a boss.  I'm freelance."

"Somebody still pays you."  She risked more pressure, not with the
points of her nails but with the flat surfaces, although Rasmussen was
so swept away by a rapture of fear that he might still imagine he could
feel those filed edges gradually carving through the delicate shields of
his eyelids.  He must be seeing interior starfields now, bursts and
whorls of color, and maybe he was feeling some pain.  He was shaking;
his shackles clinked and rattled.  More tears squeezed from beneath his
lids.

"Delafield."  The word erupted from him, as if he had been trying
simultaneously to hold it back and to expel it with all his might.

"Kevin Delafield."

"Who's he?"  Julie asked, still holding Rasmussen's chin with one hand,
her fingernails against his eyes, unrelenting.

"Microcrest Corporation."

"That's who hired you for this?"

He was rigid, afraid to move a fraction of an inch, convinced that the
slightest shift in his position would force her fingernails into his
eyes.

"Yeah.  Delafield.  A nut case.  A renegade.  They don't understand
about him at Microcrest.  They know he gets results for them.  When this
hits the fan, I won't be surprised by it, blown away.  So let go of me.
What do you want?"

She let go of him.

Immediately he opened his eyes, blinked, testing his vision then broke
down and sobbed with relief.

As Julie stood, the nearby elevator doors opened, and Bobby returned
with the officer who had accompanied him down stairs to Ackroyd's
office.  Bobby looked at Rasmussen, his head at Julie, clucked his
tongue, and said,

"You've been naughty, haven't you, dear?  Can't I take you anywhere

"I just had a conversation with Mr. Rasmussen.  That's all."

"He seems to have found it stimulating," Bobby said.

Rasmussen sat slumped forward with his hands over his eyes, weeping
uncontrollably.

"We disagreed about something," Julie said.

"Movies, books?"

"Music."

"Ah."

Sampson Garfeuss said softly, "You're a wild woman Julie."

"He tried to have Bobby killed," was all she said.

Sampson nodded.

"I'm not saying I don't admire will sometimes...  a little.  But you
sure as hell owe me on this one."

"I do," she agreed.

"You owe me more than one," Burdock said.

"This guy's going to file a complaint.  You can bet your ass on it."

"Complaint about what?"  Julie asked.  "He's not marked."

Already the faint welts on Rasmussen's cheek were faint Sweat, tears,
and a case of the shakes were the only evidence of his ordeal.

"Listen," Julie told Burdock, "he cracked because I just happened to
know exactly the right weak point where I could give him a little tap,
like cutting a diamond.  It worked because scum like him thinks everyone
else is scum, too, thinks we're capable of doing what he'd do in the
same situation.  I'd never put out his eyes, but he might've put mine
out if our roles were reversed, so he thought for sure I'd do him like
he would've done me.  All I did was use his own screwed-up attitudes
against him.  Psychology.  Nobody can file a complaint about the
application of a little psychology."

She turned to Bobby and said, "What was on those diskettes?"

"Wizard.  Not trash data.  The whole thing.  These have to be the files
he duplicated.  He only made one set while I was watching, and after the
shooting started he didn't have time to make backup copies."

The elevator bell rang, and their floor number lit on the board.  When
the doors opened, a plain-clothes detective they knew, Gil Dainer,
stepped into the hallway.

Julie took the package of diskettes from Bobby, handed them to Dainer.
She said, "This is evidence.  The whole case might rest on it.  You
think you can keep track of it?"

Dainer grinned.

"Gosh, ma'am, I'll try."

FRANK POLLARD-alias James Roman, and George Farris-looked in the trunk
of the stolen Chevy found a small bundle of tools wrapped in a felt
pouch tucked in the wheel well.  He used a screwdriver to take the
plates off the car.

Half an hour later, after cruising some of the higher and more quiet
neighborhoods in fog bound Laguna, he parked on a dark side street and
exchanged the Chevy's plates for those on an Oldsmobile.  With luck, the
owner of the Olds wouldn't notice the new plates for a couple of days,
maybe even a day or longer; until he reported the switch, the Chevy
wouldn't match anything on a police hot sheet and he would, therefore be
relatively safe to drive.  In any case, Frank intended to get rid of the
car by tomorrow night and either boost a new one or use some of the cash
in the flight bag to buy legal wheels.  Though he was exhausted, he
didn't think it wise to check into a motel.  Four-thirty in the morning
was a damned hour for anyone to be wanting a room.  Furthermore, he was
unshaven, and his thick hair was matted and oily, and his jeans and
checkered blue flannel shirt were dirty and filthy from his recent
adventures.  The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to
himself, so he decided to catch a couple hours of sleep in the car.

He drove farther south, into Laguna Niguel, where he parked on a quiet
residential street, under the immense bow of a date palm.  He stretched
out on the back seat, as foully as possible without benefit of
sufficient legroom or pillow and closed his eyes.

For the moment he was not afraid of his unknown pursuers because he felt
that the man was no longer nearby.  Temporarily, at least, he had given
his enemy the shake, and had no desire to lie awake in fear of a hostile
face suddenly appearing at the window.  He was also able to put out of
his mind all questions about his identity and the money in the flight
bag; he was so tired-and his thought processes were so fuzzy-that any
attempt to puzzle out solutions to those mysteries would be fruitless.

He was kept awake, however, by the memory of how strange the events in
Anaheim had been, a few hours ago.  The foreboding gusts of wind.  The
eerie flowerlike music.  Imploding windows, exploding tires, failed
brakes, failed steering...

Who had come into that apartment behind the blue light?

Was "who" the right word...  or would it be more accurate to ask what
had been searching for him?

During his urgent flight from Anaheim to Laguna, he'd not had the
leisure to reflect upon those bizarre incidents, but now he could not
turn his mind from them.  He sensed that he had survived an encounter
with something unnatural.  Worse, he sensed that he knew what it was-and
that his amnesia was self-induced by a deep desire to forget.

After a while, even the memory of those preternatural events wasn't
enough to keep him awake.  The last thing that crossed his waking mind,
as he slipped off on a tide of sleep, was that four-word phrase that had
come to him when he had first awakened in the deserted alleyway:

Fireflies in a windstorm....

BY THE time they had cooperated with the police at the scene, made
arrangements for their disabled vehicle and talked with the three
corporate officers who showed at Decodyne, Bobby and Julie did not get
home until shortly before dawn.  They were dropped at their door by a
police cruiser, and Bobby was glad to see the place.

They lived on the east side of Orange, in a three-bedroom
sort-of-ersatz-Spanish tract house, which they had bought new two years
ago, largely for its investment potential.  Even though the relative
youth of the neighborhood was apparent the landscaping: and None of the
shrubbery had reached full size the trees were still too immature to
loom higher than the gutters on the houses.

Bobby unlocked the door.  Julie went in, and he followed The sound of
their footsteps on the parquet floor of the foyer echoing hollowly off
the bare walls of the adjacent and utter empty living room, was proof
that they were not committed to the house for the long term.  To save
money toward the fulfillment of The Dream, they had left the living
room, dining room, and two bedrooms unfurnished.  They installed carpet
and cheaper draperies.  Not a penny had been spent on other
improvements.  This was merely a way station enroute to The Dream, so
they saw no point in lavishing funds on dreams.

The Dream.  That was how they thought of it-with a capital d They kept
their expenses as low as possible in order to fund The Dream.  They
didn't spend much on clothes or vacations, and they didn't buy fancy
cars.  With hard work and iron determination, they were building Dakota
and Dakota Investigations into a major firm that could be sold for a
large capital gain, so they plowed a lot of earnings back into the
business to make it grow.  For The Dream.

At the back of the house, the kitchen and family room-and the small
breakfast area that separated them-were furnished.  This-and the master
bedroom upstairs-was where they lived when at home.

The kitchen had a Spanish-tile floor, beige counters, and dark oak
cabinets.  No money had been spent on decorative accessories, but the
room had a cozy feeling because some necessities of a functioning
kitchen were on display: a net bag filled with half a dozen onions,
copper pots dangling from a ceiling rack, cooking utensils, bottles of
spices.  Three green tomatoes were ripening on the windowsill.

Julie leaned against the counter, as if she could not stand another
moment without support, and Bobby said, "You want a drink?"

"Booze at dawn?"

"I was thinking more of milk or juice."

"No, thanks."

"Hungry?"

She shook her head.  "I just want to fall into bed.  I'm beat."

He took her in his arms, held her close, cheek to cheek, with his face
buried in her hair.  Her arms tightened around him.

They stood that way for a while, saying nothing, letting the residual
fear evaporate in the gentle heat they generated between them.

Fear and love were indivisible.  If you allowed yourself to care, to
love, you made yourself vulnerable, and vulnerability led to fear.  He
found meaning in life through his relationship with her, and if she
died, meaning and purpose would die too.

With Julie still in his arms, Bobby leaned back and studied her face.
The smudges of dried blood had been wiped away.  The skinned spot on her
forehead was beginning to scab over with a thin yellow membrane.
However, the imprint of their recent ordeal consisted of more than the
abrasion on her forehead.  With her tan complexion, she could never be
said to look pale, even in moments of the most profound anxiety; a
detectable grayness seeped into her face, however, at times like this,
and at the moment her cinnamon-and-cream skin was underlaid with a shade
of gray that made him think of headstone marble.

"It's over," he assured her, "and we're okay."

"It's not over in my dreams.  Won't be for weeks."

"A thing like tonight adds to the legend of Dakota and Dakota.

"I don't want to be a legend.  Legends are all dead."

"We'll be living legends, and that'll bring in business.  The more
business we build, the sooner we can sell out, grab the Dream."

He kissed her gently on each corner of her mouth

"I have to call in, leave a long message on the agency machine so Clint
will know how to handle everything when he goes to work."

"Yeah.  I don't want the phone to start ringing only a couple of hours
after I hit the sheets.

He kissed her again and went to the wall phone beside the refrigerator.

As he was dialing the office number, Julie walk to the bathroom off the
short hall that connected the kitchen to the laundry room.  She closed
the bathroom door just as the answering machine picked up:

"Thank you for calling Dakota and Dakota.  No one-"

Clint Karaghiosis -whose Greek-American family had been fans of Clint
Eastwood from the earliest days of his first television show, and had
named their baby after him.  "Rawhide"-was Bobby and Julie's right hand
man at the office.  He could be trusted to handle any problem.  Bobby
left a long message for him, summarizing the events at Decodyne and
noting specific tasks that had to be done to wrap up the case.

When he hung up, he stepped down into the adjoining family room,
switched on the CD player, and put on a Benny Goodman disc.  The first
notes of "King Porter Stomp" brought the dead room to life.

In the kitchen again, he got a quart can of eggnog from the
refrigerator.  They had bought it two weeks ago for their at-home, New
Year's Eve celebration, but had not opened it after all, on the holiday.
He opened it now and half-filled the water glasses.

From the bathroom he heard Julie make a tortured sound she was finally
throwing up.  It was mostly just dry heaves because they had not eaten
in eight or ten hours, but the spasm sounded violent.  Throughout the
night, Bobby had expected her to succumb to nausea, and he was surprised
that she had retained control of herself this long.

He retrieved a bottle of white rum from the bar cabinet in the family
room and spiked each serving of eggnog with a double shot.  He was
gently stirring the drinks with a spoon to blend in the rum, when Julie
returned, looking even grayer than before.

When she saw what he was doing, she said, "I don't need that.

"I know what you need.  I'm psychic.  I knew you'd toss your cookies
after what happened tonight.  Now I know you need this.

" He stepped to the sink and rinsed off the spoon.

"No, Bobby, really, I can't drink that."

The Goodman music didn't seem to be energizing her.

"It'll settle your stomach.  And if you don't drink it, you're not going
to sleep."

Taking her by the arm, crossing the breakfast area, and stepping down
into the family room, he said, "You'll lie awake worrying about me,
about Thomas"Thomas was her brother-"about the world and everyone in
it."  They sat on the sofa, and he did not turn on any lamps.  The only
light was what reached them from the kitchen.

She drew her legs under her and turned slightly to face him.  Her eyes
shone with a soft, reflected light.  She sipped the eggnog.

The room was now filled with the strains of "One Sweet Letter From You,"
one of Goodman's most beautiful thematic statements, with a vocal by
Louise Tobin.

They sat and listened for a while.

Then Julie said, "I'm tough, Bobby, I really am."

"I know you are."

"I don't want you thinking I'm lame."

"Never." :

"It wasn't just the shooting that made me sick, or using the Toyota to,
run that guy down, or even the thought of almost losing you-'

"I know.  It was what you had to do to Rasmussen."

"He's a slimy little weasel-faced bastard, but even he doesn't deserve
to be broken like that.  What I did to him stank."

"It was the only way to crack the case, because it wasn't nearly cracked
till we'd found out who hired him."

She drank more eggnog.  She frowned down at the milky contents of her
glass, as if the answer to some mystery could be found there.

Following Tobin's vocal, Ziggy Elman came in with a trumpet solo,
followed by Goodman's clarinet.  The sounds made that boxy, tract-house
room seem like the most romantic place in the world.

"What I did...  I did for The Dream.  Giving Decodyne's Rasmussen's
employer will please them.  But breaking him somehow...  It was worse
than wasting a man in a fair gunfight."

Bobby put one hand on her knee.  It was a nice knee.  All these years,
he was still sometimes surprised by her slenderness and the delicacy of
her bone structure, for he always thought of her as being strong for her
size, solid, formidable.

"If you hadn't put Rasmussen in that vise and squeezed I would've done
it."

"No, you wouldn't have.  You're scrappy, Bobby, and you're smart and
you're tough, but there're certain things you never do.  This was one of
them.  Don't jive me just to make me feel good."

"You're right," he said.

"I couldn't have done it.  But glad you did.  Decodyne's very big time,
and this could've put us back years if we'd flubbed it."

"Is there anything we won't do for The Dream?"

Bobby said, "Sure.  We wouldn't torture small children with red-hot
knives, and we wouldn't shove innocent old people down long flights of
stairs, and we wouldn't club a basket of newborn puppies to death with
an iron bar-at least without good reason."

Her laughter lacked a full measure of humor.

"Listen," he said, "you're a good person.  You've got a good heart, and
nothing you did to Rasmussen blackens it at all.

"I hope you're right.  It's a hard world sometimes."

"Another drink will soften it a little."

"You know the calories in these?  I'll be fat as a hippo

"Hippos are cute," he said, taking her glass and heading back toward the
kitchen to pour another drink.  "I love POS."

"You won't want to make love to one."

"Sure.  More to hold, more to love."

"You'll be crushed."

"Well, of course, I'll always insist on taking the top."

CANDY WAS going to kill.  He stood in the dark living room of a
stranger's house, shaking with need.  Blood.  He needed blood.

Candy was going to kill, and there was nothing he could do to stop
himself.  Not even thinking of his mother could shame him into
controlling his hunger.

His given name was James, but his mother-an unselfish soul, exceedingly
kind, brimming with love, a saint-always said he was her little candy
boy.  Never James.  Never Jim or Jimmy.  She'd said he was sweeter than
anything on earth, and "little candy boy" eventually had become "candy
boy," and by the time he was six the sobriquet had been shortened and
capitalized, and he had become Candy for good.  Now, at twenty-nine,
that was the only name to which he would answer.

Many people thought murder was a sin.  He knew otherwise.  Some were
born with a taste for blood.  God had made them what they were and
expected them to kill chosen victims.  It was all part of His mysterious
plan.

The only sin was to kill when God and your mother did not approve of the
victim, which was exactly what he was about to do.  He was ashamed.  But
he was also in need.

He listened to the house.  Silence.  Like unearthly and dusky beasts,
the shadowy forms of the living-room furniture huddled around him.

Breathing hard, trembling, Candy moved into the dining room, kitchen,
family room, then slowly along the hallway that led to the front of the
house.  He made no sound that would have alerted anyone asleep upstairs.
He seemed to glide rather than walk, as if he were a specter instead of
a real man.

He paused at the foot of the stairs and made one last feeble attempt to
overcome his murderous compulsion.  Failing he shuddered and let out his
pent-up breath.  He began to climb toward the second floor, where the
family was probably sleeping.

His mother would understand and forgive him.

She had taught him that killing was good and moral only when necessary,
only when it benefited the family.

She had been terribly angry with him on those occasions when he had
killed out of sheer compulsion, with no good reason.  She had no need to
punish him physically for his errant ways, because her displeasure gave
him more agony than any punishment she could have devised.  For days at
a time she refused to speak to him, and that silent treatment caused his
cheeks to swell with pain, so it seemed as if his heart would spasm
cease to beat.  She looked straight through him, too, as if he no longer
existed.

When the other children spoke of him, she said, "Oh, you mean your late
brother, Candy, your poor brother.  Well, remember him if you want, but
only to yourselves, not to me, never to me, because I don't want to
remember him, not that bad seed.  He was no good, that no good at all,
wouldn't listen to his mother, not him, he thought he knew better.  Just
the sound of his name makes me feel sick, revolts me, so don't mention
him in my hearing."

Candy had been temporarily banished to the world of the dead for having
misbehaved, no place was set for him at the table, and he had to stand
in a corner, watching the others eat, as if he was a visiting spirit.
She would not favor him with either a frown or a smile, and she would
not stroke his hair or touch his face with her warm soft hands, and she
would not let him cuddle against her or put his weary head upon her
breast, and at night he had to find his way into a troubled sleep
without being guided there by either her bedtime stories or sweet
lullabies.  In that total banishment he learned moor Hell than he ever
hoped to know.

But she would understand why Candy could not help himself tonight, and
she'd forgive him.  Sooner or later she always forgave him because her
love for him was like the love of God for all His children: perfect,
rich with forbearance mercy.  When she deemed that Candy had suffered
enough, she always had looked at him again, smiled for him, opened arms
wide.  In her new acceptance of him, he had experienced as much of
Heaven as he needed to know.

She was in Heaven now, herself.  Seven long years!  God, how he missed
her.  But she was watching him even now.  She would know he had lost
control tonight, and she would be disappointed in him.

He climbed the stairs, rushing up two risers at a time, staying close to
the wall, where the steps were less likely to squeak.  He was a big man
but graceful and light on his feet, and if some of the stair treads were
loose or tired with age, they did not creak under him.

In the upstairs hall he paused, listening.

Nothing.

A dim night-light was part of the overhead smoke alarm.  The glow was
just bright enough for Candy to see two doors on the right of the hall,
two on the left, and one at the far end.

He crept to the first door on the right, eased it open, and slipped into
the room beyond.  He closed the door again and stood with his back to
it.

Although his need was great, he forced himself to wait for his eyes to
adjust to the gloom.

Ashen light, from a street lamp at least half a block away, glimmered
faintly at the two windows.  He noticed the mirror, first, a frosty
rectangle in which the meager radiance was murkily reflected; then he
began to make out the shape of the dresser beneath it.  A moment later
he was also able to see the bed and, dimly, the huddled form of someone
lying under a light-colored blanket that was vaguely phosphorescent.

Candy stepped cautiously to the bed, took hold of the blanket and sheets
and hesitated, listening to the soft rhythmic breathing of the sleeper.
He detected a trace of perfume mingled with a pleasant scent of warm
skin and recently shampooed hair.  A girl.  He could always tell
girl-smell from boy smell.  He also sensed that this one was young,
perhaps a teenager.  If his need had not been so intense, he would have
hesitated much longer than he did, for the moments preceding a kill were
exciting, almost better than the act itself.

With a dramatic flick of his arm, as if he were a magician throwing back
the cloth that had covered an empty cage to reveal a captive dove of
sorcerous origins, he uncovered the sleeper.  He fell upon her, crushing
her into the mattress with his body.

She woke instantly and tried to scream, even though he surely knocked
the wind out of her.  Fortunately, he had unhumanly large and powerful
hands, and he had found her face as she began to raise her voice, so he
was able to thrust palm under her chin and hook his fingers in her
cheeks clamp her mouth shut.

"Be quiet, or I'll kill you," he whispered, his lips brushing against
her delicate ear.

Making a muffled, panicky sound, she squirmed under him to no avail.
Judging by the feel of her, she was not yet a woman, perhaps no younger
than twelve, certainly not older than fifteen.

She was no match for him.

"I don't want to hurt you.  I just want you, and when i'm done with you,
I'll leave."  That was a lie, for he had no desire to rape her.  Sex was
no interest to him.  Indeed, sex disgusted him; involving unmentionable
fluids, depending upon the shameless useless organs associated with
urination, sex was an unspeakable repulsive act.  Other people's
fascination with it only proved to Candy that men and women were members
of a fallen humanity and that the world was a cesspool of sin and
madness Either because she believed his pledge not to kill her cause she
was now half-paralyzed with fear, she stopped resisting.  Maybe she just
needed all of her energy to breath with Candy's full weight-two hundred
and twenty pounds pressing on her chest, restricting her lungs.  Against
his hand with which he clamped her mouth shut, he could feel her
inhalations as her nostrils flared, followed by short, hot exhalations.

His vision had continued to adapt to the poor light.

though he still could not make out the details of her face, he could see
her eyes shining darkly in the gloom, glistening terror.  He could also
see that she was a blonde; her pale caught even the dull gray glow from
the windows and with burnished-silver highlights.

With his free hand, he gently pushed her hair back from the right side
of her neck.  He shifted his position slightly, moved down on her in
order to bring his lips to her throat.  He kissed the tender flesh, felt
the strong throb of her pulse against his lips, then bit deep and found
the blood.

She bucked and thrashed beneath him, but he held her down and held her
fast, and she could not dislodge his greedy mouth from the wound he had
made.  He swallowed rapidly but could not consume the thick, sweet fluid
as fast as it was offered.  Soon, however, the flow diminished.  The
girl's convulsions became less violent, as well, then faded altogether,
until she was as still beneath him as if she had been nothing more than
a tangled mound of bedclothes.

He rose from her and switched on the bedside lamp just long enough to
see her face.  He always wanted to see their faces, after their
sacrifices if not before.  He also liked to look into their eyes, which
seemed not sightless but gifted with a vision of the far place to which
their souls had gone.  He did not entirely understand his curiosity.
After all, when he ate a steak, he did not wonder what the cow had
looked like.  This girl and each of the others on whom he'd fed-should
have been nothing more than one of the cattle to him.  Once, in a dream,
when he had finished drinking from a ravaged throat, his victim,
although dead, had spoken to him, asking him why he wanted to look upon
her in death.  When he had said that he didn't know the answer to her
question, she had suggested that perhaps, on those occasions when he had
killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because,
in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face
looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed.

"Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "you know that you're already
dead yourself, burnt out inside.  You realize that you have far more in
common with your victims after you've killed them than before."

Those words, though spoken only in a dream, and though amounting to the
purest nonsense, had nevertheless brought him awake with a sharp cry. He
was alive, not dead, powerful and vital, a man with appetites as strong
as they were unusual.  The dream-victim's words stayed with him over the
years, and when they echoed through his memory at times like this, they
made him anxious.  Now, as always, he refused to dwell on them.  He
turned his attention, instead, to the girl on the bed.

She appeared to be about fourteen, quite pretty.  Captivated by her
flawless complexion, he wondered if her skin would feel as perfect as it
looked, as smooth as porcelain, if he dared to stroke it with his
fingertips.  Her lips were slightly parted, as if they had been gently
prised open by her spirit was it departed wonderfully blue, clear eyes
seemed enormous, big for her face-and as wide as a winter sky.

He would have liked to gaze upon her for hours.  Letting a sigh of
regret escape him, he switched off the lamp.  He stood for a while in
the darkness, enveloped by the gent aroma of blood.

When his eyes had readjusted to the gloom, he returned to the hall, not
bothering to close the girl's door behind him.

He entered the room across from hers and found it unoccupied But in the
room next to that one, Candy smelled stale sweat, and heard snoring.
This one was a boy, seven or eighteen, not a big kid but not small
either, and he put up more of a struggle than his sister.  However, he
was sleeping on his stomach, and when Candy threw back the covers fell
upon him, the boy's face was jammed hard into the pit of the mattress,
smothering him and making it difficult for him to shout a warning.  The
fight was violent but brief.  The boy passed out from lack of oxygen,
and Candy flopped him over When he went for the throat, Candy let out a
low eager cry that was louder than any sound the boy had made.  Later,
when he opened the door to the fourth bedroom, first pewter light of
dawn had pierced the windows.  shadows still huddled in the corners, but
the deeper darkness had been chased off.  The early light was too thin
to elicit color from objects, and everything in the room seemed to be
one shadow of gray or another.

An attractive blonde in her late thirties was asleep on her side of a
king-size bed.  The sheets and blanket on the other half of the bed were
hardly disturbed, so he figured the woman's husband and had either moved
out or was away on business.  He noted a half-full glass of water and a
plastic bottle of prescription drugs on the night stand.  He picked up
the pharmacy bottle and saw that it was two-thirds full of small pills.
A sedative, according to the label.  From the label, he learned her
name: Roseanne Lofton.

Candy stood for a while, staring down at her face, an old longing for
maternal solace stirred in him.  Need continued to drive him, but he did
not want to take her violently, not want to rip her open and drain her
in a few minutes.

He wanted this one to last.

He had the urge to suckle on this woman as he had suckled on his
mother's blood when she would permit him that grace.  Occasionally, when
he was in her favor, his mother would make a shallow cut in the palm of
her hand or puncture one of her fingers, then allow him to curl up
against her and be nursed on her blood for an hour or longer.  During
that time a great peace stole over him, a bliss so profound that the
world and all its pain ceased to be real to him, because his mother's
blood was like no other, untainted, pure as the tears of a saint.
Through such small wounds, of course, he was able to drink no more than
an ounce or two of her, but that meager dribble was more precious and
more nourishing to him than the gallons he might have drained from a
score of other people.  The woman before him would not have such
ambrosia within her veins, but if he closed his eyes while he suckled on
her, and if he let his mind reel backward to memories of the days before
his mother's death, he might recapture at least some of the exquisite
serenity he had known then...  and experience a faint echo of that old
thrill.

At last, without casting the covers aside, Candy gently lowered himself
to the bed and stretched out beside the woman, watching as her
heavy-lidded eyes fluttered and then opened.  She blinked at him as he
cuddled next to her, and for a moment she seemed to think that she was
still dreaming, for no expression tightened the muscles of her slack
face.

"All I want is your blood," he said softly.

Abruptly she cast off the lingering effects of the sedative, and her
eyes filled with alarm.

Before she could spoil the beauty of the moment by screaming or
resisting, thereby shattering the illusion that she was his mother and
was giving voluntarily of herself, he struck the side of her neck with
his heavy fist.  Then he struck her again.  Then he hammered the side of
her face twice.  She slumped unconscious against the pillow.

He squirmed under the covers to be close against her, withdrew her hand,
and nipped her palm with his teeth.  He put his head on the pillow,
lying face to face with her, holding her hand between them, drinking the
slow trickle from her palm.  He closed his eyes after a while and tried
to imagine that she was his mother, and eventually a gratifying peace
stole over him.  However, though he was happier at that moment than he
had been in a long time, it was not a deep happiness, mere a veneer of
joy that brightened the surface of his heart but the inner chambers dark
and cold.

the residue on his hands troubled him as deeply as if it been fresh
blood.

"Who the hell am I, what's happening to me?"  he wondered aloud.

He knew that he needed help.  But he didn't know to whom he could turn.

AFTER ONLY a few hours of sleep, Frank Pollard woke in the back seat of
the stolen Chevy.  The morning sun, streaming through the windows, was
bright enough to make him wince.

He was stiff, achy, and unrested.  His throat was dry, and his eyes
burned as if he had not slept for days.

Groaning, Frank swung his legs off the seat, sat up, and cleared his
throat.  He realized that both of his hands were numb; they felt cold
and dead, and he saw that he had curled them into fists.  He had
evidently been sleeping that way for some time, because at first he
could not unclench.  With considerable effort, he opened his right
fist-and a handful of something black and grainy poured through his
tingling fingers.

He stared, perplexed, at the fine grains that had spilled down the leg
of his jeans and onto his right shoe.  He raised his hand to take a
closer look at the residue that had stuck to his palm.  It looked and
smelled like sand.

Black sand?  Where had he gotten it?

When he opened his left hand, more sand spilled out.

Confused, he looked through the car windows at the residential
neighborhood around him.  He saw green lawns, dark topsoil showing
through where the grass was sparse, mulch-filled planting beds, redwood
chips mounded around some shrubs, but nothing like what he had held in
his tightly clenched fists.

He was in Laguna Niguel, so the Pacific Ocean was nearby, rimmed by
broad beaches.  But those beaches were white, not black.

As full circulation returned to his cramped fingers, he leaned back in
the seat, raised his hands in front of his face, and stared at the black
grains that speckled his sweat-damp skin.  Sand, even black sand, was a
humble and innocent substance.

BOBBY WAs awakened by a Santa Ana wind blowing through the trees
outside.  It whistled under the eaves, and forced a chorus of ticks and
creaks from the cedar-shingle roof and the attic rafters.

He blinked sleep-matted eyes and squinted at the numbers on the bedroom
ceiling: 12:07.  Because they sometimes worked odd hours and slept
during the day, they had installed exterior Roll-up security shutters,
leaving the room coal-mine dark except for the projection clock's pale
green numerals, which floated on the ceiling like some portentous spirit
message from Beyond.

Because he had gone to bed near dawn, and instantly to sleep, he knew
the numbers on the ceiling meant that it was shortly past noon, not
midnight.  He had slept perhaps six hours.  He lay unmoving for a
moment, wondering if Julie was awake.

She said, "I am."

"You're spooky," he said.

"You knew what I was thinking."

"That's not spooky," she said.  "That's married."

He reached for her, and she came into his arms.

For a while they just held each other, satisfied to be close.  But by
mutual and unspoken desire, they began to make love.

The projection clock's glowing green numerals were too pale to relieve
the absolute darkness, so Bobby could see nothing of Julie as they clung
together.  However, he "saw" her through his hands.  As he reveled in
the smoothness and warmth of her skin, the elegant curves of her
breasts, the discovery of angularity precisely where angularity was
desirable, the tautness of muscle, and the fluid movement of muscle and
bone, he might have been a blind man using his hands to describe an
inner vision of ideal beauty.

The wind shook the world outside, in sympathy with the climaxes that
shook Julie.  And when Bobby could withhold him self no longer, when he
cried out and emptied himself into her the skirting wind cried, too, and
a bird that had taken shelter in a nearby eave was blown from its perch
with a rustle of wings and a spiraling shriek.

For a while they lay side by side in the blackness, their breath
mingling, touching each other almost reverently.  They did not want or
need to speak; talk would have diminished the moment.

The aluminum-slat shutters vibrated softly in the huffing wind.

Gradually the afterglow of lovemaking gave way to a curious uneasiness,
the source of which Bobby could not identify.  The enveloping blackness
began to seem oppressive, as if a continued absence of light was somehow
contributing to a thickening of the air, until it would become as vivid
and unbreathable as syrup.

Though he had just made love to her, he was stricken by the crazy notion
that Julie was not actually there with him, that what he had coupled
with was a dream, or the congealing darkness itself, and that she had
been stolen from him in the night, whisked away by some power he could
not fathom, and that she was forever beyond his reach.

His childish fear made him feel foolish, but he rose onto one elbow and
turned on one of the wall-mounted bedside lamps.

When he saw Julie lying beside him, smiling, her head raised on a
pillow, the level of his inexplicable anxiety abruptly dropped.  He let
out a rush of breath, surprised to discover that he'd pent it up in the
first place.  But a peculiar tension remained in him, and the sight of
Julie, safe and undamaged but for the scabbing spot on her forehead, was
insufficient to completely relax him.

"What's wrong?"  she asked, as perceptive as ever.

"Nothing," he lied.

"Bit of a headache from all that rum in the eggnog?"

What troubled him was not a hangover, but the queer, unshakable feeling
that he was going to lose Julie, that something out there in a hostile
world was coming to take her away.  As the optimist in the family, he
wasn't usually given to grim forebodings of doom; accordingly, this
strange August chill frightened him more than it would have if he had
been regularly subject to such disturbances

"Bobby?"  she said, frowning.

"Headache," he assured her.

He leaned down and gently kissed her eyes, then again, forcing her to
close them so she could not see his face and read the anxiety that he
was unable to conceal.

LATER, AFTER showering and dressing, they ate a hasty breakfast while
standing at the kitchen counter: English muffins and raspberry jam, half
a banana each, and black coffee.  By mutual agreement, they were not
going to the office.  A brief call to Clint Karaghiosis confirmed that
the wrap-up on the Decodyne case was nearly completed, and that no other
business needed their urgent personal attention.

Their Suzuki Samurai waited in the garage, and Bobby's spirits rose at
the sight of it.  The Samurai was a small sports truck with four-wheel
drive.  He had justified its purchase by pitching its dual
nature-utilitarian and recreational-to Julie, especially noting its
comparatively reasonable price tag, but in fact he had wanted it because
it was fun to drive.  She had not been deceived, and she had gone for it
because she, too, thought it was fun to drive.  This time, she was
willing to let him have the wheel when he suggested she drive.

"I did enough driving last night," she said as she buckled herself into
her shoulder harness.

Dead leaves, twigs, a few scraps of paper, and less identifiable debris
whirled and tumbled along the windswept streets.  Dust devils spun out
of the east, as the Santa Anas-named for the mountains out of which they
arose-poured down through the canyons and across the arid,
scrub-stubbled hills that Orange County's industrious developers had not
yet graded and covered with thousands of nearly identical wood
and-stucco pieces of the California dream.  Trees bent to the surging
oceans of air that moved in powerful and erratic tides toward the real
sea in the west.  The previous night's fog was gone, and the day was so
clear that, from the hills, Catalina Island could be seen twenty-six
miles off the Pacific's distant coast.

Julie popped an Artie Shaw CD into the player, and the smooth melody and
softly bouncing rhythms of "Begin the Be guine" filled the car.  The
mellow saxophones of Les Robinson Hank Freeman, Tony Pastor, and Ronnie
Perry provided strange counterpoint to the chaos and dissonance of the
Santa Ana winds.

From Orange, Bobby drove south and west toward the beach cities-Newport,
Corona Del Mar, Laguna, and Dana Point.  He traveled as much as possible
on those few of the urbanize county's blacktop byways that could still
be called back roads They even passed a couple of orange groves, with
which the county had once been carpeted, but which had mostly fallen to
the relentless advance of the tracts and malls.

Julie became more talkative and bubbly as the miles rolled up on the
odometer, but Bobby knew that her spirited mood was not genuine.  Each
time they set out to visit her brother Thomas, she worked hard to
inflate her spirits.  Although she loved Thomas, every time that she was
with him, her fear broke anew, so she had to fortify herself in advance
with manufactured good humor.

"Not a cloud in the sky," she said, as they passed the Irvine Ranch
fruit-packing plant.

"Isn't it a beautiful day Bobby?"

"A wonderful day," he agreed.

"The wind must've pushed the clouds all the way to Japan piled them up
miles high over Tokyo."

"Yeah.  Right now California litter is falling on the Ginza."

Hundreds of red bougainvillea blossoms, stripped from their vines by the
wind, blew across the road, and for a moment the Samurai seemed to be
caught in a crimson snowstorm.  Maybe it was because they had just
spoken of Japan, but there was something oriental about the whirl of
petals.  He would not have been surprised to glimpse a kimono-clad woman
at the side of the road, dappled in sunshine and shadow.

"Even a windstorm is beautiful here," Julie said.

"Aren't we lucky, Bobby?  Aren't we lucky to be living in this special
place?"

Shaw's "Frenzies" struck up, string-rich swing.  Every time he heard the
song, Bobby was almost able to imagine that he was in a movie from the
1930s or '40s, that he would turn a corner and encounter his old friend
Jimmy Stewart or maybe Bing Crosby, and they'd go off to have lunch with
Cary Grant and Jean Arthur and Katharine Hepburn, while all kinds of
screwy things would happen.

"What movie are you in?"  Julie asked.  She knew him too well.

"Haven't figured it yet.  Maybe The Philadelphia Story.

By the time they pulled into the parking lot of Cielo Vista Care Home,
Julie had whipped herself into a state of high good humor.  She got out
of the Samurai, faced west, and grinned at the horizon, which was
delineated by the marriage of sea and sky, as if she had never before
encountered a sight to match it.  In truth it was a stunning panorama,
because Cielo Vista stood on a bluff half a mile from the Pacific,
overlooking a long stretch of southern California's Gold Coast.  Bobby
admired it, too, shoulders hunched slightly and head tucked down in
deference to the cool and blustery wind.

When Julie was ready, she took Bobby's hand and squeezed it hard, and
they went inside.

Cielo Vista Care Home was a private facility, operated without
government funds, and its architecture eschewed all of the standard
institutional looks.  Its two-story Spanish facade of pale peach stucco
was accented by white marble corner pieces, door frames, and window
lintels; white-painted French windows and doors were recessed in
graceful arches, with deep sills.  The sidewalks were shaded by lattice
arbors draped with a mix of purple- and yellow-blooming bougainvillea,
from which the wind drew a chorus of urgent whispers.  Inside, the
floors were gray vinyl tile, speckled with peach and turquoise, and the
walls were peach with white base and crown molding, which lent the place
a warm and airy ambience.

They paused in the foyer, just inside the front door, while Julie
withdrew a comb from her purse and pulled the wind tangles from her
hair.  After stopping at the front desk in the cozy visitors' lobby,
they followed the north hall to Thomas's first floor room.

His was the second of the two beds, nearest the windows, but he was
neither there nor in his armchair.  When they stopped in his open
doorway, he was sitting at the worktable that belonged to both him and
his roommate, Derek.  Bent over the table, using a pair of scissors to
clip a photograph from a magazine, Thomas appeared curiously both
hulking and fragile, thickset yet delicate; physically, he was solid but
mentally and emotionally he was frail, and that inner weakness shone
through to belie the outer image of strength.  With thick neck, heavy
rounded shoulders, broad back, proportionally short arms, and stocky
legs, Thomas had a gnomish look but when he became aware of them and
turned his head to see who was there, his face was not graced by the
cute and beguiling features of a fairy-tale creature; it was instead a
face of cruel genetic destiny and biological tragedy.

"Jules!"  he said, dropping the scissors and magazine, nearly knocking
over his chair in his haste to get up.  He was wearing baggy jeans and a
green-plaid flannel shirt.  He seemed years younger than his true age.

"Jules, Jules!"

Julie let go of Bobby's hand and stepped into the room opening her arms
to her brother.

"Hi, honey."  Thomas hurried to her in that shuffling walk of his, as if
his shoes were heeled and soled with enough iron to preclude lifting
them.  Although he was twenty years old, ten years younger than Julie,
he was four inches shorter than she, just barely five feet.  He had been
born with Down's syndrome, a diagnosis that even a layman could read in
his face: his brow was sloppy and heavy; inner epicanthic folds gave his
eyes an oriental cant the bridge of his nose was flat; his ears were
low-set on a head that was slightly too small to be in proportion to his
body; the rest of his features had those soft, heavy contours often
associated with mental retardation.  Though it was a common shaped more
for expressions of sadness and loneliness, it no less defied its
naturally downcast lines and formed itself into a wondrous smile, a warm
grin of pure delight.

Julie always had that effect on Thomas.

Hell, she has that effect on me, Bobby thought.

Stooping only slightly, Julie threw her arms around her brother when he
came to her, and for a while they hugged each other.

"How're you doing?"  she asked.

"Good," Thomas said.

"I'm good."  His speech was thick but not at all difficult to
understand, for his tongue was as deformed as those of some victims of
DS; it was a little larger than it should have been but not fissured or
protruding.

"I' real good."

"Where's Derek?"

"Visiting.  Down the hall.  He'll be back.  I'm real good.  Are you
good?"

"I'm fine, honey.  Just great."

"I'm just great too.  I love you, Jules," Thomas said happily, for with
Julie he was always free of the shyness that colored his relations with
everyone else.

"I love you so much."

"I love you, too, Thomas."

"I was afraid...  maybe you wouldn't come."

"Don't I always come?"

"Always," he said.  At last he relaxed his grip on his sister and peeked
around her.  "Hi, Bobby."

"Hi, Thomas.  You're looking' good."

"Am I?"

"If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'."

Thomas laughed.  To Julie, he said, "He's funny."

"Do I get a hug too?"  Bobby asked.

"Or do I have to stand here with my arms out until someone mistakes me
for a hatrack?"

Hesitantly, Thomas let go of his sister.  He and Bobby embraced.  After
all these years, Thomas was still not entirely comfortable with Bobby,
not because they had bad chemistry between them or any bad feelings, but
because Thomas didn't like change very much and adapted to it slowly.
Even after more than seven years, his sister being married was a change,
something that still felt new to him.

But he likes me, Bobby thought, maybe even as much as I like him.

Liking DS victims was not difficult, once you got past the pity that
initially distanced you from them, because most of them had an innocence
and guilelessness that was charming and refreshing.  Except when
inhibited by shyness or embarrassment about their differences, they were
usually forthright, more truthful than other people, and incapable of
the petty social games and scheming that marred so many relationships
among "ordinary" people.

The previous summer, at Cielo Vista's Fourth of July picnic, a mother of
one of the other patients had said to Bobby,

"Sometimes, watching them, I think there's something in them-a
gentleness, a special kindness that's closer to God than anything in
us."

Bobby felt the truth of that observation now, as he hugged Thomas and
looked down into his sweet, lumpish face.

"Did we interrupt a poem?"  Julie asked.

Thomas let go of Bobby and hurried to the work table, where Julie was
looking at the magazine from which he had been clipping a picture when
they'd arrived.  He opened his current scrapbook-fourteen others were
filled with his creations and shelved in a corner bookcase near his
bed-and pointed at a two-page spread of pasted-in clippings that were
arranged lines and quatrains, like poetry.

"This was yesterday.  Finished yesterday," Thomas said.

"Took me a looooong time, and it was hard, but now it...  is...  right."
Four or five years ago, Thomas had decided that he wanted to be a poet
like someone he had seen and admired on television.  The degree of
mental retardation among victims of Down's syndrome varied widely, from
mild to severe; Thomas was somewhere just above the middle of the
spectrum, but did not possess the intellectual capacity to learn to
write more than his name.  That didn't stop him.  He had asked for paper
glue, a scrapbook, and piles of old magazines.  Since he rarely asked
for anything, and since Julie would have moved a mountain on her back to
get him whatever he wanted, the items, his list, were soon in his
possession.

"All kinds of magazine he'd said, "with different pretty pictures... but
ugly too.  all kinds."  From Time, Newsweek, Life, Hot Rod, Omni,
Seventeen, and dozens of other publications, he snipped whole pictures
and parts of pictures, arranging them as if they were words, in a series
of images that made a statement that was important to him.  Some of his
"poems" were only five lines long, and some involved hundreds of
clippings arranged in dearly stanzas or, more often, in loosely
structured lines that resembled free verse.

Julie took the scrapbook from him and went to the armchair by the
window, where she could concentrate on his newest composition.  Thomas
remained at the worktable, watching her anxiously.

His picture poems did not tell stories or have recognizable thematic
narratives, but neither were they merely random jumbles of images.  A
church spire, a mouse, a beautiful worn in an emerald-green ball gown, a
field of daisies, a can of Do pineapple rings, a crescent moon, pancakes
in a stack with syrup drizzling down, rubies gleaming on a black-velvet
drape play cloth, a fish with mouth agape, a child laughing, a nun
praying, a woman crying over the blasted body of a loved one in some
Godforsaken war zone, a pack of Lifesavers, a puppy with floppy ears,
black-clad nuns with starched white wimples-from those and thousands of
other pictures in his treasured boxes of clippings, Thomas selected the
elements of his compositions.

From the beginning Bobby recognized an uncanny rightness to many of the
poems, a symmetry too fundamental to be defined, juxtapositions that
were both naive and profound, rhythms as real as they were elusive, a
personal vision plain to see but too mysterious to comprehend to any
significant degree.  Over the years, Bobby had seen the poems become
better, more satisfying, though he understood them so little that he
could not explain how he could discern the improvement; he just knew
that it was there.

Julie looked up from the two-page spread in the scrapbook and said,
"This is wonderful, Thomas.  It makes me want to...  run outside in the
grass...  and stand under the sky and maybe even dance, just throw my
head back and laugh.  It makes me glad to be alive."

"Yes!"  Thomas said, slurring the word, clapping his hands.

She passed the book to Bobby, and he sat on the edge of the bed to read
it.

The most intriguing thing about Thomas's poems was the emotional
response they invariably evoked.  None left a reader untouched, as an
array of randomly assembled images might have done.  Sometimes, when
looking at Thomas's work, Bobby laughed out loud, and sometimes he was
so moved that he had to blink back tears, and sometimes he felt fear or
sadness or regret or wonder.  He did not know why he responded to any
particular piece as he did; the effect always defied analysis.  Thomas's
compositions functioned on some primal level, eliciting reaction from a
region of the mind far deeper than the subconscious.

The latest poem was no exception.  Bobby felt what Julie had felt: that
life was good; that the world was beautiful; elation in the very fact of
existence.

He looked up from the scrapbook and saw that Thomas was awaiting his
reaction as eagerly as he had awaited Julie's, perhaps a sign that
Bobby's opinion was cherished as much as hers, even if he still didn't
rate as long or as ardent a hug as Julie did.

"Wow," he said softly.  "Thomas, this one gives such a warm, tingly
feeling that...  I think my toes are curling."  Thomas grinned.

Sometimes Bobby looked at his brother-in-law and felt two Thomases
shared that sadly deformed skull.  Thomas and one was the moron, sweet
but feebleminded.  Thomas and two was just as smart as anyone, but he
occupied one small part of the damaged brain that he shared with number
one, a chamber in the center, from which he had direct communication
with the outside world.  Although number two's thoughts had to be
filtered through number one's part of the brain, so they ended up
sounding different from Thomas number one's thoughts; therefore the
world could not know that number two was in there, thin and feeling and
fully alive-except through the evidence of picture poems, the essence of
which survived even after being filtered through Thomas number one.

"You've got such a talent," Bobby said, and he meant it almost envied
it.

Thomas blushed and lowered his eyes.  He rose and quickly shuffled to
the softly humming refrigerator that stood by the door to the bathroom.
Meals were served in the communal dining room, where snacks and drinks
were provided on request, but patients with sufficient mental capacity
to keep their rooms neat were allowed to have their own refrigerators
stocked with their favorite snacks and drinks, to encourage as much
independence as possible.  He withdrew three cans of Coke.  He gave one
to Bobby, one to Julie.  With the third he returned to the chair at the
worktable, sat down, and asked, "You been catchin' bad guys?"

"Yeah, we're keeping the jails full," Bobby said.

"Tell me."

Julie leaned forward in the armchair, and Thomas scooted his
straight-backed chair closer to her, until their knees touched, and she
recounted the highlights of the events at Decodyne last night.  She made
Bobby more heroic than he'd really been, and she played down her own
involvement a little not only out of modesty but in order not to
frighten Thomas with too clear a picture of the danger in which she had
gotten herself.  Thomas was tough in his own way; if he hadn't been he
would have curled up on his bed long ago, facing into the corner, and
never gotten up again.  But he was not tough enough to endure the loss
of Julie.  He would be devastated even to imagine that she was
vulnerable.  So she made her daredevil driving and the shoot-out sound
funny, exciting but not really dangerous.  Her revised version of events
entertained Bobby nearly as much as it did Thomas.

After a while, as usual, Thomas became overwhelmed by what Julie was
telling him, and the tale grew more confusing than entertaining.

"I'm full up," he said, which meant he was still trying to process
everything he had been told, and didn't have room for any more just now.
He was fascinated by the world outside Cielo Vista, and he often longed
to be a part of it, but at the same time he found it too loud and bright
and colorful to be handled in more than small doses.

Bobby got one of the older scrapbooks from the shelves and sat on the
bed, reading picture poems.

Thomas and Julie sat in their chairs, Cokes put aside, knees to knees,
leaning forward and holding hands, sometimes looking at each other,
sometimes not, just being together, close.  Julie needed that as much as
Thomas did.

Julie's mother had been killed when Julie was twelve.  Her father had
died eight years later, two years before Bobby and Julie had been
married.  She'd been only twenty at the time, working as a waitress to
put herself through college and to pay her half of the rent on a studio
apartment she shared with another student.  Her parents had never been
rich, and though they had kept Thomas at home, the expense of looking
after him had depleted what little savings they'd ever had.  When her
dad died, Julie had been unable to afford an apartment for her and
Thomas, to say nothing of the time required to help him cope in a
civilian environment, so she'd been forced to commit him to a state
institution for mentally disabled children.  Though Thomas never held it
against her, she viewed the commitment as a betrayal of him.

She had intended to get a degree in criminology, but she dropped out of
school during her third year and applied to the sheriffs' academy.  She
had worked as a deputy for fourteen months by the time Bobby met and
married her; she had been living on peanuts, her life-style hardly
better than that of a bag lady, saving most of her salary in hope of
putting together a nest egg that would allow her to buy a small house
someday take Thomas in with her.  Shortly after they were married when
Dakota Investigations became Dakota & and Dakota, they brought Thomas to
live with them.  But they worked irregular hours, and although some
victims of Down's syndrome were capable of living to a degree on their
own, Thomas needed someone nearby at all times.  The cost of three daily
shift qualified companions was even more than the cost of his care at a
private institution like Cielo Vista; but they would have borne it if
they could have found enough reliable help.

When it became impossible to conduct their business, have a life of
their own, and take care of Thomas, too, they brought him to Cielo
Vista.  It was as comfortable a care institution that ever existed, but
Julie viewed it was her second betrayal of her brother.  That he was
happy at Cielo Vista, even thrived it did not lighten her burden of
guilt.

One part of The Dream, an important part, was to have time and financial
resources to bring Thomas home again.

Bobby looked up from the scrapbook just as Julie asked, "Thomas, think
you'd like to go out with us for a while?

Thomas and Julie were still holding hands, and Bobby his
brother-in-law's grip tighten at the suggestion of an excursion.

"We could just go for a drive," Julie said.

"Down to the Walk on the shore.  Get an ice cream cone.  What do you
say?"

Thomas looked nervously at the nearest window, who framed a portion of
clear blue sky, where white sea gulls oddly swooped and capered.

"It's bad out."

"Just a little windy, honey."

"Don't mean the wind."

"We'll have fun."

"It's bad out," he repeated.  He chewed on his lower lip.  At times he
was eager to venture out into the world, but other times he withdrew
from the prospect as if the air outside Cielo Vista was purest poison.
Thomas could never be argued or cajoled out of that agoraphobic mood,
and Julie knew better than to push the issue.

"Maybe next time," she said.

"Maybe," Thomas said, looking at the floor.

"But feel really bad.  I...  sort of feel it...  the badness...  cold
over my skin."

For a while Bobby and Julie tried various subjects, but Thomas was
talked out.  He said nothing, did not make eye contact, and gave no
indication that he even heard them.

They sat together in silence, then, until after a few minutes Thomas
said, "Don't go yet."

"We're not going," Bobby assured him.

"Just 'cause I can't talk...  don't mean I want you gone."

"We know that, kiddo," Julie said.

"I...  need you."

"I need you too," Julie said.  She lifted one of her brother's
thick-fingered hands and kissed his knuckles.

AFter BUYING an electric razor at a drug store Frank Pollard shaved and
washed as best he could in a service station restroom.  He stopped at a
shopping mall and bought a suitcase, underwear, socks, a couple of
shirts, another pair of jeans, and incidentals.  In the mall parking
lot, with the stolen Chevy rocking slightly in the gusting wind, he
packed the other purchases in the suitcase.  Then he drove to a motel in
Irvine, where he checked in under the name of George Ferris, using one
of the sets of ID he possessed, making a cash deposit because he lacked
a credit card.  He had cash in advance.

He could have stayed in the Laguna area; but he sensed that he should
not remain in one place too long.  Maybe his wariness was based on hard
experience.  Or maybe he had been on the run for so long that he had
become a creature of motion could never again be truly comfortable at
rest.

The motel room was large, clean, and tastefully decorated The designer
had been swept up in the southwest craze: white washed wood, rattan side
chairs with cushions upholstered peach and pale-blue patterns,
seafoam-green drapes.  Only mottled-brown carpet, evidently chosen for
its ability to conceal stains and wear, spoiled the effect; by contrast,
the light hued furnishings seemed not merely to stand on the dark carpet
but to float above it, creating spatial illusions that were
disconcerting, even slightly eerie.

For most of the afternoon Frank sat on the bed, using a pile of pillows
as a back rest.  The television was on, but he didn't watch it. Instead,
he probed at the black hole of his past.  Hard as he tried, he could
still not recall anything of his life prior to waking in the alleyway
the previous night.  Some strange a exceedingly malevolent shape loomed
at the edge of recollection, however, and he wondered uneasily if
forgetfulness actually might be a blessing.

He needed help.  Given the cash in the flight bag and his two sets of
ID, he suspected that he would be unwise to seek assistance from the
authorities.  He withdrew the Yellow Pages from one of the night stands
and studied the listings for private investigators.  But a PI called to
mind old Humphrey Bogart movies and seemed like an anachronism in this
modern age.  How could a guy in a trench coat and a snap-brimmed fedora
help him recover his memory?

Eventually, with the wind singing melodies at the window, Frank
stretched out to get some of the sleep he had missed last night.

A few hours later, just an hour before dusk, he woke suddenly,
whimpering, gasping for breath.  His heart pounded furiously.

When he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, he saw that
his hands were wet and scarlet.  His shirt and jeans were smeared with
blood.  Some, though surely not all of it, was his own blood, for both
of his hands bore deep, oozing scratches.  His face stung, and in the
bathroom, the mirror revealed two long scratches on his right cheek, one
on his left cheek, and a fourth on his chin.

He could not understand how this could have happened in his sleep.  If
he had torn at himself in some bizarre dream frenzy-and he could recall
no dream-or if someone else had clawed him while he slept, he would have
awakened at once.  Which meant that he had been awake when it had
happened, then had stretched out on the bed again and gone back to
sleep-and had forgotten the incident, just as he had forgotten his life
prior to that alleyway last night.

He returned in panic to the bedroom and looked on the other side of the
bed, then in the closet.  He was not sure what he was looking for. Maybe
a dead body.  He found nothing.

The very thought of killing anyone made him sick.  He knew he did not
have the capacity to kill, except perhaps in self defense.  So who had
scratched his face and hands?  Whose blood was on him?

In the bathroom again, he stripped out of his stained clothes and rolled
them into a tight bundle.  He washed his face and hands.  He had a
styptic pencil along with other shaving gear; he used that to stop the
scratches from bleeding.

When he met his own eyes in the mirror, they were haunted that he had to
look away.

Frank dressed in fresh clothes and snatched the car keys from the
dresser.  He was afraid of what he might find in the Chevy parked At the
door, as he disengaged the dead bolt, he realized that neither the frame
nor the door itself was smeared with blood.  If he had left during the
afternoon and returned, bleeding from his hands, he would not have had
the presence of mind to wipe the door clean before climbing into bed.
Anyway, he had seen no bloody washcloth or tissues with which a cleanup
might have been accomplished.

Outside, the sky was clear; the westerly sun was bright.  the motel's
palm trees shivered in a cool wind.

The concrete walkway outside his room was not spotted with blood.  The
interior of the car was free of blood.  No blood marked the dirty rubber
mat in the trunk, either.

He stood by the open trunk, blinking at the sun-wash motel and parking
lot around him.  Three doors down, a man and woman in their twenties
were unloading luggage from their black Pontiac.  Another couple and
their grade-school-a daughter were hurrying along the covered walkway,
apparently heading toward the motel restaurant.  Frank realized that he
could not have gone out and committed murder and turned, blood-soaked
and in broad daylight, without being seen.

In his room again, he went to the bed and studied the rumpled sheets.
They were crimson-spotted, but not a fraction saturated as they would
have been if the attack-whatever nature-had happened there.  Of course,
with all the blood, it might have spilled mostly on the front of his
shirt and jeans.  But he still couldn't believe that he had clawed
himself in his sleep-one hand ripping at the other, both hands tearing
at his face-without waking.

Besides, he had been scratched by someone with sharp fingernails.  His
own nails were blunt, bitten down to the quick.

SOUTH OF Cielo Vista Care Home, between Corona Del Mar and Laguna, Bobby
tucked the Samurai into a corner of a parking lot at a public beach.  He
and Julie walked down to the shore.

The sea was marbled blue and green, with thin veins of gray.  The water
was dark in the troughs, lighter and more colorful where the waves rose
and were half pierced by the rays of the fat, low sun.  In serried ranks
the breakers moved toward the strand, big but not huge, wearing caps of
foam that the wind snatched from them.

Surfers in black wet suits paddled their boards out toward where the
swell rose, seeking a last ride before twilight.  Others, also in wet
suits, sat around a couple of big coolers, drinking hot beverages from
thermos bottles or Coors from the can.  The day was too cool for
sunbathing, and except for the surfers, the beach was deserted.

Bobby and Julie walked south until they found a low knoll, far enough
back from the water to escape the spray.  They sat on the stiff grass
that flourished in patches in the sandy soil.

When at last she spoke, Julie said,

"A place like this, with a view like this.  Not a big place."

"Doesn't have to be.  A living room, one bedroom for us and one for
Thomas, maybe a cozy little den lined with books."

"We don't even need a dining room, but I'd like a big kitchen."

"Yeah.  A kitchen you can really live in."  She sighed.

"Music, books, real home-cooked meals instead of junk food grabbed on
the fly, lots of time to sit on the porch and enjoy the view-and the
three of us together."

That was the rest of The Dream: a place by the sea and by otherwise
living simply-enough financial security to retire twenty years early.

One of the things that had drawn Bobby to Julie-and Julie to him-was
their shared awareness of the shortness of life.  Everyone knew that
life was too short, of course, but most people pushed that thought out
of mind, living as if there were endless tomorrows.  If most people
weren't able to deceive themselves about death, they could not have
cared so passionately about the outcome of a ball game, the plot of a
soap opera, the blatherings of politicians, or a thousand other things
that actually meant nothing when considered against the inevitable fall
of the endless night that finally came to everyone.  They could not have
endured to waste a minute standing in a supermarket line and would not
have suffered hours in the company of bores or fools.  Maybe a world lay
beyond this on maybe even Heaven, but you couldn't count on it; you
could count only on darkness.  Self-deception in this case was a
blessing.  Neither Bobby nor Julie was a gloom-monger.  She knew how to
enjoy life as well as anyone, and so did he, even if neither of them
could buy the fragile illusion of immortality than served most people as
a defense against the unthinkable.  This awareness expressed itself not
in anxiety or depression, but in a strong resolve not to spend their
lives in a hurly-burly meaningless activity, to find a way to finance
long stretches time together in their own serene little tide pool.

As her chestnut hair streamed in the wind, Julie squinted at the far
horizon, which was filling up with honey-gold light as the sinking sun
drizzled toward it.

"What frightens Thomas about being out in the world is people, too many
people.  But he'd be happy in a little house by the sea, a quiet stretch
of coast, few people.

"I'm sure he would."

"It'll happen," Bobby assured her.

"By the time we build the agency big enough to sell, the southern coast
will be too expensive.  But north of Santa Barbara is pretty."

"It's a long coast," Bobby said, putting an arm around her.

"We'll still be able to find a place in the south.  And we'll have time
to enjoy it.  We're not going to live forever, but we're young.  Our
numbers aren't going to come up for years an years yet."  But he
remembered the premonition that had shivered through him in bed that
morning, after they had made love, the feeling that something malevolent
was out there in the windswept world, coming to take Julie away from
him.

The sun had touched the horizon and begun to melt into it.  The golden
light deepened swiftly to orange and then to bloody red.  The grass and
tall weeds behind them rustled in the wind, and Bobby looked over his
shoulder at the spirals of airborne sand that swirled across the slope
between the beach and the parking lot, like pale spirits that had fled a
graveyard with the coming of twilight.  From the east a wall of night
was toppling over the world.  The air had grown downright cold.

CANDY SLEPT all day in the front bedroom that had once been his
mother's, breathing her special scent.  Two or three times a week, he
carefully shook a few drops of her favorite perfume-Channel Number
Five-onto a white, lace-trimmed handkerchief, which he kept on the
dresser beside her silver comb-and-brush set, so each breath he took in
the room reminded him of her.  Occasionally he half woke from slumber to
readjust the pillows or pull the covers more tightly around him, and the
trace of perfume always lulled him as if it were a tranquilizer; each
time he happily drifted back into his dreams.

He slept in sweatpants and a T-shirt, because he had a hard time finding
pajamas large enough and because he was too modest to sleep in the nude
or even in his underwear.  Being unclothed embarrassed Candy, even when
no one was around to see him.

All of that long Thursday afternoon, hard winter sun reeled the world
outside, but little got past the flower-patterned shades and
rose-colored drapes that guarded the two window The few times he woke
and blinked at the shadows, Candy saw only the pearl-gray glimmer of the
dresser mirror and glint from the silver-framed photographs on the night
stand Drugged by sleep and by the freshly applied perfume on the
handkerchief, he could easily imagine that his beloved mother was in her
rocking chair, watching over him, and he felt safe.  He came fully awake
shortly before sunset and lay for a while with his hands folded behind
his head, staring up at the underside of the canopy that arched over the
four-poster; he could not see it, but he knew it was there, and in his
mind could conjure up a vivid image of the fabric's rosebud patter.  For
a while he thought about his mother, about the best time of his life,
now all gone, and then he thought about the girl, the boy, and the woman
he had killed last night.  He tried to recall the taste of their blood,
but that memory was not as intense as those involving his mother.

After a while he switched on a bedside lamp and looked around at the
comfortably familiar room: rosebud wallpaper; rosebud bedspread; rosebud
blinds; rose-colored drapes and carpets; dark mahogany bed, dresser, and
highboy.  Two afghans-one green like the leaves of a rose, one the shade
of the petals-were draped over the arms of the rocking chair.

He went into the adjoining bathroom, locked and tested the door.  The
only light came from the fluorescent panels in the soffit, over the
sink, for he had long ago lathered black paint on the small high window.

He studied his face in the mirror for a moment because he liked the way
he looked.  He could see his mother in his face.  He had her blond hair,
so pale it was almost white, and her sea-blue eyes.  His face was all
hard planes and strong features, with none of her beauty or gentleness,
though his full mouth was as generous as hers.

As he undressed, he avoided looking down at himself.  He was proud of
his powerful shoulders and arms, his broad chest, and his muscular legs,
but even catching a glimpse of the sex thing made him feel dirty and
mildly ill.  He sat on the toilet to make water, so he wouldn't have to
touch himself.  During his shower, when he soaped his crotch, he first
pulled on a mitten that he had sewn from a pair of washcloths, so the
flesh of his hand would not have to touch the wicked flesh below.

When he had dried off and dressed-athletic socks, running shoes, dark
gray cords, black shirt-he hesitantly left the reliable shelter of his
mother's old room.  Night had fallen, and the upstairs hall was poorly
lit by two low-wattage bulbs in a ceiling fixture that was coated with
gray dust and missing half its pendant crystals.  To his left was the
head of the staircase.  To his right were his sisters' room, his old
room, and the other bath, the doors to which stood open; no lights were
on back there.  The oak floor creaked, and the threadbare runner did
little to soften his footsteps.  He sometimes thought he should give the
rest of the house a thorough cleaning, maybe even spring for some new
carpeting and fresh paint; however, though he kept his mother's room
spotless and in good repair, he was not motivated to spend time or money
on the rest of the house, and his sisters had little interest in-or
talent for homemaking.

A flurry of soft footfalls alerted him to the approach of the cats, and
he stopped short of the stairs, afraid of treading on one of their paws
or tails as they poured into the upstairs hallway.  A moment later they
streamed over the top step and swarmed around him: twenty-six of them,
if his most recent count was not out of date.  Eleven were black,
several more were chocolate-brown or tobacco-brown or charcoal-gray, two
were deep gold, and only one was white.  Violet and Verbina, his
sisters, preferred dark cats, the darker the better.

The animals milled around him, walking over his shoes, rubbing against
his legs, curling their tails around his calve Among them were two
Angoras, an Abyssinian, a tall Manx, a Maltese, and a tortoise shell,
but most were mongrel cats of no easily distinguished lineage.  Some had
green some yellow, some silver-gray, some blue, and they all regarded
him with great interest.  Not one of them purred or mowed; their
inspection was conducted in absolute silence.

Candy did not particularly like cats, but he tolerated them not only
because they belonged to his sisters but because, in a way, they were
virtually an extension of Violet and Verbina To have hurt them, to have
spoken harshly to them, would have been the same as striking out at his
sisters, which he could never do because his mother, on her death bed,
had admonished him to provide for the girls and protect them.

In less than a minute the cats had fulfilled their mission and almost as
one, turned from him.  With much swishing of tail and flexing of feline
muscles and rippling of fur, they flowed like a single beast to the head
of the stairs and down.

By the time he reached the first step, they were at the dining room
turning, slipping out of sight.  He descended to the low hall, and the
cats were gone.  He passed the lightless and must smelling parlor.  The
odor of mildew drifted out of the stud where shelves were filled with
the moldering romance novels that his mother had liked so much, and when
he pass through the dimly lit dining room, litter crunched under his
shoes.

Violet and Verbina were in the kitchen.  They were identical twins. They
were equally blond, with the same fair and flawless skin, with the same
china-blue eyes, smooth brows, high cheekbones, straight noses with
delicately carved nostrils, lips that were naturally red without
lipstick, and small even teeth as bone-white as those of their cats.

Candy tried to like his sisters, and failed.  For his mother's sake he
could not dislike them, so he remained neutral, sharing the house with
them but not as a real family might share it.  They were too thin, he
thought, fragile-looking, almost frail, and too pale, like creatures
that infrequently saw the sun which in fact seldom warmed them, since
they rarely went outside.  Their slim hands were well manicured, for
they groomed themselves as constantly as if they, too, were cats; but,
to Candy, their fingers seemed excessively long, unnaturally flexible
and nimble.  Their mother had been robust, with strong features and good
color, and Candy often wondered how such a vital woman could have
spawned this pallid pair.

The twins had piled up cotton blankets, six thick, in one corner of the
big kitchen, to make a large area where the cats could lie comfortably,
though the padding was actually for Violet and Verbina, so they could
sit on the floor among the cats for hours at a time.  When Candy entered
the room, they were on the blankets, with cats all around them and in
their laps.  Violet was filing Verbina's fingernails with an emery
board.  Neither of them looked up, though of course they had already
greeted him through the cats.  Verbina had never spoken a word within
Candy's hearing, not in her entire twenty-five years-the twins were four
years younger than he was,-but he was not sure whether she was unable to
talk, merely unwilling to talk, or shy of talking only when around him.
Violet was nearly as silent as her sister, but she did speak when
necessary; apparently, at the moment, she had nothing that needed to be
said.

He stood by the refrigerator, watching them as they huddled over
Verbina's pale right hand, grooming it, and he supposed that he was
unfair in his judgment of them.  Other men might find them attractive in
a strange way.  Though, to him, their limbs seemed too thin, other men
might see them as supple and erotic, like the legs of dancers and the
arms of acrobats.  Their skin was clear as milk, and their breasts were
full.  Because he was blessedly free of any interest in sex, he was not
qualified to judge their appeal.

They habitually wore as little as possible, as little as he would
tolerate before ordering them to put on more clothes.  They kept the
house excessively warm in winter, and more often dressed-as now-in
T-shirts and short shorts or panties barefoot and bare-limbed.  Only his
mother's room, which was now his, was kept cooler, because he had closed
the vents there.  Without his presence to demand a degree of modesty
they would have roamed the house in the nude.

Lazily, lazily, Violet filed Verbina's thumbnail, and they both stared
at it was intently as if the meaning of life was to read in the curve of
the half-moon or the arc of the nail itself.  Candy raided the
refrigerator, removing a chunk of canned ham, a package of Swiss cheese,
mustard, pickles, and a quart of milk.  He got bread from one of the
cupboards and sat on a rail back chair at the age-yellowed table.

The table, chairs, cabinets, and woodwork had once been glossy white,
but they had not been painted since before his mother died.  They were
yellow-white now, gray-white in the seams and corners, crackle-finished
by time.  The dais patterned wallpaper was soiled and, in a couple of
places, peeling along the seams, and the chintz curtains hung limp
covered with grease and dust.

Candy made and consumed two thick ham-and-cheese sandwiches.  He gulped
the milk straight from the carton.

Suddenly all twenty-six cats, which had been sprawling languidly around
the twins, sprang up simultaneously, proceeded to the pet door in the
bottom of the larger kitchen door, and went outside in orderly fashion.

Time to make their toilet, evidently.

Violet and Verbina didn't want the house smelling of litter boxes.

Candy closed his eyes and took a long swallow of milk.

He would have preferred it at room temperature or even slightly warm. It
tasted vaguely like blood, though not as pleasant pungent; it would have
been more like blood if it had not been chilled.

Within a couple of minutes the cats returned.  Now Verbina was lying on
her back, with her head propped on a pillow, eyes closed, lips moving as
if talking to herself, though no sound issued from her.  She extended
her other slender hand so his sister could meticulously file those nails
too.  Her long legs were spread, and Candy could see between her smooth
thighs.  She was wearing only a T-shirt and flimsy peach-colored panties
that defined rather than concealed the cleft of her womanhood.  The
silent cats swarmed to her, draped themselves over her, more concerned
about propriety than she was, and they regarded Candy accusatory, as if
they knew that he'd been staring.

He lowered his eyes and studied the crumbs on the table.

Violet said, "Frankie was here."

At first he was more surprised by the fact that she had spoken than by
what she had said.  Then the meaning of those three words reverberated
through him as if he were a brass gong struck by a mallet.  He stood up
so abruptly that he knocked over his chair.

"He was here?  In the house?"

Neither the cats nor Verbina twitched at the crash of the chair or the
sharpness of his voice.  They lay somnolent, indifferent.

"Outside," Violet said, still sitting on the floor beside her reclining
sister, working on the other twin's nails.  She had a low, almost
whispery voice.

"Watching the house from the Eugenia hedge."

Candy glanced at the night beyond the windows.

"When?"

"Around four o'clock."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"He wasn't here long.  He's never here long.  A minute or two, then he
goes.  He's afraid."

"You saw him?"

"I knew he was there."

"You didn't try to stop him from leaving?"

"How could I?"

She sounded irritable now, but her voice was no less seductive than it
had been.

"The cats went after him, though."

"Did they hurt him?"

"A little.  Not bad.  But he killed Samantha."

"Who?"

"Our poor little pussy.  Samantha."

Candy did not know the cats' names.  They had always seemed to be not
just a pack of cats but a single creature, most often moving as one,
apparently thinking as one.

"He killed Samantha.  Smashed her head against one of the stone
pilasters at the end of the walk."  At last Violet looked up from her
sister's hand.  Her eyes seemed to be a paler blue than before, icy.

"I want you to hurt him, Candy.  I want you to hurt him real bad, the
way he hurt our cat.  I don't care if he is our brother-"

"He isn't our brother any more, not after what he did Candy said
furiously.

"I want you to do to him what he did to our poor Samantha I want you to
smash him, Candy, I want you to crush his head crack his skull open
until his brains ooze out."  She continued to speak softly, but he was
riveted by her words.  Sometimes, like now, when her voice was even more
sensuous than us it seemed not merely to play upon his ears but to
slither inside his head, where it lay gently on his brain, like a mist,
a

"I want you to pound him, hit him and tear him until he's just
splintered bones and ruptured guts, and I want you to rip his eyes.  I
want him to be sorry he hurt Samantha."  Candy shook himself.

"If I get my hands on him, I'll kill him, all right, but not because of
what he did to your cat.

cause of what he did to our mother.  Don't you remember what he did to
her?  How can you worry about getting revenge on a cat when we still
haven't made him pay for our mother, after seven long years?"  She
looked stricken, turned her face from him, and fell silent.

The cats flowed off Verbina's recumbent form.

Violet stretched out half atop her sister, half beside her.

and put her head on Verbina's breasts.  Their bare legs were twined.

Rising part of the way out of her trance like state, Verbina stroked her
sister's silken hair.

The cats returned and cuddled against both twins where there was a warm
hollow to welcome them.

"Frank was here," Candy said aloud but largely to himself and his hands
curled into tight fists.

A fury grew in him, like a small turning wheel of wind out on the sea
but soon to whirl itself into a hurricane.  However, rage was an emotion
he dared not indulge; he must control himself.  A storm of rage would
water the seeds of his need.  His mother would approve of killing Frank,
for Frank had betrayed the family; his death would benefit the family.
But if Candy let his anger at his brother swell into a rage, then was
unable to find Frank, he would have to kill someone else because the
need would be too great to deny.  His mother, in Heaven, would be
ashamed of him, and for a while she would turn her face from him and
deny that she had ever given birth to him.  Looking up at the ceiling,
toward the unseen sky and the place at God's court where his mother
dwelled, Candy said,

"I'll be okay.  I won't lose control.  I won't."  He turned from his
sisters and the cats, and he went outside to see if any trace of Frank
remained near the Eugenia hedge or at the pilaster where he'd killed
Samantha.

BOBBY AND Julie ate dinner at Ozzie's, in Orange then shifted to the
adjoining bar.  The music was provided Eddie Day, who had a smooth,
supple voice; he played contemporary stuff but also tunes from the
fifties and early sixties.

It wasn't Big Band, but some early rock-and-roll had a swing beat.  They
could swing to numbers like "Dream Love, rumba to "La Bamba," and
cha-cha to any disco that was put into Eddie's repertoire, so they had a
good time.

Whenever possible, Julie liked to go dancing after she visited Thomas at
Cielo Vista.  In the thrall of the music, keeping time to the beat,
focused on the patterns of the dance, she was able to put everything
else out of her mind-even guilt, even grief.  Nothing else freed her so
completely.  Bobby liked to dance too, especially swing.  Tuck in, throw
out, change places, pull push, do a tight whip, tuck in again, throw
out, trade places with both hands linked, back to basic position...
Music soothed, but dance had the power to fill the heart with joy a to
numb those parts of it that were bruised.

During the musicians' break, Bobby and Julie sipped beer at a table near
the edge of the parquet dance floor.  They talked about everything
except Thomas, and eventually they got around to The Dream-specifically,
how to furnish the seaside bungalow if they ever bought it.  Though they
would not spend a fortune on furniture, they agreed that they could
indulge themselves with two pieces from the swing era: maybe a bronze
and marble Art Deco cabinet by Emile-Jacques Ruhlman and definitely a
Wurlitzer jukebox.

"The model 950," Julie said.

"It was gorgeous.  Bubble tub Leaping gazelles on the front panels."

"Fewer than four thousand were made.  Hitler's fault.  Wurlitzer
retooled for war production.  The model 500 is pretty too -or the 700."

"Nice, but they're not the 950."

"Not as expensive as the 950, either."

"You're counting pennies when we're talking ultimate beauty?"  He said,

"Ultimate beauty is the Wurlitzer 950?"

"That's right.  What else?"

"To me, you're the ultimate beauty."

"Sweet," she said.

"But I still want the 950."

"To you, aren't I the ultimate beauty?"

He batted his eyelashes.

"To me, you're just a difficult man who won't let me have my Wurlitzer
950," she said, enjoying the game.

"What about a Seeburg?  A Packard Player-moor?  Okay.  A Rock-ola?"

"Rock-ola made some beautiful boxes," she agreed.

"We'll buy one of those and the Wurlitzer 950."

"You'll spend our money like a drunken sailor."

"I was born to be rich.  Stork got confused.  Didn't deliver me to the
Rockefellers."

"Wouldn't you like to get your hands on that stork now?"

"Got him years ago.  Cooked him, ate him for Christmas dinner.  He was
delicious, but I'd still rather be a Rockefeller."

"Happy?"  Bobby asked.

"Delirious.  And it's not just the beer.  I don't know why, but tonight
I feel better than I've felt in ages.  I think we're going to get where
we want to go, Bobby.  I think we're going to retire early and live a
long happy life by the sea."

His smile faded as she talked.  Now he was frowning.  She said, "What's
wrong with you, Sourpuss?"

"Nothing."

"Don't kid me.  You've been a little strange all day.  You've tried to
hide it, but something's on your mind."

He sipped his beer.  Then: "Well, you've got this good feeling that
everything's going to be fine, but I've got a bad feeling."

"You?  Mr. Blue Skies?"  He was still frowning.

"Maybe you should confine yourself to office work for a while, stay off
the firing line."

"Why?"

"My bad feeling."

"Which is?"  "That I'm going to lose you."

"Just try."

WITH ITS invisible baton, the wind conducted a chorus of whispery voices
in the hedgerow.  The dense Eugenias formed a seven-foot-high wall
around three sides of the two-acre property, and they would have been
higher than the house itself if Candy had not used power trimmers to
chop off the tops of them a couple of times each year.

He opened the waist-high, wrought-iron gate between the two stone
pilasters, and stepped out onto the graveled shoulder of the county
road.  To his left, the two-lane blacktop wound up into the hills for
another couple of miles.  To his right, it dropped down toward the
distant coast, past houses on lots that were more parsimoniously
proportioned the nearer they were to the shore, until in town they were
only a tenth as big as the Pollard place.  As the land descended
westward, lights were clustered in ever greater concentration-then
stopped abruptly, several miles away, as if crowding against a black
wall; that wall was the night sky and the lightless expanse of the deep,
cold sea.

Candy moved along the high hedge, until he sensed that he had reached
the place where Frank had stood.  He held up both big hands, letting the
wind-fluttered leaves tremble against his palms, as if the foliage might
impart to him some psychic residue of his brother's brief visit.

Nothing.

Parting the branches, he peered through the gap at the house, which
looked larger at night than it really was, as if it had eighteen or
twenty rooms instead of ten.  The front windows were dark; along the
side, toward the back, where the light was filtered through greasy
chintz curtains, a kitchen window was filled with a yellow glow.  But
for that one light, the house might have appeared abandoned.  Some of
the Victorian gingerbread had warped and broken away from the eaves. The
porch roof was sagging, and a few railing balusters were ken, and the
front steps were swaybacked.  Even by the mere light of the low crescent
moon, he could see the house needed painting; bare wood, like glimpses
of dark bone, showed many places, and the remaining paint was either
peeling translucent as an albino's skin.

Candy tried to put himself in Frank's mind, to imagine Frank kept
returning.  Frank was afraid of Candy, and he had reason to be.  He was
afraid of his sisters, too, and of all memories that the house held for
him, so he should have stayed away.  But he crept back with frequency,
in search of something-perhaps something that even he did not understand
Frustrated, Candy let the branches fall together, retraced his steps
along the hedge, and stopped at one gate post, then other, searching for
the spot where Frank had fended off cats and smashed Samantha's skull.
Though far milder than it had been earlier, the wind nevertheless had
dried blood that had stained the stones, and darkness hid the residue
Still, Candy was sure he could find the killing place.  He gently
touched the pilaster high and low, on all four faces, if he expected a
portion of it to be hot enough to sear his hand.  But though he
patiently traced the outlines of the rough stones and the mortar seams,
too much time had passed; even his exceptional talents could not extract
his brother's lingering and He hurried along the cracked and canted
walkway, out the chilly night and into the stiflingly warm house again,
i the kitchen, where his sisters were sitting on the blankets the cats'
corner.  Verbina was behind Violet, a comb in hand and a brush in the
other, grooming her sister's flat hair.

Candy said, "Where's Samantha?"

Tilting her head, looking up at him perplexedly, Violet said, "I told
you.  Dead."

"Where's the body?"

"Here," Violet said, making a sweeping gesture with hands to indicate
the quiescent felines sprawled and curled around her.

"Which one?"  Candy asked.  Half of the creatures were still that any of
them might have been the dead one.

"All," Violet said.

"They're all Samantha now."  Candy had been afraid of that.  Each time
one of them died, the twins drew the rest of the pack into a circle,
placed the corpse at the center, and without speaking commanded the
living to partake of the dead.

"Damn," Candy said.

"Samantha still lives, she's still a part of us," Violet said.  Her
voice was as low and whispery as before, but dreamier than usual.

"None of our pussies ever really leaves us.  Part of him...  or her...
stays in each of us...  and we're all stronger because of that, stronger
and purer, and always together, always and forever."

Candy did not ask if his sisters had shared in the feast, for he already
knew the answer.  Violet licked the corner of her mouth, as if
remembering the taste, and her moist lips glistened; a moment later
Verbina's tongue slid across her lips too.

Sometimes Candy felt as if the twins were members of an entirely
different species from him, for he could seldom fathom their attitudes
and behavior.  And when they looked at him Verbina, in perpetual
silence-their faces and eyes revealed nothing of their thoughts or
feelings; they were as inscrutable as the cats.

He only dimly grasped the twins' bond with the cats.  It was their
blessed mother's gift to them just as his many talents were his mother's
generous bequest to him, so he did not question the rightness or
wholesomeness of it.

Still, he wanted to hit Violet because she hadn't saved the body for
him.  She had known Frank had touched it, that it could be of use to
Candy, but she had not saved it until he'd awakened, had not come to
wake him early.  He wanted to smash her, but she was his sister, and he
couldn't hurt his sisters; he had to provide for them, protect them. His
mother was watching.

"The parts that couldn't be eaten?"  he asked.

Violet gestured toward the kitchen door.

He switched on the outside light and stepped onto the back porch.  Small
knobs of bone and vertebrae were scattered like queerly shaped dice on
the unpainted floorboards.  Only two sides of the porch were open; the
house angled around the other two flanks of it, and in the niche where
the house walls met, Candy found a piece of Samantha's tail and scraps
of fur, jammed there by the night wind.  The half-crushed skull was on
the top step.  He snatched it up and moved down on to unmown lawn.

The wind, which had been declining since late afternoon suddenly stopped
altogether.  The cold air would have carried the faintest sound a great
distance; but the night was hushed.  Usually Candy could touch an object
and see who had handled it before him.  Sometimes he could even see
where some of those people had gone after putting the object down, and
when he went looking for them, they were always to be found where his
clairvoyance had led him.  Frank had killed the cat, and Candy hoped
that contact with the remains would spark an inner vision that would put
him on his brother's trail again.

Every speck of flesh had been stripped from Samantha's broken pate, and
its contents had been emptied as well.  Pick clean, licked smooth, dried
by the wind, it might have been a portion of a fossil from a distant
age.  Candy's mind was fill not with images of Frank but of the other
cats and Verbina and Violet, and finally he threw down the damaged skull
in disgust.

His frustration sharpened his anger.  He felt the need rising in him. He
dared not let the need bloom...  but resisting was infinitely harder
than resisting the charms of women and other sins.  He hated Frank.  He
hated him so much, so deep he had hated him so constantly for seven
years, that he couldn't even bear the thought that he had slept through
an opportunity to destroy him.

Need....

He dropped to his knees on the weedy lawn.  He fisted his hands and
hunched his shoulders and clenched his teeth, trying to make a rock of
himself, an unmovable mass that would not be swayed one inch by the most
urgent need, not one hair width by even the most dire necessity, the
most demanding hunger, the most passionate craving.  He prayed to his
mother to give him strength.  The wind began to pick up again, an he
believed it was a devil wind that would blow him toward temptation, so
he fell forward on the ground and dug his fingers into the yielding
earth, and he repeated his mother's name-Roselle-whispered her name
furiously into the grass and dirt, again and again, desperate to quell
the mention of his dark need.  Then he wept.  Then he got up.  And went
hunting.

FRANK WENT to a theater and sat through a movie but was unable to
concentrate on the story.  He ate dinner at El Torito, though he didn't
really taste the food; he just pushed down the enchiladas and rice as if
feeding fuel to a furnace.  For a couple of hours he drove aimlessly
back and forth across the middle and southern reaches of Orange County,
staying on the move only because, for the time being, he felt safer when
in motion.  Finally he returned to the motel.

He kept probing at the dark wall in his mind, behind which his entire
life was concealed.  Diligently, he sought the tiniest chink through
which he might glimpse a memory.  If he could find one crack, he was
sure that the entire facade of amnesia would come tumbling down.  But
the barrier was smooth and flawless.

When he switched off the lights, he could not sleep.

The Santa Anas had abated.  He could not blame his insomnia on the noisy
winds.

Although the amount of blood on the sheets had been minimal and though
it had dried since he'd awakened from his nap earlier in the day, he
decided that the thought of lying in bloodstained bedclothes was
preventing him from nodding off.  He snapped on a lamp, stripped the
bed, turned up the heat, stretched out in the darkness again, and tried
to sleep without covers.

No good.

He told himself that his amnesia-and the resultant loneliness and sense
of isolation-was keeping him awake.  Although there was some truth in
that, he knew that he was kidding himself.

The real reason he could not sleep was fear.  Fear of where he might go
while sleepwalking.  Fear of what he might do.  Fear of what he might
find in his hands when he woke up.

DEREK SLEPT.  In the other bed.  Snoring so Thomas couldn't sleep.  He
got up and stood by the window looking out.  The moon was gone.  The
dark was very big.

He didn't like the night.  It scared him.  He liked sunshine and flowers
all bright, and grass looking green, and blue all over so you felt like
there was a lid on the world to keep everything down here on the ground
and in place.  At night the colors were gone, and the world was empty,
like somebody took the lid off and let in a lot of nothingness, and
looked up at all that nothingness and you felt you might just float away
like the colors, float up and away and out of the world, and then in the
morning when they put the lid back on, you wouldn't be here, you'd be
out there somewhere, and you could never get back in again.  Never.

He put his fingertips against the window.  The glass was cold.  He
wished he could sleep away the night.  Usually he slept okay.  Not
tonight.

He was worried about Julie.  He always worried about her a little.  A
brother was supposed to worry.  But this wasn't little worry.  This was
a lot.

It started just that morning.  A funny feeling.  Not funny ha.  Funny
strange.  Funny scary.  Something real bad's going to happen to Julie,
the feeling said.  Thomas got so upset, tried to warn her.  He made a
warning to her.  They said the pictures and voices and music on the TV
were sent through the air, which he first thought was a lie, that they
were making fun of his being dumb, expecting him to believe anything,
but then Julie said it was true, so sometimes he tried to turn his
thoughts to her, because if you could send pictures and voices through
the air, thoughts ought to be easy.  Be careful, Julie, he thought. Look
out, be careful something bad's going to happen.

Usually, when he felt things about someone, that someone was Julie.  He
knew when she was happy.  Or sad.  When she was sick, he sometimes
curled up on his bed and put his hands on his own belly.  He always knew
when she was coming to visit.

He felt things about Bobby too.  Not at first.  When Julie first brought
Bobby around, Thomas felt nothing.  But slowly he felt more.  Until now
he felt almost as much about Bobby as about Julie.

He felt things about some other people too.  Like Derek.  Like Gina,
another Down's kid at The Home.  And like a couple of the aides, one of
the visiting nurses.  But he didn't feel half as much about them as he
did about Bobby and Julie.  He figured that maybe the more he loved
somebody, the bigger he felt things-knew things-about them.

Sometimes when Julie was worried about him, Thomas wanted real bad to
tell her that he knew how she felt, and that he was all right.  Because
just knowing he -understood would make her happier.  But he didn't have
the words.  He couldn't explain how or why he sometimes felt other
people's feelings.  And he didn't want to try to tell them about it
because he was afraid of looking dumb.

He was dumb.  He knew that.  He wasn't as dumb as Derek, who was very
nice, good to room with, but who was real slow.  They sometimes said
"slow" instead of "dumb" when they talked in front of you.  Julie never
did.  Bobby never did.  But some people said "slow" and thought you
didn't get it.  He got it.  They had bigger words, too, and he really
didn't understand those, but he sure understood "slow."  He didn't want
to be dumb, nobody gave him a choice, and sometimes he thought a message
to God, asking God to make him not dumb any more, but either God wanted
him to stay dumb always and forever but why?  or God just didn't get the
messages.

Julie didn't get the messages either.  Thomas always knew when he got
through to someone with a thought.  He never got to Julie.

But he could sometimes get through to Bobby, which was funny.  Not ha-ha
funny.  Strange funny.  Interesting funny.  When Thomas sent a thought
to Julie, Bobby sometimes got it instead.  Like this morning.  When he'd
sent a warning to Julie -Something bad is going to happen, Julie,
something real bad is coming -Bobby had picked it up.  Maybe because
Thomas and Bobby both loved Julie.  Thomas didn't know.  He couldn't
feel sure- But it sure happened.  Bobby tuned in.

Now Thomas stood at the window, in his pajamas, and looked out at the
scary night, and he felt the Bad Thing over there, felt it like a ripple
in his blood, like a tingle in his body The Bad Thing was far away, not
anywhere near Julie, but coming.

Today, during Julie's visit, Thomas wanted to tell her about the Bad
Thing coming.  But he couldn't find a way to say and make sense, and he
was scared of sounding dumb.  Julie and Bobby knew he was dumb, sure,
but he hated to sound dumb in front of them, to remind them how dumb he
was.  Every time he almost started to tell her about the Bad Thing he
just forgot how to use words.  He had the words in his mind, all lined
up in a row, ready to say, but then suddenly they were mixed up, and he
couldn't make them get back in the right order, so he couldn't say the
words because they'd be just words without meaning anything, and he'd
look really, real dumb.

Besides, he didn't know what to tell her the Bad Thing was He thought
maybe it was a person, a real terrible person over there, going to do
something to Julie, but it didn't exactly feel like a person.  Partly a
person, but something else.  Something that made Thomas feel cold not
just on his outside but on his inside, too, like standing in a winter
wind and eating ice cream at the same time.

He shivered.

He didn't want to get these ugly feelings about whatever out there, but
he couldn't just go back to bed and tune out either, because the more he
felt about the far-away Bad Thing the better he could warn Julie and
Bobby when the thing wasn't so far away any more.

Behind him, Derek murmured in a dream.

The Home was real quiet.  All the dumb people were deep asleep.  Except
Thomas.  Sometimes he liked to be awake when everyone else wasn't.
Sometimes that made him feel smarter than all of them put together,
seeing things they couldn't see and knowing things they couldn't know
because they were asleep and he wasn't.

He stared at the nothingness of night.

He put his forehead against the glass.

For Julie's sake, he reached.  Into the nothingness.  Toward the
far-away.

He opened himself.  To the feelings.  To the ripple-tingle.

A big ugly-nasty hit him.  Like a wave.  It came out of the night and
hit him, and he stumbled back from the window and fell on his butt
beside the bed, and then he couldn't feel the Bad Thing at all, it was
gone, but what he had felt was so big and so ugly that his heart was
pounding and he could hardly breathe, and right away he thought to
Bobby: Run, go, get away, save Julie, the Bad Thing's coming, the Bad
Thing, run, run.

THE DREAM was filled with the music of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight
Serenade," though like everything in dreams, the song was indefinably
different from the real tune.  Bobby was in a house that was at once
familiar yet total strange, and somehow he knew it was the seaside
bungalow to which he and Julie were going to retire young.  He drifted
into the living room, over a dark Persian carpet, comfortable-looking
upholstered chairs, a huge old chesterfield with rounded back and thick
cushions, a rusty looking carpet with bronze panels, an Art Deco lamp,
and overflowing bookshelves.  The music was coming from outside, so he
was out there.  He enjoyed the easy transitions of the dream, moving
through a door without opening it, crossing a wide porch a descending
wooden stairs without ever quite lifting a foot.  The sea rumbled to one
side, and the phosphorescent foam of breakers glowed faintly in the
night.  Under a palm tree, in the sand, with a scattering of shells
around it, stood a Wurlitzer 950, ablaze with gold and red light, bubble
tubes percolating gazelles perpetually leaping, figures of Pan
perpetually pipin record-changing mechanism gleaming like real silver,
and large black platter spinning on the turntable.  Bobby felt as
"Moonlight Serenade" would go on forever, which would have been fine
with him, because he had never been more mellow more at peace, and he
sensed that Julie had come out of the house behind him, that she was
waiting on the damp sand near the water's edge, and that she wanted to
dance with him, as he turned, and there she was, exotically illuminated
by the Wurlitzer, and he took a step toward her "Run, go, get away, save
Julie, the Bad Thing's coming, Bad Thing, run, run!

The indigo ocean suddenly leapt as if under the lash of a storm, and
spume exploded into the night air.

Hurricane winds shook the palms.

The Bad Thing!  Run!  Run!

The world tilted.  Bobby stumbled toward Julie.  The sea surged up
around her.  It wanted her; it was going to seize her; it was water with
a will, a thinking sea with a malevolent consciousness gleaming darkly
in its depths.

The Bad Thing!

The Glenn Miller tune speeded up, whirling at double time.

The Bad Thing!

The soft, romantic light from the Wurlitzer flamed brighter, stung his
eyes, yet did not drive back the night.  It was radiating light as if
the door to Hell had opened, but the darkness around them only
intensified, yielding nothing to that supernatural blaze.

THE BAD THING!  THE BAD THING!

The world tilted again.  Heaved and rolled.

Bobby staggered across the carnival-ride beach, toward Julie, who seemed
unable to move.  She was being swallowed by the churning oil-black sea.

THE BAD THING THE BAD THING THE BAD THING!

With the hard crack of riven stone, the sky split above them, but no
lightning stabbed out of that crumbling vault.

Geysers of sand erupted around Bobby.  Inky water exploded out of sudden
gaping holes in the beach.

He looked back.  The bungalow was gone.  The sea rose on all sides.  The
beach was dissolving under his feet.

Screaming, Julie disappeared under the water.

BADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHING

A twenty-foot wave loomed over Bobby.  It broke.  He was swept away.  He
tried to swim.  The flesh on his arms and hands bubbled and blistered
and began to peel off, revealing glints of ice-white bone.  The midnight
seawater was an acid.  His head went under.  He gasped, broke the
surface, but the corrosive sea had already kissed away his lips, and he
felt his gums receding from his teeth, and his tongue turned to rancid
mush in the salty rush of caustic brine that he had swallowed.  Even the
spray-filled air was erosive, eating away his lungs in an instant, so
when he tried to breathe he could not.  He went down, flailing at the
waves with arms and hands that were only bone, caught in an undertow,
sucked into everlasting darkness, dissolution, oblivion.

BAD THING!

Bobby sat straight up in bed.

He was screaming, but no cry issued from him.  When he realized he had
been dreaming, he stopped trying to scream and finally a low and
miserable sound escaped him.

He had thrown off the sheets.  He sat on the edge of the bed feet on the
floor, both hands on the mattress, steadying himself as if he was still
on that heaving beach or struggling to swim in those roiling tides.

The green numbers of the projection clock glowed fain on the ceiling:
2:43.

For a while the drum-loud thud of his own heart filled him with sound
from within, and he was deaf to the outer warmth But after a few seconds
he heard Julie breathing rhythmically, and he was surprised that he had
not awaken her.  Evidently he had not been thrashing in his sleep.

The panic that infused the dream had not entirely left him His anxiety
began to swell again, partly because the room was lightless as that
devouring sea.  Afraid of waking Julie did not switch on the bedside
lamp.

As soon as he was able to stand, he got up and circled the bed in the
perfect blackness.  The bathroom was on her side but a clear path was
provided, and he found his way as he had on countless other nights,
without difficulty, guided by both experience and instinct.

He eased the door shut behind him and switched on the lights.  For a
moment the fluorescent brilliance prevented him from looking into the
glary surface of the mirror above the double sinks.  When at last he
regarded his reflection, and that his flesh had not been eaten away. The
dream had been frighteningly vivid, unlike anything he'd known before;
and in some strange way it had been even more real than waking like with
intense colors and sounds that pulsed through his slumbering mind with
the full glare dazzle of light along the filament of an incandescent
bulb.  Though aware that it had been a dream, he had half feared that
the nightmare ocean had I its corrosive mark on him even after he woke.

Shuddering, he leaned against the counter.  He turned on the cold water,
bent forward, and splashed his face.  Dripping, he looked at his
reflection again and met his eyes.  He whispered to himself.

"What the hell was that?"  CANDY PROWLED.

The eastern end of the Pollard family's two-acre property dropped into a
canyon.  The walls were steep, composed mostly of dry crumbling soil
veined in places by pink and gray shale Only the expansive root systems
of the hardy, desert vegetation-chapparal, thick clumps of bunchgrass,
pampas grass scattered mesquite-kept the slopes from eroding extensively
in every heavy rain.  A few eucalyptuses, laurels, and melaleucas grew
on the walls of the canyon, and where the floor was broad enough,
melaleucas and California live oaks sank roots deep into the earth along
the runoff channel.  That channel only a dry stream bed now, but during
a heavy rain it over flowed.

Fleet and silent in spite of his size, Candy followed the canyon
eastward, moving upslope, until he came to a junction wit another
declivity that was too narrow to be called a canyon There, he turned
north.  The land continued to climb, though not as steeply as before.
Sheer walls soared on both sides of him, and in places the passage was
nearly pinched off, narrowing to only a couple of feet.  Brittle
tumbleweeds, blown into the ravine by the wind, had collected in mounds
at some those choke points, and they scratched Candy as he pushed
through them.

Without even a fragment moon, the night was unusually dark at the bottom
of that fissure in the land, but he seldom stumbled and never hesitated.
His gifts did not include super human vision; he was as blinded by
lightlessness as anyone However, even in the blackest night, he knew
when an obstacle lay before him, sensed the contours of the land so well
that he could proceed with surefooted confidence.  He did not know how
this sixth sense served him, and he did nothing to encourage it; he
simply had an uncanny awareness of his relationship with his
surroundings, knew his place at all times, much as the best high-wire
walkers, though blindfolded, could proceed with self-assurance along a
taut line above the upturned faces of a circus crowd.

This was another gift from his mother.

All of her children were gifted.  But Candy's talents exceeded those of
Violet, Verbina, and Frank.

The narrow passage opened into another canyon, and Candy turned east
again, along a rocky runoff channel, hurrying now as his need grew.
Though ever more widely separated, houses were still perched high above,
on the canyon rim; their bright windows were too far away to illuminate
the ground before him, but now and then he glanced up longingly because
within those homes was the blood he needed.

God had given Candy a taste for blood, made him a predator, and
therefore God was responsible for whatever Candy did; his mother had
explained all of that long ago.  God wanted him to be selective in his
killing; but when Candy was unable to restrain himself, the ultimate
blame was God's, for He had instilled the blood lust in Candy but had
not provided him with the strength to control it.

Like that of all predators, Candy's mission was to kill the sick and the
weak from the herd.  In his case, morally degenerate members of the
human herd were the intended prey: thieves, liars, cheats, adulterers.
Unfortunately he did not always recognize sinners when he met them.
Fulfilling his mission had been far easier when his mother had been
alive, for she had no trouble spotting the blighted souls for him.

Tonight he would try as best he could to confine his killing to wild
animals.  Slaughtering people-especially close to home-was chancy; it
might bring him under the eye of the police.  He could risk killing
locals only when they had crossed the family in some way and simply
could not be allowed to live.

If he was unable to satisfy his need with animals, he would go
somewhere, anywhere, and kill people.  His mother, up there in Heaven,
would be angry with him and disappointed by his lack of control, but God
would not be able to blame him.  After all, he was only what God had
made him.

With the lights of the last house well behind him, he stopped in a grove
of melaieucas.  The day's strong winds had blown out of the high hills,
down through the canyons, and out sea; currently the air seemed utterly
still.  Drooping from the branches of the melaleucas, and every I
blade-sleek leaf was motionless.

His eyes had adapted to the darkness.  The trees were silent in the dim
starlight, and their cascading trailers contributed to an illusion that
he was surrounded by a silent waterfall frozen in a paperweight
blizzard.  He could even make out ragged scrolls of bark that curled
away from the trunks limbs in the perpetual peeling process that lent a
unique be to the species.

He could not see any prey.

He could hear no furtive movement of wildlife in the brush However, he
knew that many small creatures, filled warm blood, were huddled nearby
in burrows, in secreting drifts of old leaves, and in the sheltered
niches of rocks.

The very thought of them made him half mad with hunger.

He held his arms out in front of him, palms facing away from him,
fingers spread.  Blue light, the shade of pale sapphire, as the glow of
a quarter-moon, perhaps a second in duration pulsed from his hands.  The
leaves trembled, and the sparse bunchgrass stirred, then all was still
as darkness reclaimed canyon floor.

Again, blue light shone forth from his hands, as if they were hooded
lanterns from which the shutters had been brightly lifted.  This time
the light was twice as bright as before, a deep blue, and it lasted
perhaps two seconds.  The leaves rustled, a few of the drooping trailers
swayed, and the grass shivered for thirty or forty feet in front of him.

Disturbed by those queer vibrations, something scurried toward Candy,
started past him.  With that special sense of surroundings that did not
rely on sight or sound or smell, reached to his left and snatched at the
unseen darting creature His reflexes were as uncanny as anything else
about him, he seized his prey.  A field mouse.  For an instant it froze
in horror.  Then it squirmed in his grasp, but he held fast to it.

His power had no effect on living things.  He could not use it on prey
with the telekinetic energy that radiated from his 0 palms.  He could
not draw them forth or call them to him, frighten them out of hiding. He
could have shattered on the melaieucas or sent geysers of dirt and
stones into the air, but no matter how hard he strained, he could not
have stirred one hair on the mouse by using just his mind.  He didn't
know why he was hampered by that limitation.  Violet and Verbina, whose
gifts were not half as impressive as his, seemed to have power only over
living things, smaller animals like the cats.  Plants bent to Candy's
will, of course, and sometimes insects, but nothing with a mind, not
even something with a mind as weak as that of a mouse.

Kneeling under the silvery trees, he was swaddled in gloom so deep that
he could see nothing of the mouse except its dimly gleaming eyes.  He
brought the fist-wrapped creature to his mouth.

It made a thing, terrified sound, more of a peep than a squeal.

He bit off its head, spat it out, and fastened his lips upon the torn
neck.  The blood was sweet, but there was too little of it.

He cast the dead rodent aside and raised his arms again, palms out,
fingers spread.  This time the splash of spectral light was an intense,
electric, sapphire blue.  Although it was of no longer duration than
before, its effect was startlingly greater.  A half dozen waves of
vibrations, each a fraction of a second apart, slammed up the inclined
floor of the canyon.  The tall trees shook, and the hundreds of drooping
trailers lashed the air, and the leaves thrashed with a sound like
swarms of bees.  Pebbles and smaller stones were flung up from the
ground, and loose rocks rattled against one another.  Every blade of
bunchgrass stood up stiff and straight, like hair on a frightened man's
nape, and a few clumps tore out of the soil and tumbled away into the
night, along with showers of dead leaves, as if a wind had captured
them.  But no wind disturbed the night-only the brief burst of sapphire
light and the powerful vibrations that accompanied it.

Wildlife erupted from concealment, and some of the animals streamed
toward him, heading down the canyon.  He had learned long ago that they
never recognized his scent as that of a human being.  They were as
likely to flee toward him as away from him.  Either he had no scent that
they could detect...  or they smelled something wild in him, something
more like themselves than like a human being, and in their panic they
did not realize that he was a predator.

They were visible, at best, as shapeless dark forms, streaming past him,
like shadows flung off by a spinning lamp.  But also sensed them with
his psychic gift.  Coyotes loped by, a panicked raccoon brushed against
his leg; he did not reach out for those, because he wanted to avoid
being badly clawed or bitten.  At least a double score of mice streamed
wit reach, as well, but he wanted something more full of life, he
with-blood.

He snatched at what he thought was a squirrel, missed, a moment later
seized a rabbit by its hind legs.  It shrieked thrashed with its less
formidable forepaws, but he got hold of those, too, not only
immobilizing the creature but paralyzed it with fear.

He held it up to his face.

Its fur had a dusty, musky smell.

Its red eyes glistened with terror.

He could hear its thunderous heart.

He bit into its throat.  The fur, hide, and muscle resisted teeth, but
blood flowed.

The rabbit twitched, not in an attempt to escape but a to express its
resignation to its fate; they were slow spas strangely sensuous, as if
the creature almost welcomed death.  Over the years Candy had seen this
behavior in countless animals, especially in rabbits, and he always
thrilled to it, it gave him a heady sense of power, made him feel as one
the fox and the wolf.

The spasms ceased, and the rabbit went limp in his hand Though it was
still alive, it had acknowledged the immanence of death and had entered
a trance like state in which it felt no pain.  This seemed to be a grace
that God bestowed small prey.

Candy bit into its throat again, harder this time, deeper,bit again,
deeper still, and the life of the rabbit spurted bubbled into his greedy
mouth.

Far away in another canyon, a coyote howled.  It was answered by others
in its pack.  A chorus of eerie voices rose fell and rose again, as if
the coyotes were aware that they were not the only hunters in the night,
as if they smelled the kill.

When he had supped, Candy cast the drained corpse aside.  His need was
still great.  He would have to break open blood reservoirs within more
rabbits or squirrels before his thirst was slaked.

He got to his feet and headed farther up into the canyon, where the
wildlife had not been disturbed by his first use of the power, where
creatures of many kinds waited in their burrows and hidey-holes to be
harvested.  The night was deep and bountiful.

MAYBE IT was just Monday morning blues.  May it was the bruised sky and
the promise of rain that formed her mood.  Or maybe she was tense and
sour because the violent events at Decodyne were only four days in the
past and the fore still too fresh.  But for some reason, Julie did not
want take on this Frank Pollard's case.  Or any other new case, that
matter.  They had a few ongoing security contracts with firms they had
served for years, and she wanted to stick to the comfortable, familiar
business.  Most of the work they did was about as risky as going to the
supermarket for a quart of milk but danger was a potential of the job,
and the degree of danger in each new case was unknown.  If a frail,
elderly lady had come to them that Monday morning, seeking help in
finding a lost cat, Julie probably would have regarded her as a menace a
par with an ax-wielding psychopath.  She was edgy.  After a if luck had
not been with them last week, Bobby would no be four days dead Sitting
forward in her chair, leaning over her sturdy met and-Formica desk, arms
crossed on the green-felt blotter, Julie studied Pollard.  He could not
meet her eyes, and that evasiveness aroused her suspicion in spite of
his harmless -even his appearance.

He looked as if he ought to have a Vegas comedian's nam Shecky, Buddy,
something like that.  He was about thirty yea old, Jive ten, maybe a
hundred and eighty pounds, which him was thirty pounds too much;
however, it was his face that was most suited for a career in comedy.
Except for a coup of curious scratches that were mostly healed, it was a
pleasant mug: open, kind, round enough to be jolly, deeply dimple A
permanent flush tinted his cheeks, as if he had been standing in an
arctic wind for most of his life.  His nose was reddish too, apparently
not from too great a fondness for booze, but from having been broken a
few times; it was lumpish enough to be amusing, but not sufficiently
squashed to make him look like a thug.

Shoulders slumped, he sat in one of the two leather-arm chrome chairs in
front of Julie's desk.  His voice was soft and pleasant, almost musical.

"I need help.  I don't know where else to go for it."  In spite of his
comedic looks, his manner was bleak.  Though it was mellifluous, his
voice was heavy with despair and weariness.  With one hand he
periodically wiped his face, as if pulling off cobwebs, then peered at
his hand with puzzlement each time it came away empty.

The backs of his hands were marked with scabbed-over scratches, too, a
couple of which were slightly swollen and inflamed.

"But frankly," he said,

"seeking help from private detectives seems ridiculous, as if this isn't
real life but a TV show."

"I've got heartburn, so it's real life, all right," Bobby said.  He was
standing at one of the big sixth-floor windows that faced out toward the
mist-obscured sea and down on the nearby buildings of Fashion Island,
the Newport Beach shopping center adjacent to the office tower in which
Dakota & Dakota leased a seven-room suite.  He turned from the view,
leaned against the sill, and extracted a roll of Rolaids from the pocket
of his jacket.

"TV detectives never suffer heartburn, dandruff, or the heartbreak of
psoriasis."

"Mr. Pollard," Julie said,

"I'm sure Mr. Karaghiosis has explained to you that strictly speaking we
aren't private detectives."

"Yes."

"We're security consultants.  We primarily work with corporations and
private institutions.  We have eleven employees with sophisticated
skills and years of security experience, which is a lot different from
the one-man PI fantasies on TV.  We don't shadow men's wives to see if
they're being unfaithful, and we don't do divorce work or any of the
other things that people usually come to private detectives for."

"Mr. Karaghiosis explained that to me," Pollard said, looking down at
his hands, which were clenched on his thighs.

From the sofa to the left of the desk, Clint Karaghiosis said,

"Frank told me his story, and I really think you ought to h why he needs
us."  Julie noted that Clint had used the would-be client's first name,
which he had never done before during six years with Dakota & Dakota.
Clint was solidly built-five foot eight, hundred and sixty pounds.  He
looked as though he had on been an inanimate assemblage of chunks of
granite and stone marble, flint and field stone, slate and iron and
lodesto which some alchemist had transmuted into living flesh.

broad countenance, though handsome enough, also looked if it had been
chiseled from rock.  In a search for a sign of weariness in his face,
one could say only that, though strong, so features were not as strong
as others.  He had a rocklike personality too: steady, reliable,
imperturbable.  Few people i pressed Clint, and fewer still pierced his
reserve and elicit more than a polite, businesslike response from him.
Hint of the client's first name seemed to be a subtle expression of
sympathy for Pollard and a vote of confidence in the truthfulness of
whatever tale the man had to tell.

"If Clint thinks this is something for us, that's good enough for me,"
Bobby said.

"What's your problem, Frank?"  Julie was not impressed that Bobby had
used the client's first name so immediately, casually.  Bobby liked
everyone he met at least until they emphatically proved themselves
unworthy of being liked.  In fact, you had to stab him in the back
repeatedly, virtually giggling with malice, before he would finally a
regretfully consider the possibility that maybe he shouldn't like you.
Sometimes she thought she had married a big puppy that was pretending to
be human.

Before Pollard could begin, Julie said,

"One thing, first.

we decide to accept your case-and I stress the if-we are cheap."

"That's no problem," Pollard said.  He lifted a leather flight bag from
the floor at his feet.  It was one of two he'd brought with him.  He put
it on his lap and unzippered it.  He withdrew a couple of packs of
currency and put them on the desk.  Twenties and hundreds.

As Julie took the money to inspect it, Bobby pushed away from the
windowsill and went to Pollard's side.  He look down into the flight bag
and said,

"It's crammed full."

"One hundred and forty thousand dollars," Pollard said Upon quick
inspection, the money on the desk did not appear to be counterfeit.
Julie pushed it aside and said,

"Mr. Pollard, are you in the habit of carrying so much cash?"

"I don't know," Pollard said.

"You don't know?"

"I don't know," he repeated miserably.

"He literally doesn't know,"

Clint said.

"Hear him out."  In a voice at once subdued yet heavy with emotion,
Pollard said,

"You've got to help me find out where I go at night.  What in God's name
am I doing when I should be sleeping?"

"Hey, this sounds interesting," Bobby said, sitting down on one corner
of Julie's desk.

Bobby's boyish enthusiasm made Julie nervous.  He might commit them to
Pollard before they knew enough to be sure that it was wise to take the
case.  She also didn't like him sitting on her desk.  It just didn't
seem businesslike.  She felt that it gave the prospective client an
impression of amateurism.

From the sofa, Clint said,

"Should I start the tape?"

"Definitely,"

Bobby said.

Clint was holding a compact, battery-powered tape recorder.  He flicked
the switch and set the recorder on the coffee table in front of the
sofa, with the built-in microphone aimed at Pollard, Julie, and Bobby.

The slightly chubby, round-faced man looked up at them.  The rings of
bluish skin around his eyes, the watery redness of the eyes themselves,
and the paleness of his lips belied any image of robust health to which
his ruddy cheeks might have lent credence.  A hesitant smile flickered
across his mouth.  He met Julie's eyes for no more than a second, looked
down at his hands again.  He seemed frightened, beaten, altogether
pitiable.  In spite of herself she felt a pang of sympathy for him.

As Pollard began to speak, Julie sighed and slumped back in her chair.
Two minutes later, she was leaning forward again, listening intently to
Pollard's soft voice.  She did not want to be fascinated, but she was.
Even phlegmatic Clint Karaghiosis, hearing the story for the second
time, was obviously captivated by it.

If Pollard was not a liar or a raving lunatic-and most likely he was
both-then he was caught up in events of an almost supernatural nature.
Julie did not believe in the SUPERNATURAL.

She tried to remain skeptical, but Pollard's demeanor and dent
conviction persuaded her against her will.

Bobby began making holy-jeez-gosh-wow sounds and slurping the desk in
astonishment at the revelation of each twist in the tale.  When the
client- No. Pollard.  Not

"the client."  He wasn't their client yet.  Pollard.  When Pollard told
them about waking in a motel room Thursday afternoon, blood on his
hands, Bobby blurted,

"We'll take the case!"

"Bobby, wait," Julie said.

"We haven't heard everything Mr. Pollard came here to tell us.  We
shouldn't-"

"Yeah, Frank," Bobby said,

"what the hell happened the Julie said, "What I mean is, we have to hear
his whole story before we can possibly know whether or not we can help
him

"Oh, we can help him, all right," Bobby said.

"We-"

"Bobby," she said firmly,

"could I see you alone for a moment?"  She got up, crossed the office,
opened the door to adjoining bathroom, and turned on the light in there.

Bobby said,

"Be right back, Frank."  He followed Julie i the bathroom, closing the
door behind them.

She switched on the ceiling exhaust fan to help muffle the voices, and
spoke in a whisper.

"What's wrong with you?

"Well, I have flat feet, no arches at all, and I've got that mole in the
middle of my back."

"You're impossible."

"Flat feet and a mole are too many faults for you to hand You're a hard
woman."  The room was small.  They were standing between the sink and
the toilet, almost nose to nose.  He kissed her forehead

"Bobby, for God's sake, you just told Pollard we'll take case.  Maybe we
won't."

"Why wouldn't we?  It's fascinating."

"For one thing, he sounds like a nut."

"No, he doesn't."

"He says some strange power caused that car to disintegrate blew out
streetlights.  Strange flute music, mysterious blue lights...  This
guy's been reading the National Enquirer too long."

"But that's just it.  A true nut would already be able to plain what
happened to him.  He'd claim he'd met God or Magicians.  This guy is
baffled, looking for answers.  That strikes as a sane response."

"Besides, we're in business, Bobby.  Business.  Not for fun.

For money.  We're not a couple of damned hobbyists."

"He's got money.  You saw it."

"What if it's hot money?"

"Frank's no thief."

"You know him less than an hour and you're sure he's no thief'?  You're
so trusting, Bobby."

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment.  How can you do the kind of work you do, and be
so trusting?"  He grinned.

"I trusted you, and that turned out okay."  She refused to be charmed.

"He says he doesn't know where he got the money, and just for the sake
of the argument, let's say we buy that part of the story.  And let's
also say you're right about him not being a thief.  So maybe he's a drug
dealer.  Or something else.  There's a thousand ways it could be hot
money without being stolen.  And if we find out that it's hot, we can't
keep what he pays us.  We'll have to turn it over to the cops.  We'll
have wasted our time and energy.  Besides...  it's going to be messy."

"Why do you say that?"  he asked.

"Why do I say that?  He just told you about waking up in a motel room
with blood all over his hands!"

"Keep your voice down.  You might hurt his feelings."

"God forbid!"

"Remember, there was no body.  It must've been his own blood."

Frustrated, she said, "How do we know there was no body?

Because he says there wasn't?  He might be such a nut case that he
wouldn't even notice the body if he stepped in its steaming bowels and
stumbled over its decapitated head."

"What a vivid image."  "Bobby, he says maybe he clawed at himself, but
that's not very damned likely.  Probably some poor woman, some innocent
girl, maybe even a child, a helpless schoolgirl, was attacked by that
man, dragged into his car, raped and beaten and raped again, forced to
perform every humiliating act a perverse mind could imagine, then driven
to some lonely desert canyon, maybe tortured with needles and knives and
God knows what, then clubbed to death, and pitched naked into a dry
wash, where coyotes are even now chewing on the softer parts of with
flies crawling in and out of her open mouth."

"Julie, you're forgetting something."

"What?"

"I'm the one with the overactive imagination."  She laughed.  She
couldn't help it.  She wanted to thump skull hard enough to knock some
sense into him, but laughed instead and shook her head.

He kissed her cheek, then reached for the doorknob.

She put her hand on his.

"Promise we won't take the case until we've heard his whole story and
have time to think about it."

"All right."  They returned to the office.

Beyond the windows, the sky resembled a sheet of steel that had been
scorched black in places, with a few scattered incrustations of
mustard-yellow corrosion.  Rain had not begun to fall, but the air
seemed tense in expectation of it.

The only lights in the room were two brass lamps on tables that flanked
the sofa, and a silk-shaded brass floorlamp in the corner.  The overhead
fluorescence were not on, because both hated the glare and believed that
an office should be as cozy lighted as a den in a private home.  Julie
thought it should look and feel like an office.  But she humored Bobby
and usually left the fluorescence off.  Now as the oncoming storm
darkened the day, she wanted to switch on the overhead and chase away
the shadows that had begun to gather in the corners untouched by the
amber glow of the lamps.

Frank Pollard was still in his chair, staring at the framed posters of
Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Uncle Scrooge that adorned the walls.
They were another burden under who Julie labored.  She was a fan of
Warner Brothers cartoons, because they had a harder edge than Disney's
creations, and owned videotape collections of them, plus a couple of
additional cells of Daffy Duck, but she kept that stuff at home.  Bobby
brought the Disney cartoon characters into the office because (he said)
they relaxed him, made him feel good, and helped him think.  No clients
ever questioned their professionalism merely because of the
unconventional artwork on the walls, but she still worried about what
they might think.

She went behind her desk again, and again Bobby perched on it.

After winking at Julie, Bobby said, "Frank, I was premature in accepting
the case.  We really can't make that decision until we've heard your
whole story."

"Sure," Frank said, looking quickly at Bobby, at Julie, then down at his
scratched hands, which were now clutching the open flight bag.

"That's perfectly understandable."

"Of course it is," Julie said.

Clint switched on the tape recorder again.

Exchanging the flight bag on his lap for the one on the floor, Pollard
said, "I should give you these."

He unzippered the second satchel and withdrew a plastic bag that
contained a small portion of the handsful of black sand he'd been
clutching when he had awakened after his brief sleep Thursday morning.
He also withdrew the bloody shirt he had been wearing when he had arisen
from his even shorter nap later that same day.

"I saved them because...  well, they seemed like evidence.  Clues. Maybe
they'll help you figure out what's going on, what I've done."

Bobby accepted the shirt and the sand, examined them briefly, then put
them on the desk beside him.

Julie noted that the shirt had been thoroughly saturated with blood, not
merely spotted.  Now the dry brownish stains made the material stiffer.

"So you were in the motel Thursday afternoon," Bobby prompted.

Pollard nodded.

"Nothing much happened that night.  I went to a movie, couldn't get
interested in it.  Drove around a while.  I was tired, real tired, in
spite of the nap, but I couldn't sleep at all.  I was afraid to sleep.
Next morning I moved to another motel."

"When did you finally sleep again?"  Julie asked.

"The next evening."

"Friday evening that was?"

"Yeah.  I tried to stay awake with lots of coffee.  Sat at the counter
in the little restaurant attached to the motel, and drank coffee until I
started to float off the stool.  Stomach got so acidic, I had to stop.
Went back to my room.  Every time I started nodding off, I went out for
a walk.  But it was pointless.  I couldn't stay awake forever.  I was
coming apart at the seams.

I Had to get some rest.  So I went to bed shortly past eight in the
evening, fell asleep instantly, and didn't wake up until half past five
in the morning."

"Saturday morning."

"Yeah."

"And everything was okay?"  Bobby asked.

"At least there was no blood.  But there was something else They waited.

Pollard licked his lips, nodded as if confirming to himself his
willingness to continue.

"See, I'd gone to bed in my boxer shorts...  but when I woke up I was
fully clothed."

"So you were sleepwalking, and you dressed in your sleep.  Julie said.

"But the clothes I was wearing weren't any I'd ever seen before."

Julie blinked.

"Excuse me?"

"They weren't the clothes I was wearing when I came to that alleyway two
nights before, and they weren't the clothes I bought at the mall on
Thursday morning."

"Whose clothes were they?"  Bobby asked.

"Oh, they must be mine," Pollard said, "because they fit too well to
belong to anyone else.  They fit perfectly.  Even the shoes fit
perfectly.  I couldn't have lifted that outfit from some one else and
been lucky enough to have it all fit so well."

Bobby slipped off the desk and began to pace.

"So what are you saying?  That you left that motel in your underwear,
went out to some store, bought clothes, and nobody objected to your
modesty or even questioned you about it?"

Shaking his head, Pollard said, "I don't know."

Clint Karaghiosis said, "He could've dressed in his room while
sleepwalking, then went out, bought other clothes changed into them."

"But why would he do that?"  Julie asked.

Clint shrugged.

"I'm just offering a possible explanation

"Mr. Pollard," Bobby said, "why would you have done something like
that?"

"I don't know."

Pollard had used those three words so oft that he was wearing them out;
each time he repeated them his voice seemed softer and fuzzier than
before.

"I don't think I did.  It doesn't feel right-as an explanation, I mean.
besides I didn't fall asleep in the motel until after eight o'clock.  I
probably couldn't have gotten up again, gone out, and bought the clothes
before the stores closed."

"Some places are open until ten o'clock," Clint said.

"There was a narrow window of opportunity," Bobby agreed.

"I don't think I would've broken into a store after hours," Pollard
said.  "Or stolen the clothes.  I don't think I'm a thief."

"We know you're not a thief," Bobby said.

"We don't know any such thing," Julie said sharply.

Bobby and Clint looked at her, but Pollard continued to stare at his
hands, too shy or confused to defend himself.

She felt like a bully for having questioned his honesty.  Which was
nuts.  They knew nothing about him.  Hell, if he was telling the truth,
he knew nothing about himself.

Julie said, "Listen, whether he bought or stole the clothes is not the
point here.  I can't accept it either.  At least not with our current
scenario.  It's just too outrageous-the man going to a mall or K-Mart or
someplace in his underwear, outfitting himself, while he's sleepwalking.
Could he do all that and not wake up-and appear to be awake to other
people?  I don't think so.  I don't know anything about sleepwalking,
but if we research it, I don't think we'll find such a thing is
possible."

"Of course, it wasn't just the clothes," Clint said.

"No, not just the clothes," Pollard said.

"When I woke up, there was a large paper bag on the bed beside me, like
one of those you get at a supermarket if you don't want plastic.  I
looked inside, and it was full of...  money.  More cash."

"How much?"  Bobby asked.

"I don't know.  A lot."

"You didn't count it?"

"It's back at the motel where I'm staying now, the new place.  I keep
moving.  I feel safer that way.  Anyway, you can count it later if you
want.  I tried to count it, but I've lost my ability to do even simple
arithmetic.  Yeah, that sounds screwy, but it's what happened.  Couldn't
add the numbers.  I keep trying but...  numbers just don't mean much to
me any more."  He lowered his head, put his face in his hands.

"First I lost my memory.  Now I'm losing essential skills, like math.  I
feel as if...  as if I'm coming apart...  dissolving...  until there's
going to be none of me left, just a body, no mind at all...  gone."

"That won't happen, Frank," Bobby said.

"We won't quit.  We'll find out who you are and what all this means."

"Bobby," Julie said warningly.

"Hmmm?"  He smiled obtusely.

She got up from her desk and went into the bathroom.

"Ah, Jeez."  Bobby followed her, closed the door, and turned on the fan.

"Julie, we have to help the poor guy."

"The man is obviously experiencing psychotic fugues.

doing these things in a blacked-out condition.  He gets them in the
middle of the night, yeah, but he's not sleepwalking.

awake, alert, but in a fugue state.  He could steal, kill-and remember
any of it."

"Julie, I'll bet you that was his own blood on his hands.

maybe having blackouts, fugues, whatever you want to call them, but he's
not a killer.  How much you want to bet?

"And you still say he's not a thief.?  On a regular basis he wakes up
with a bagful of money, doesn't know where he got it, but he's not a
thief.?  You think maybe he counterfeits during these amnesiac spells?
No, I'm sure you think he's nice to be a counterfeiter."

"Listen," he said,

"we've got to go with gut feelings sometimes, and my gut feeling is that
Frank is a good guy.  Clint thinks he's a good guy."

"Greeks are notoriously gregarious.  They like every one.

"You telling me Clint is your typical Greek social animal?  Are we
talking about the same Clint?  Last name-Karaghiosis ?  Guy who looks as
if he was cast from concrete, and about as stoic as a cigar store
Indian?"

The light in the bathroom was too bright.  It bounced off the mirror,
white sink, white walls, and white ceramic tile.  Thanks to the glare
and Bobby's good-natured if not iron-willed did nothing to help Pollard,
Julie was getting a headache.

She closed her eyes.

"Pollard's pathetic," she admitted.

"Want to go back in there and hear him out?"

"All right.  But, dammit, don't tell him we'll help him until we've
heard everything.  All right?"

They returned to the office.

The sky no longer looked like cold, scorched metal.  It was darker than
before, and churning, molten.  Though only a mildest breeze stirred at
ground level, stronger winds were at work in the higher altitudes, for
dense black thunderheads were being hurled inland from the sea.

Like metal filings drawn to magnets, shadows had piled up in some
corners.  Julie reached for the switch to snap on the overhead
fluorescence.  Then she saw Bobby looking around with obvious pleasure
at the softly lustrous, burnished brass surfaces of the lamps, at the
way the polished oak end tables and coffee table glimmered in the fall
of warm buttery light, and she left the switch unflicked.

She sat behind her desk again.  Bobby perched on the edge of it, legs
dangling.

Clint clicked on the tape recorder, and Julie said,

"Frank...

Mr. Pollard, before you continue your story, I'd like you to answer a
few important questions for me.  In spite of the bloody hands, and the
scratches, you believe you're incapable of hurting anyone?"

"Yeah.  Except maybe in self-defense."

"And you don't think you're a thief'?"

"No. I can't..., I don't see myself as a thief, no."

"Then why haven't you gone to the police for help?"

He was silent.  He clutched the open flight bag on his lap and peered
into it, as if Julie was speaking to him from its interior.

She said, "Because if you really feel certain you're an innocent man in
all regards, the police are best equipped to help you find out who you
are and who's pursuing you.  You know what I think?  I think you're not
as certain of your innocence as you pretend.  You know how to hot-wire a
car, and although any man with reasonable knowledge of automobiles could
perform that trick, it's at least an indication of criminal experience.
And then there's the money, all that money, bags full of it.  You don't
remember committing any crimes, but in your heart you're convinced you
have, so you're afraid to go to the COPS."

"That's part of it," he acknowledged.

She said, "You do understand, I hope, that if we take your case, and if
we turn up evidence that you've committed a criminal act, we'll have to
convey that information to the police."

"Of course.  But I figure if I went to the cops first, they wouldn't
even look for the truth.  They'd make up their minds that I was guilty
of something even before I finished telling my story."

"And of course we wouldn't do that," Bobby said, turning his head to
favor Julie with a meaningful look.

Pollard said, "Instead of helping me, they'd look around some recent
crimes to pin on me."

"The police don't work that way," Julie assured him.

"Of course they do," Bobby said mischievously.

He slid the desk and began to pace back and forth from the Uncle Scrooge
poster to one of Mickey Mouse.

"Haven't we seen 'e do that a thousand times on TV shows?  Haven't we
all read Hammett and Chandler?"  "Mr. Pollard," Julie said,

"I was a police officer once-' "Proves my point," Bobby said.

"Frank, if you'd gone to the cops, you'd no doubt already have been
booked, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a thousand years."

"There's a more important reason I can't go to the cops That would be
like going public.  Maybe the press would hear about me, and be real
eager to do a story about this poor guy with amnesia and bags of cash.
Then he would know where to find me.  I can't risk that."

Bobby said, "Who is 'he,' Frank?"

"The man who was chasing me the other night."

"The way you said it, I thought you'd remembered his name, had a
specific person in mind."

"No. I don't know who he is.  I'm not even entirely sure who he is.  But
I know he'll come for me again if he learns where I am.  So I've got to
keep my head down."

From the sofa, Clint said, "I better flip the tape over."

They waited while he popped the cassette out of the recorder.

Although it was only three o'clock, the day was in the grip of a false
twilight indistinguishable from the real one.  The breeze at ground
level was striving to match the wind that drove the clouds at higher
altitudes; a thick fog poured in from the west, exhibiting none of the
lazy motion with which fog usually advanced, swirling and churning, a
molten flux that seemed to be trying to solder the earth to the thunder
heads above.

When Clint had the recorder going again, Julie said, "Frank is that the
end of it?  When you woke Saturday morning, were you wearing new
clothes, with the paper bag full of money on the bed beside you?"

"No. Not then."

He raised his head, but he didn't look at her.  He stared past her at
the dreary day beyond the windows, though he seemed to be gazing at
something much farther away than Newport Beach.

"Maybe it's never going to end."  From the second flight bag out of
which he had earlier withdrawn the bloody shirt and the sample of black
sand, he produced a one-pint mason jar of the type used to store
homecanned fruits and vegetables, with a sturdy, hinged glass lid that
clamped on a rubber gasket.  The jar was filled with what appeared to be
rough, uncut, dully gleaming gems.  Some were more polished than others;
they sparkled, flared.

Frank released the lid, tipped the jar, and poured some of the contents
onto the imitation blond-wood Formica desktop.

Julie leaned forward.

Bobby stepped in for a closer look.

The less irregular gems were round, oval, teardrop, or lozenge-shaped;
some aspects of each stone were smoothly curved, and some were naturally
beveled with lots of sharp edges.  Other gems were lumpy, jagged,
pocked.  Several were as large as fat grapes, others as small as peas.
They were all red, though they varied in their degree of coloration.
They vigorously refracted the light, a pool of scarlet glitter on the
pale surface of the desk; the gems marshaled the diffuse glow of the
lamps through their prisms, and cast shimmering spears of crimson toward
the ceiling and one wall, where the acoustic tiles and Sheetrock
appeared to be marked by luminous wounds.

"Rubies?"  Bobby asked.

"They don't look quite like rubies," Julie said.

"What are they, Frank?"

"I don't know.  They might not even be valuable."

"Where'd you get them?"

"Saturday night I couldn't sleep much at all.  Just minutes at a time. I
kept tossing and turning, popping awake again as soon as I dozed off.
Afraid to sleep.  And I didn't nap Sunday afternoon.  But by yesterday
evening, I was so exhausted, I couldn't keep my eyes open any more.  I
slept in my clothes, and when I got up this morning, my pants pockets
were filled with these things."

Julie plucked one of the more polished stones from the pile and held it
to her right eye, looking through it toward the nearest lamp.  Even in
its raw state, the gem's color and clarity were exceptional.  They
might, as Frank implied, be only semiprecious, but she suspected that
they were, in fact, of considerable value.

Bobby said, "Why're you keeping them in a mason jar?"

"Because I had to go buy one anyway to keep this, stuff.

From the flight bag he produced a larger, quart-size jar and placed it
on the desk.

Julie turned to look at it and was so startled that she dropped the gem
she had been examining.  An insect, nearly as large as her hand, lay in
that glass container.  Though it had a tough shell like a
beetle-midnight black with blood-red markings around the entire rim-the
thing within that carapace more closely resembled a spider than a
beetle.  It had the sturdy, hairy legs of a tarantula.

"What the hell?"

Bobby grimaced.  He was mildly entromophobic.  When he encountered any
insect more formidable than a housefly, he called upon Julie to capture
or kill it, while he watched from a distance.

"Is it alive?"  Julie asked.

"Not now," Frank said.

Two forearms, like miniature lobster claws, extended from under the
front of the thing's shell, one on each side of the head, though they
differed from the appendages of a lobster in that the pincers were far
more highly articulated than those of any common crustacean.  They
somewhat resembled a hand with four curved, chitinous segments, each
jointed at the back, the edges were wickedly serrated.

"If that thing got hold of your finger," Bobby said, "It could snip it
off.  You say it was alive, Frank?"

"When I woke up this morning, it was crawling on my chest.

"Good God!"  Bobby paled visibly.

"It was sluggish."

"Yeah?  Well, it sure looks quick as a damned cockroach

"I think it was dying already," Frank said.

"I screamed brushed it off.  It just lay there on its back, on the
floor, kicking kinda feebly for a few seconds, then it was still.  I
stripped the case off one of the bed pillows, scooped the thing into it,
knotted the top so it wouldn't crawl away if it was still alive.  Then I
discovered the gems in my pockets, so I bought two mason jars, one for
the bug, and it hasn't moved since I put it in there, so I figure it's
dead.  You ever see anything like it?"

"No," Julie said.

"Thank God, no," Bobby agreed.  He was not leaning over the jar for a
closer look, as Julie was.  In fact he had taken a step back from the
desk, as if he thought the creepy-crawler might be able, in a wink, to
cut its way through the glass.

Julie picked up the jar and turned it so she could look at the bug
face-on.  Its satin-black head was almost as big as a plum and half
hidden under the carapace.  Multifaceted, muddy yellow eyes were set
high on the sides of the face, and under each of them was what appeared
to be another eye, a third smaller than the one above it and
reddish-blue.  Queer patterns of tiny holes, half a dozen thumblike
extrusions, and three clusters of silky-looking hairs marked the
otherwise smooth, shiny surface of that hideous countenance.  Its small
mouth, open now, was a circular orifice in which she saw what appeared
to be rings of tiny but sharp teeth.

Staring at the occupant of the jar, Frank said, "Whatever the hell I'm
mixed up in, it's a bad thing.  It's a real bad thing, and I'm afraid."

Bobby twitched.  In a thoughtful voice, speaking more to himself than to
them, Bobby said, "Bad thing.

Putting the jar down, Julie said, "Frank, we'll take the case."

"All right!"  Clint said, and switched off the recorder.

Turning away from the desk, heading toward the bathroom, Bobby said,
"Julie, I need to see you alone for a moment."

For the third time they stepped into the bathroom together, closed the
door behind them, and switched on the fan.

Bobby's face was grayish, like a highly detailed portrait done in
pencil; even his freckles were colorless.  His customarily merry blue
eyes were not merry now.

He said, "Are you crazy?  You told him we'll take the case."

Julie blinked in surprise.

"Isn't that what you wanted?"

"No."

"Ah. Then I guess I heard you wrong.  Must be too much wax in my ears.
Solid as cement."

"He's probably a lunatic, dangerous."

"I'd better go to a doctor, have my ears professionally cleaned."

"This wild story he's made up is just-"

She held up one hand, halting him in mid-sentence-

"It's real, Bobby.  He didn't imagine that bug.  What is that thing I've
never even seen pictures of anything like it."

"What about the money?  He must've stolen it."

"Frank's no thief."

"What-did God tell you that?  Because there's no other way you could
know.  You only met Pollard little more than an hour ago."

"You're right," she said.

"God told me.  And I always listen to God because if you don't listen to
Him, then He's likely to visit a plague of teeming locusts on you or
maybe set your house on fire with a lightning bolt.  Listen, Frank's so
lost, adrift, I feel sorry for him.  Okay?"

He stared at her, chewing on his pale lower lip for a moment then
finally said, "We work good together because we complement each other.
You're strong where I'm weak, and I'm strong where you're weak.  In many
ways we're not at all alike but we belong together because we fit like
pieces of a puzzle.

"What's your point?"

"One way we're different but complementary is our motivation.  This line
of work suits me because I get a kick out of helping people whore in
trouble through no fault of their own.  I like to see good triumph.
Sounds like a comic-book hero, but it's the way I feel.  You, on the
other hand, are primarily motivated by a desire to stomp the bad guys.
Yeah, sure, I like to see the bad guys all crumpled and whimpering, too,
but it is not as important to me as it is to you.  And, of course,
you're happy to help innocent people, but with you that's second to the
stomping and crushing.  Probably because you're still working out your
rage over the murder of your mother."

"Bobby, if I want psychoanalysis, I'll get it in a room when the primary
piece of furniture is a couch-not a toilet."

Her mother had been taken hostage in a bank holdup when Julie was
twelve.  The two perpetrators had been high on amphetamines and low on
common sense and compassion.  Before it was all over, five of the six
hostages were dead, and Julie's mother was not the lucky one.

Turning to the mirror, Bobby looked at her reflection, as if he was
uncomfortable meeting her eyes directly.

"My point is-suddenly you're acting like me, and that's no good, that
destroys our balance, disrupts the harmony of this relationship, and
it's the harmony that has always kept us alive, successful and alive.
You want to take this case because you're fascinated, it excites your
imagination, and because you'd like to help Frank, he's so pitiful.
Where's your usual outrage?  I'll tell you where it is.  You don't have
any because, at this moment anyway, there's no one to elicit it, no bad
guy.  Okay, there's the guy he says chased him that night, but we don't
even know if he's real or just a figment of Frank's fantasy.  Without an
obvious bad guy to focus your anger, I should have to drag you into this
every step of the way, and that's what I was doing, but now you're doing
the dragging, and that worries me.  It doesn't feel right."

She let him ramble on, with their gazes locked in the mirror, and when
at last he finished, she said, "No, that's not your point."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, everything you just said is smoke.  What's really bothering
you, Robert?"

His reflection tried to stare down her reflection.

She smiled.

"Come on.  Tell me.  We never keep secrets."

Bobby-in-the-mirror looked like some bad imitation of the real Bobby
Dakota.  The real Bobby, her Bobby, was full of fun and life and energy.
Bobby-in-the-mirror was gray-faced, almost grim; his vitality had been
sapped by worry.

"Robert?"  she prodded.

"You remember last Thursday when we woke?"  he said.  "The Santa Anas
were blowing.  We made love."

"I remember."

"And right after we'd made love...  I had the strange, terrible feeling
that I was going to lose you, that something out there in the wind
was...  coming to get you."

"You told me about it later that night, at Ozzie's, when we were talking
about jukeboxes.  But the windstorm ended, and nothing got me.  Here I
am."

"That same night, Thursday night, I had a nightmare, the most vivid damn
dream you can imagine."  He told her about the little house on the
beach, the jukebox standing in the san the thunderous inner voice-THE
BAD THING IS COMING, THE BAD THING, BAD THING!-and about the corrosive
sea that had swallowed both of them, dissolving the flesh and dragging
their bones into lightless depths.

"It rock me.  You can't conceive of how real it seemed.  Sounds crazy
but...  that dream was almost more real than real life.  I woke up,
scared as bad as I've ever been.  You were sleeping, and I didn't wake
you.  Didn't tell you about it later because I didn't see the point of
worrying you and because -..  well, it seemed childish to put much stock
in a dream.  I haven't had the nigh mare again.  But since then-Friday,
Saturday, yesterday I've had moments when a strange anxiety sort of
shivered through me, and I think maybe some bad thing is coming to get
you.  And now, out there in the office, Frank said he's mixed up in a
bad thing, a real bad thing, that's heavy, and right away I made the
connection.  Julie, maybe this guy is the bad thing I dreamed about.
Maybe we shouldn't take it.

She stared at Bobby-in-the-mirror for a moment, wondering how to
reassure him.  Finally she decided that, because the roles had reversed,
she should deal with him as Bobby would deal with her in a similar
situation.  Bobby would not resolve to logic and reason-which were her
tools-but would charm and humor her out of a funk.

Instead of responding directly to his concerns, she said, long as we're
getting things off our chests, you know who bothers me?  The way you sit
on my desk sometimes while we're talking to a prospective client.  With
some clients, it might make sense for me to sit on the desk, wearing a
short skirt, showing some leg, 'cause I have good legs, even if I say so
myself But you never wear skirts, short or otherwise, and you don't have
the gams for it, anyway."

"Who's talking about desks?"

"I am," she said, turning away from the mirror and looking at him
directly.

"We leased a seven-room suite instead of an eight-room to save money,
and by the time the rest of the staff was settled had only one office
for ourselves, which seemed ok because There's plenty of room in there
for two desks, but you say you don't want one.  Desks are too formal for
you.  All you need is a couch to lie on while making calls, you say, yet
when clients come in, you sit on my desk."

"Julie-"

"Formica is a hard, nearly impervious surface, but sooner or later
you'll have spent so much time sitting on my desk, it'll be marked by a
permanent imprint of your ass -."

Because she wouldn't look at the mirror, he had to turn away from it,
too, and face her.

"Didn't you hear what I said about the dream?"

"Now, don't get me wrong.  You've got a cute ass, Bobby, but I don't
want the imprint on my desktop.  Pencils will keep rolling into the
depression.  Dust will collect in it."

"What's going on here?"

"I want to warn you that I'm thinking of having the top of my desk
wired, so I can electrify it with a flick of a switch.  You sit on it
then, and you'll know what a fly feels like when it settles on one of
those electronic bug zappers."

"You're being difficult, Julie.  Why're you being difficult?"

"Frustration.  I haven't gotten to stomp or crush any bad guys lately.
Makes me irritable."

He said, "Hey, wait a minute.  You're not being difficult."

"Of course I'm not."

"You're being me!"

"Exactly."  She kissed his right cheek and patted his left.  "Now, let's
go back out there and take the case."

She opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom.

With some amusement, Bobby said, "I'll be damned," and followed her into
the office.

Frank Pollard was talking quietly with Clint, but he fell silent and
looked up hopefully as they entered.

Shadows clung to the corners like monks to their cloisters, and for some
reason the amber glow from the three lamps reminded her of the
scintillant and mysterious light of serried votive candles in a church.

The puddle of scarlet gems still glimmered on the desk.

The bug was still in a death crouch in the mason jar.

"Did Clint explain our fee schedule?"  she asked Pollard.

"Yes."

"Okay.  In addition, we'll need ten thousand dollars as advance against
expenses."

Outside, lightning scarred the bellies of the clouds.  bruised sky
ruptured, and cold rain spattered against the windows.

VIOLET HAD been awake for more than an hour, and during most of that
time she had been a hawk, swooping high on the wind, darting down now
and then to make a swift kill.  The open sky was nearly as real to her
as it was to the bird that she had invaded.  She glided on thermal
currents, the air offering little resistance to the sleek fore edges of
her wings, with only the lowering gray clouds above, and the whole
huddled world below.

She was also aware of the shadowy bedroom in which her body and a
portion of her mind remained.  Violet and Verbina usually slept during
the day, for to sleep away the night was to waste the best of times.
They shared a room on the second floor, one king-size bed, never more
than an arm's reach from each other, though usually entwined.  That
Monday afternoon, Verbina was still asleep, naked, on her belly, with
her head turned away from her sister, occasionally mumbling wordlessly
into her pillow.  Her warm flank pressed against Violet.  Even while
Violet was with the hawk, she was aware of her twin's body heat, smooth
skin, slow rhythmic breathing, sleepy murmurings, and distinct scent.
She smelled the dust in the room, too, and the stale odor of the long
unwashed sheets and the cats, of course.

She not only smelled the cats, which slept upon the bed and the
surrounding floor or lay lazily licking themselves, but lived in each of
them.  While a part of her consciousness remained in her own pale flesh
and a part soared with the feathered predator, other aspects of her held
tenancy in each of the cats, twenty-five of them now that poor Samantha
was gone.  Simultaneously Violet experienced the world through her own
senses, through those of the hawk, and through the fifty eyes and
twenty-five noses and fifty ears and hundred paws and twenty-five
tongues of the pack.  She could smell her own odor not merely through
her own nose but through the of all the cats: the faint soapy residue of
last night's bath pleasantly lingering with the tang of lemon-scented
shampoo; that always followed sleep; halitosis ripe with the ghosts of
the raw eggs and onions and raw liver that she eaten that morning before
going to bed with the rising sun.  Each remember of the pack had a
sharper ol factory sense she didn't, and each perceived her scent
differently from what she did; they found her natural fragrance strange
yet intriguing and familiar.

She could smell, see, hear, and feel herself through their senses, as
well, for she was always inextricably linked with Verbina.  At will, she
could swiftly enter or disengage from minds of other lifeforms, but
Verbina was the only other person with whom she could join in that way.
It was a permanence which they had shared since birth.  She could never
disengage from her twin.  Likewise, she could control the minds of
animals as well as inhabit them, but she was not able to control her
sister.  Their link was not that of master and puppet, but special and
sacred.

All of her life, Violet had lived at the confluence of rivers of
sensation, bathed in great churning currents of and scent and sight and
taste and touch, experiencing the world not only through her own senses
but those of surrogates.  For part of her childhood, she had been so
overwhelmed by sensory input that she could not cope; had turned inward,
to her secret world of rich, varied, and found experience, until she had
learned to control the quenching flood, harnessing it instead of being
swept away.  Only had she chosen to relate to the people around her,
absolutism, and she had not learned to talk until she was six years old.
She had never risen out of those deep, fast current extraordinary
sensation to stand on the comparatively dry of life on which other
people existed, but at least she learned to interact with her mother,
Candy, and others to a limited degree.

Verbina had never coped half as well as Violet, and probably never
would.  Having chosen a life almost exclusively by sensation, she
exhibited little or no concern for the development of her intellect. She
had never learned to talk, showed only the vaguest interest in anyone
but her sister, and immersed herself with joyous abandonment in the
ocean of sensory stimuli that surged around her.  Running as a squirrel,
flying as a hawk or gull, rutting as a cat, loping and killing as a
coyote, drinking cool water from a stream through the mouth of a raccoon
or field mouse, entering the mind of a bitch in heat as other dogs
mounted her, simultaneously sharing the terror of the cornered rabbit
and the savage excitement of the predatory fox, Verbina enjoyed a
breadth of life that no one else but Violet could ever know.  And she
preferred the constant thrill of immersion in the wildness of the world
to the comparatively mundane existence of other people.

Now, although Verbina still slept, a part of her was with Violet in the
soaring hawk, for even sleep did not necessitate the complete
disconnection of their links to other minds.  The continuous sensory
input of the lesser species was not only the primary fabric from which
their lives were cut, but the stuff of which their dreams were formed,
as well.

Under storm clouds that grew darker by the minute, the hawk glided high
over the canyon behind the Pollard property.  It was hunting.

Far below, among pieces of dried and broken tumbleweed, between spiny
clumps of gorse, a fat mouse broke cover.  It scurried along the canyon
floor, alert for signs of enemies at ground level but oblivious to the
feathered death that observed it from far above.

Instinctively aware that the mouse could hear the flapping of wings from
a great distance and would scramble into the nearest haven at the first
sound of them, the hawk silently tucked its wings back, half folding
them against its body, and dived steeply, angling toward the rodent.
Though she had shared this experience countless times before, Violet
held her breath as they plummeted twelve hundred feet, dropping past
ground level and farther down into the ravine; and though she actually
was safely on her back in bed, her stomach seemed to turn within her,
and a primal terror swelled within her breast even as she let out a
thing squeal of pleasurable excitement.

On the bed beside Violet, her sister also softly cried out.

On the canyon floor the mouse froze, sensing onrushing doom but not
certain from which quarter it was coming.

The hawk deployed its wings as foils at the last moment abruptly the
true substance of the air became apparent a provided a welcome braking
resistance.  Letting its hind quarters precede it, extending its legs,
opening its claws, the hawk seized the mouse even as the creature
reacted to the sudden spread of wings and tried to flee.

Though remaining with the hawk, Violet entered the mind of the mouse an
instant before the predator had taken it.  She felt the icy satisfaction
of the hunter and the hot fear of the prey.  From the perspective of the
hawk, she felt the flesh puncture and split under the sharp and powerful
assault of her talons, and from the perspective of the mouse she was
wracked by searing pain and was aware of a dread rupturing within.  The
bird peered down at the squealing rodent in its grasp, and shivered with
a wild sense of dominant and power, with a realization that hunger would
again sated.  It loosed a caw of triumph that echoed along the canyon.
Feeling small and helpless in the grip of its winged assailant in the
thrall of excruciating fear so intense as to be strong akin to the most
exquisite of sensory pleasures, the mouse looked up into the steely,
merciless eyes and ceased to struggle, went limp, resigned itself to
death.  It saw the fierce beak descending, was aware of being rended,
but no longer felt pain only numb resignation, then a brief moment of
shattering pain then nothing, nothing.  The hawk tipped back its head
and bloody ribbons and warm knots of flesh fall down its gull.  On the
bed Violet turned on her side to face her sister.  Having been shaken
from sleep by the power of the experience with the hawk, Verbina came
into Violet's arms.  Naked, pelvis pelvis, belly to belly, breasts to
breasts, the twins held each other and shuddered uncontrollably.  Violet
gasped against Verbina's tender throat, and through her link with
Verbina's mind, she felt that hot flood of her own breath and the warmth
it brought to her sister's skin.  They made wordless sounds a clung to
each other, and their frantic breathing did not beg to subside until the
hawk tore the last red sliver of nourishing meat from the mouse's hide
and, with a flurry of wings, threw itself into the sky again.

Below was the Pollard property: the Eugenia hedge; the grey blued,
slate-roofed, weathered-looking house; the twenty-year-' old Buick that
had belonged to their mother and that Candy sometimes drove; clusters of
primrose burning with red and yellow and purple blooms in a narrow and
untended flower bed that extended the length of the decrepit back porch.
Violet also saw Candy far below, at the northeast corner of the
sprawling property.

Still holding fast to her sister, gracing Verbina's throat and cheek and
temple with a lace of gentle kisses, Violet simultaneously directed the
hawk to circle above her brother.  Through the bird, she watched him as
he stood, head bowed, at their mother's grave, mourning her as he had
mourned her every day, without exception, since her death those many
years ago.

Violet did not mourn.  Her mother had been as much a stranger to her as
anyone in the world, and she had felt nothing special at the woman's
passing.  Indeed, because Candy was gifted, too, Violet felt closer to
him than she had to her mother, which was not saying much because she
did not really know him or care a great deal about him.  How could she
be close to anyone if she could not enter his mind and live with him,
through him?  That incredible intimacy was what welded her to Verbina,
and it marked the myriad relationships she enjoyed with all the fowl and
fauna that populated nature's world.  She simply did not know how to
relate to anyone without that intense, innermost connection, and if she
could not love, she could not mourn.

Far below the wheeling hawk, Candy dropped to his knees beside the
grave.

MONDAY AFTERNOON.  Thomas sat at his work table.  Making a picture poem.

Derek helped.  Or thought he did.  He sorted through some magazine
clippings.  He chose pictures, gave them to Thomas.  If the picture was
right, Thomas trimmed it, pasted it on the page.  Most of the time it
wasn't right, so he put it waside and asked for another picture and
another until he gave him something he could use.

He didn't tell Derek the awful truth.  The awful truth that he wanted to
make the poem by himself.  But he could hurt Derek's feelings.  Derek
was hurt enough.  Being dumb really hurt, and Derek was dumber than
Thomas.  Though Derek was dumber-looking, too, which was more hurtful.

His forehead sloped more than Thomas's.  His nose was flatter, his head
had a squashy shape.  Awful truth.

Later, tired of making the picture poem, Thomas and Derek went to the
wreck room, and that was where it happen Derek got hurt.  He got hurt so
much he cried.  A girl did it.  Mary.  In the wreck room.

Some people were playing a game of marbles in one corner.  Some were
watching TV.  Thomas and Derek were sitting on a couch near some
windows, Being Sociable when any came around.  The aides always wanted
people at The home to Be Sociable.  It was good for you to Be Sociable.
When one came around to Be Sociable with them, Thomas and Derek were
watching hummingbirds at a feeder that hung outside windows.
Hummingbirds didn't really hum, but they zip around and were a lot of
fun to watch.  Mary, who was at The Home, didn't zip around and wasn't
fun to watch, she hummed a lot.  No, she buzzed.  Buzz, buzz, buzz, all
the time.

Mary knew about eye cues.  She said they really mattered, eye cues, and
maybe they did, though Thomas had never heard of them and didn't
understand what they were, but then a lot of things he didn't understand
were important.  He knew what eyes were, of course.  He knew a cue was a
stick you hit balls with because they had a pool table right there in
the wreck room, near where he and Derek were sitting, though nobody used
it much.  He figured it would be a bad thing, real bad, if you stuck
yourself in the eye with a cue, but this Mary said eye cues were good
and she had a big one for a Down's kid.

"I'm a high-end moron," she said, real happy with herself, you could
tell.

Thomas didn't know what a moron was, but he couldn't see a high-end to
Mary anywhere, she was fat and mostly droopy all over.

"You're probably a moron, too, Thomas, but you ain't high-end like me.
I'm almost normal, and you ain't as close to normal as me."  All this
only confused Thomas.

It confused Derek even more, you could tell, and in his thick and
sometimes hard to understand voice, Derek said, "Me?  No moron."

He shook his head.

"Cowboy."  He smiled.

"Cowboy."  Mary laughed at him.

"You ain't no cowboy or ever going to be.  What you are is you're an
imbecile."  They had to ask her to say it a few times before they got
it, but even then they didn't really get it.  They could say it but
didn't know what it was any more than they knew what one of these eye
cues looked like.

"You've got your normal people," Mary said,

"then morons under them, then imbeciles, whore dumber than morons, and
then you got idiots, whore dumber than even imbeciles.  Me, I'm a
high-end moron, and I ain't going to be here forever, I'm going to be
good, behave, work hard to be normal, and someday go back to the halfway
house."

"Halfway where?"  Derek asked, which was what Thomas wondered too.

Mary laughed at him.

"Halfway to being normal, which is more than you'll ever be, you poor
damn imbecile."  This time Derek realized she was looking down on him,
making fun, and he tried not to cry, but he did.  He got red in the face
and cried, and Mary grinned sort of wild, she was all puffed up,
excited, like she'd won some big prize.  She'd said a bad word-damn-and
should be ashamed, but she wasn't, you could tell.  She said the other
word again, which Thomas now saw was a bad word, too,

"imbecile," and she kept saying it, until poor Derek got up and ran, and
even then she shout it after him.

Thomas went back to their room, looking for Derek, but Derek was in the
closet with the door shut, bawling.  Some of the aides came, and they
talked to Derek real nice, but he didn't want to come out of the closet.
They had to talk to him a long time to get him to come out of there, but
even then couldn't stop him from crying, and so after a while they had
to Give him Something.  Once in a while when you were sick, like with
the flu, the aides asked you to Take Something, which meant pill of one
shape or another, one color or another, big or little But when they had
to Give You Something, it always was a needle, which was a bad thing.
They never had to Give Something to Thomas because he was always good.
But sometimes Derek wasn't nice as he was, got to feeling so bad about
himself that he couldn't stop crying, and sometimes he hit himself, just
hit himself in the face, until he broke himself open and got blood on
himself, and even then he wouldn't stop, so they had to give Him
Something For His Own Good.  Derek never hit anyone else, he was nice,
but For His Own Good he sometimes had to be made to relax or sometimes
even made to sleep, which was what happened the day Mary the high-end
moron called him an imbecile.

After Derek was made to sleep, one of the aides sat beside Thomas at the
worktable.  It was Cathy.  Thomas liked Cathy.  She was older than Julie
but not as old as somebody's mother.  She was pretty.  Not as pretty as
Julie but pretty, with a nice voice and eyes you weren't afraid to look
into.  She took one of Thomas's hands in both of hers, and she asked if
he was okay.  He said he was, but he really wasn't, and she knew it.
They talked a while.  That helped.  Being Sociable.

She told him about Mary, so he'd understand, and that helped too.

"She's so frustrated, Thomas.  She was out their in the world for a
while, at a halfway house, and she even had a part-time job, making a
little money of her own.  She was trying so hard, but it didn't work,
she had too many problems so she had to be institutionalized again.  I
think she regrets what she did to Derek.  She's just so disappointed
that she needed to feel superior to someone."

"I am...  It was...  It was out there in the world once," Thomas said.

"I know you were, honey."

"With my dad.  Then with my sister.  And Bobby."

"Did you like it out there?"

"Some of it...  scared me.  But when I was with Julie and Bobby...  I
liked that part.".

On his bed, Derek was snoring now.

The afternoon was half gone.  The sky was getting ugly stormy.  The room
had shadows everywhere.  Only the desk lamp was on.  Cathy's face looked
pretty in the lampglow.  Her skin was like peach-colored satin.  He knew
what satin was like.  Julie once had a dress of satin.

For a while he and Cathy were quiet.

Then he said, "Sometimes it's hard."

She put her hand on his head.  Smoothed his hair.

"Yeah, I know, Thomas.  I know."  She was so nice.  He didn't know why
he started to cry when she was so nice, but he did.  Maybe it was
because she was so nice.

Cathy scooted her chair closer to his.  He leaned against her.  She put
her arms around him.  He cried and cried.  Not hard terrible crying like
Derek.  Soft.  But he couldn't stop.  He tried not to cry because crying
made him feel dumb, and he hated feeling dumb.

Through his tears, he said, "I hate feeling dumb."

"You're not dumb, honey."

"Yeah, I am.  Hate it.  But I can't be nothing else.  I try not to think
about being dumb, but you can't not think about it when it's what you
are, and when other people aren't, and they go out in the world every
day and they live, but you don't go out in the world and don't even want
to but, oh, you want to, even when you say you don't."  That was a lot
for him to say, and he was surprised that he had said it all, surprised
but also frustrated because he wanted so bad to tell her how it felt,
being dumb, being afraid of going out in the world, and he'd failed,
hadn't been able to find the right words, so the feeling was still all
bottled up in him.

"Time.  There's lots of time, see, when you're dumb and can't go out in
the world, lots of time to fill up, but then there really ain't enough
time, not enough for learning how to be not afraid of things, and I've
got to learn how not to be afraid so I can go back and be with Julie a
Bobby, which I want to do real bad, before all the time runs out.
There's too big amounts of time and not enough, and that sounds dumb,
don't it?"

"No, Thomas.  It doesn't sound dumb."

He didn't move out of her arms.  He wanted to be hugged.

Cathy said, "You know, sometimes life is hard for everyone Even for
smart people.  Even for the smartest of them all."

With one hand he wiped at his damp eyes.

"It is?  Sometimes is it hard for you?"

"Sometimes.  But I believe there's a God, Thomas, and that he put us
here for a reason, and that every hardship we have to face is a test,
and that we're better for enduring them."

He raised his head to look at her.  Such nice eyes.  Good eyes.  They
were eyes that loved you.  Like Julie's eyes or Bobby's.

Thomas said, "God made me dumb to test me?"

"You're not dumb, Thomas.  Not in some ways.  I don't like to hear you
call yourself dumb.  You're not as smart as some but that's not your
fault.  You're different, that's all.  Being..  different is your
hardship, and you're coping with it well."

"I am?"

"Beautifully.  Look at you.  You're not bitter.  You're not sullen.  You
reach out to people."  "Being Sociable."

She smiled, pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the worktable,
and wiped the tears from his face.

"Of all the smart people in the world, Thomas, not any one of them
handles hard ship better than you do, and most not as well."

He knew she meant what she said, and her words made him happy, even if
he didn't quite believe life was ever hard for smart people.

She stayed a while.  Made sure he was okay.  Then she made sure Derek
was still snoring.

Thomas sat at the worktable.  Tried to make more poems.

After a while he went to the window.  Rain was coming dow now.  It
trickled on the glass.  The afternoon was almost gone.  Night was soon
coming down on top of the rain.

He put his hands against the glass.  He stared into the rain into the
gray day, into the nothingness of the night that was slowly sneaking up
on them.

The Bad Thing was still out there.  He could feel it.  A man but not a
man.  Something more than a man.  Very bad.  Ugly-nasty.  He'd felt it
for days, but he hadn't sent a warning to Bobby since last week because
the Bad Thing wasn't coming any closer.  It was far away, right now
Julie was safe, and if he sent too many warnings to Bobby, then Bobby
would stop paying attention to them, and when the Bad Thing finally
showed up, Bobby wouldn't believe in it any more, and then it would get
to Julie because Bobby wouldn't be paying attention.

What Thomas most feared was that the Bad Thing would take Julie to the
Bad Place.  Their mother went to the Bad Place when Thomas was two years
old, so he'd never known her.  Then their dad went to the Bad Place
later, leaving Thomas with just Julie.

He didn't mean Hell.  He knew about Heaven and Hell.  Heaven was God's.
The devil owned Hell.  If there was a Heaven, he was sure his mom and
dad went there.  You wanted to go up to Heaven if you could.  Things
were better there.  In Hell, the aides weren't nice.

But, to Thomas, the Bad Place wasn't just Hell.  it was Death.  Hell was
a bad place, but Death was the Bad Place.  Death was a word you couldn't
picture.  Death meant everything stopped, went away, all your time ran
out, over, done, kaput.  How could you picture that?  A thing wasn't
real if you couldn't picture it.  He couldn't see Death, couldn't get a
picture of it in his head, not if he thought about it the way other
people seemed to think about it.  He was just too dumb, so he had to
picture it in his head as a place.  They said Death came to take you,
and it had come to take his father one night, his heart had attacked
him, but if it came to take you, then it had to take you to some place.
And that was the Bad Place.  It's where you were taken and never allowed
to come back.  Thomas didn't know what happened to a person there. Maybe
nothing nasty.  Except you weren't allowed to come back and see people
you loved, which made it nasty enough, no matter if the food was good
over there.  Maybe some people went on to Heaven, some to Hell, but you
couldn't come back from either one, so both were part of the Bad Place,
just different rooms.  And he wasn't sure Heaven and Hell were real,
maybe all there was in the Bad Place was darkness and!"  and so much
empty space that when you went over there you couldn't even find the
people who'd gone ahead of you.

That scared him most of all.  Not just losing Julie to the Place, but
not being able to find her when he went over there himself.

He was already afraid of the night.  All that big empty place off the
world.  So if just the night itself was so scary, Bad Place would be
lots worse.  It was sure to be bigger to the night, and daylight never
came in the Bad Place.

Outside, the sky got darker.

Wind blew the palms.

Rain ran down the glass.

The Bad Thing was far away.

But it would come closer.  Soon.

CANDY WAs having one of those days when he could not accept that his
mother was dead.  Every time he crossed a threshold or turned a corner,
he expected to see her.  He thought he heard her rocking in the parlor,
humming softly to herself as she knitted a new afghan, but when he went
in there to look, the rocking chair was filmed with dust and draped with
a shawl of cobwebs.  Once, he hurried into the kitchen, expecting to
find her in a brightly flowered house dress overlaid with a
ruffle-trimmed white apron, dropping neat spoonsful of cookie batter on
baking sheets or perhaps mixing a cake, but, of course, she was not
there.  In a moment of acute emotional turmoil, Candy raced upstairs,
certain that he would find his mother in bed, but when he burst into her
room, he remembered that it was his room now, and that she was gone.

Eventually, to jar himself out of that strange and troubling mood, he
went into the backyard and stood by her lonely grave in the northeast
corner of the large property.  He had buried her there, seven years ago,
under a solemn winter sky similar to the one that currently hid the sun,
with a hawk circling above just as one circled now.  He had dug her
grave, wrapped her in sheets scented with Channel No. 5, and lowered her
into the ground secretly, because interment on private property, was not
designated as a grave site, was against the law.  If he had allowed her
to be buried elsewhere, he would have had to go live there with her, for
he could not have endured being separated from her mortal remains for
any great length of time.

Candy dropped to his knees.

Over the years the original mound of earth had settled, until her grave
was marked by a shallow concavity.  The grass was sparser there, the
blades coarse, wiry, different from the rest of the lawn, though he did
not know why; even in the months following her burial, the grass above
her had not flourished No headstone memorialized her passing; although
the back yard was sheltered by the high hedge, he could not risk
calling] attention to her illegal resting place.

Staring at the ground before him, Candy wondered if a stone would help
him accept her death.  If every day he could see her name and the date
of her death deeply cut into a sliver of marble, that sight should
slowly but permanently engrave his loss upon his heart, sparing him days
like this, when he was disturbed by a queer forgetfulness and by a hope
that could never be fulfilled.

He stretched out on the grave, his head turned to one side with an ear
against the earth, as if he half expected to hear her speaking to him
from her subterranean bed.  Pressing his back hard into the unyielding
ground, he longed to feel the vitality that she had once radiated, the
singular energy that had flowed from her like heat from the open door of
a furnace, but he was nothing.  Though his mother had been a special
woman, Candy knew it was absurd to expect her corpse, after seven years
radiate even a ghost of the love that she had lavished upon when she was
alive; nevertheless, he was grievously disappointed when not even the
faintest aura shimmered up through the dirt from her sacred bones.

Hot tears burned in his eyes, and he tried to hold them back But a faint
rumble of thunder passed through the sky, an few fat droplets of rain
began to fall, and neither the storm his tears could be restrained.

She lay only five or six feet beneath him, and he was overcome by an
urge to claw his way down to her.  He knew flesh would have
deteriorated, that he would find only bow cradled in a vile muck of
unthinkable origin, but he was to hold her and be held, even if he had
to arrange her skeleton arms around himself in a staged embrace.  He
actually rip at the grass and tore up a few handsful of topsoil.  Soon,
however, he was wracked by powerful sobs that swiftly exhausted him and
left him too weak to struggle with reality any way She was dead.

Gone.

Forever.

As the cold rain fell in greater volume, pounding on Candy's back, it
seemed to leech his hot grief from him and fill him instead, with icy
hatred.  Frank had killed their mother; he must pay for that crime with
his own life.  Lying on a muddy grave and weeping like a child would not
bring Candy one step closer to vengeance.  Finally he got up and stood
with his hands fisted at his sides, letting the storm sluice some of the
mud and grief from him.

He promised his mother that he would be more relentless and diligent in
his pursuit of her killer.  The next time he got a lead on Frank, he
would not lose him.

Looking up at the cloud-choked and streaming sky, addressing his mother
in Heaven, he said,

"I'll find Frankie, kill him, crush him, I will.  I'll smash his skull
open and cut his hateful brain into pieces and flush it down a toilet."

The rain seemed to penetrate him, driving a chill deep into his marrow,
and he shuddered.

"If I find anyone who lifted a hand to help him, I'll cut their hands
off.  I'll tear out the eyes of anyone who looked at Frankie with
sympathy.  I swear I will.  And I'll cut out the tongues of any bastards
who spoke kind words to him."  Suddenly the rain fell with greater force
than before, hammering the grass flat, crackling through the leaves of a
nearby oak, stirring a chorus of whispers from the Eugenias.  It snapped
against his face, making him squint, but he did not lower his eyes from
Heaven.

"If he's found anyone to care about, anyone at all, I'll take them away
from him like he took you from me.  I'll break them open, get the blood
out of them, and throw them away like garbage."  He had made these same
promises many times during the past seven years, but he made them now
with no less passion than he had before.

"Like garbage," he repeated through clenched teeth.

His need for vengeance was no less fierce now than it had been on the
day of her murder seven years ago.  His hatred of Frank was, if
anything, harder and sharper than ever.

"Like garbage.

" An ax of lightning cleaved the conclusive sky.  Briefly a long, jagged
laceration gaped open in the dark clouds, which for a moment seemed to
him not like clouds at all but like the infinitely strange and throbbing
body of some godlike being, and through the lightning-rent flesh he
thought he glimpsed the shining mystery beyond.

Clint DREADED the rainy season in southern California.  Most of the year
was dry, and in the on-again-off-again drought of the past decade, some
winters were marked by a few storms.  When rain finally fell, the
natives seemed to have forgotten how to drive in it.  As gutters
overflowed, the street clogged with traffic.  The freeways were worse;
they looked like infinitely long car washes in which the conveyors had
broken down.

While the gray light slowly faded out of that Monday afternoon, he drove
first to Palomar Laboratories in Costa Mesa.  It was a large,
single-story concrete-block building one block west of Bristol Avenue.
Their medical-lab division an any blood samples, Pap smears, and
biopsies, among other things but they also performed industrial- and
geological-samples analyses of all kinds.

He parked his Chevy in the adjoining lot.  Carrying a plastic bag from
Von's supermarket, he sloshed through the deep ditches, head bent
against the driving rain, and went into the small reception lounge,
dripping copiously.

An attractive young blonde sat on a stool behind the counter at the
reception window.  She was wearing a white uniform and a purple
cardigan.  She said, "You should have an umbrella."

Clint nodded, put the supermarket bag on the counter, and began to untie
the knot in the straps, to open it.

"At least a raincoat," she said.

From an inside jacket pocket, he withdrew a Dakota & & Dakota & card,
passed it to her.

"Is this who you want billed?"  she asked.

"Yeah."

"Have you used our service before?"

"Yeah."

"You have an account?"

"Yeah."

"I haven't seen you in here before."

"No."

"My name's Lisa.  I've only been here about a week.  Never had a private
eye come in before, least since I've started."

From the large white sack he withdrew three smaller, clear, Ziploc bags
and lined them up side by side.

"You got a name?"  she asked, cocking her head, smiling at him.

"Clint."

"You go around without an umbrella or raincoat in this weather, Clint,
you'll catch your death, even as sturdy as you look."

"First, the shirt," Clint said, pushing that bag forward.

"We want the bloodstains analyzed.  Not just typed.  We want the whole
nine yards.  A complete genetic workup too.  Take samples from four
different parts of the shirt, because there might be more than one
person's blood on it.  If so, do a workup on both."

Lisa frowned at Clint, then at the shirt in the bag.  She began filling
out an analysis order.

"Same program on this one," he said, pushing forward the second bag.  It
contained a folded sheet of Dakota & Dakota stationery that was mottled
with several spots of blood.  Back at the office, Julie had sterilized a
pin in a match flame, stuck Frank Pollard's thumb, and squeezed the
crimson samples onto the paper.

"We want to know if any of the blood on the shirt matches what's on this
stationery."

The third bag contained the black sand.

"Is this a biological substance?"  Lisa asked.

"I don't know.  Looks like sand."

"Because if it's a biological substance, it should go to our medical
division, but if it's not biological it should go to the industrial
lab."

"Send a little to both.  And put a rush on it."

"Costs more."

"Whatever."

As she filled out the third form, she said, "There's a few beaches "in
Hawaii with black sand, you ever been there?"

.'No.

"Kaimu.  That's the name of one of the black beaches.  Comes from a
volcano, somehow.  The sand, I mean."

"You like beaches?"

"Yeah."  She looked up, her pen poised over the form, and gave a big
smile.  Her lips were full.  Her teeth were very white.  "love the
beach.  Nothing I like better than putting on a bathing suit and soaking
up some sun, really just baking in the sun, I don't care what they say
about a tan being bad for you.  I'm short anyway, you know?  Might as
well look good while we're here.  Besides, being in the sun makes me
feel...  oh, not exactly, because I don't mean it saps my energy, just
that it makes me feel full of energy, but a lazy energy, so the way a
lioness walks-you know?-strong-looking but The sun makes me feel like a
lioness."

He said nothing.

She said, "It's erotic, the sun.  I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
You lay out in the sun enough, on a nice beach, all your inhibitions
sort of melt away."  He just stared at her.

After she finished filling out the analysis orders, gave him copies, and
attached each order to the correct sample, said, "Listen, Clint, we're
living in a modern world, figuring He didn't know what she meant.

She said, "We're all liberated these days, am I right?  a girl finds a
guy attractive, she doesn't have to wait for to make the move."

Oh, Clint thought.

Leaning back on her stool, maybe to let him see how her full breasts
filled out her white uniform blouse, she smiled said, "Would you be
interested in a dinner, movie?"

"No."

Her smile froze.

"Sorry," he said.

He folded the copies of the work orders and put them in his jacket
pocket from which earlier he had withdrawn a business card.

She was glaring at him, and he realized he'd hurt her feelings.

Searching for something to say, all he could come up with was, "I'm
gay."

She blinked and shook her head as if recovering from a stunning blow.
Like sun piercing clouds, her smile broke through the gloom on her face.
"Had to be to resist this package, I guess."

"Sorry."

"Hey, it's not your fault.  We are what we are, huh?"

He went into the rain again.  It was getting colder.  The sky looked
like the ruins of a burned-out building to which the fire department had
arrived too late:

wet ashes, dripping cinders.

AS NIGHT fell on that rainy Monday, Bobby Dakota stood at the hospital
window and said, "Not much of a view, Frank.  Unless you're keen on
parking lots."

He turned and surveyed the small, white room.  Hospitals always gave him
the creeps, but he did not express his true feeling to Frank.

"The decor sure won't be featured in Architectural Digest anytime soon,
but it's comfy enough.  You've got TV, nurses, and three meals a day in
bed.  I noticed that some of the nurses are real lookers, too, but
please try to keep your hands off the nuns, okay?"

Frank was paler than ever.  The dark circles around his eyes had grown
like spreading inkblots.  He not only looked like he belonged in a
hospital but as if he had been there already.  He used the power
controls to tilt the bed up.

"Are these tests really necessary?"

"Your amnesia might have a physical cause," said Julie.  "You heard
Doctor Freeborn.  They'll look for cerebral abscesses, neoplasms, cysts,
clots, all kinds of things."

"I'm not sure about this Freeborn," Frank said.

Sanford Freeborn was Bobby and Julie's friend, as well as their
physician.  A few years ago years ago they had helped him get his
brother out of deep trouble.

"Why?  What's wrong with Sandy?"

Frank said, "I don't know him."

"You don't know anybody," Bobby said.

"That's your line.  Remember?  You're an amnesiac."

After accepting Frank as a client, they had taken him directly to Sandy
Freeborn's office for a preliminary examination.  All Sandy knew was
that Frank could remember nothing but his name.  They had not told him
about the bags of money the blood, black sand, red gems, the weird
insect, or any of the rest of it.  Sandy didn't ask why Frank had come
to them instead of the police or why they had accepted a case so far
outside their usual purview; one of the things that made him a good
friend was his reliable discretion.

Nervously adjusting the sheets, Frank said, "You think a private room is
really necessary?"

Julie nodded.

"You also want us to find out what you do at night, where you go, which
means monitoring you, tight security."

"A private room's expensive," Frank said.

"You can afford the finest care," Bobby said.

"The money in those bags might not be mine."

Bobby shrugged.

"Then you'll have to work off your hospital bill-change a few hundred
beds, empty a few thousand bedpans, perform some brain surgery free of
charge.  You might be a brain surgeon.  Who knows?  With amnesia, it's
just as likely you've forgotten that you're a surgeon as that you're a
used-car salesman.  Worth a try.  Get a bone saw, cut off the top of
some guy's head, have a peek in there, see if anything looks familiar."

Leaning against the bed rail, Julie said, "When you're not in radiology
or some other department, undergoing tests, we'll have a man with you,
watching over you.  Tonight it's Hal."

Hal Yamataka had already taken his station.  He was to one side of the
bed, between Frank and the door, in a position to watch both his charge
and, if Frank was in the mood, the wall-mounted television.  Hal
resembled a Japanese version of Clint Karaghiosis : about five foot
seven or eight, broad in the shoulders and chest, as solid-looking as if
he had been built by a mason who knew how to fit stones tight together
and hide the mortar.

In case nothing worth watching was on television and his charge proved
to be a lousy conversationalist, he had brought a John D. MacDonald
novel.

Looking at the rain-washed window, Frank said, "I guess I'm just...
scared."

"No need to be scared," Bobby said.

"Hal's not as dangerous as he looks.  He's never killed anyone he
liked."

"Only once," Hal said.

Bobby said, "You once killed someone you liked?  Over what?"

"He asked to borrow my comb."

"There you go, Frank," Bobby said.

"Just don't ask to his comb, and you're safe."

Frank was in no mood to be kidded.  "I can't stop thinking about waking
up with blood on my hands.  I'm afraid I've already hurt someone.  I
don't want to hurt anyone.

"Oh, you can't hurt Hal," Bobby said.  "He's an imputable-oriental."

"Inscrutable," Hal said.

"I'm an inscrutable oriental."

"I don't want to hear about your sex problems, Hal.

"Anyway, if you didn't eat so much sushi and didn't have raw breath,
you'd get screwed as often as anyone."

Reaching over the bed railing, Julie took one of Frank's hands.

He smiled weakly.

"Your husband always like this, Mrs.  Dakota?"

"Call me Julie.  Do you mean, does he always act like a wise ass or a
child?  Not always, but most of the time, I'm afraid."

"You hear that, Hal?"  Bobby said.

"Women and amtracs-they have no sense of humor."

To Frank, Julie said, "My husband believes everything in life should be
fun, even car accidents, even funerals-"

"Even dental hygiene," Bobby said.

"-and he'd probably be making jokes about fallout in the middle of a
nuclear war.  That's just the way he is.  He could be cured-"

"She's tried," Bobby said.

"She sent me to a happiness detox center.  They promised to knock some
gloom into me, but they Couldn't."

"You'll be safe here," Julie said, squeezing Frank's hand before letting
go of it.  "Hal will look after you."

THE ENTOMOLOGIST's house was in the Turtle Rock development in Irvine,
within easy driving distance of the university.  Low, black,
mushroom-shaped Malibu lamps threw circles of light on the rain-puddled
walkway that led to the softly gleaming oak doors.

Carrying one of Frank Pollard's leather flight bags, Clint stepped onto
the small covered porch and rang the bell.

A man spoke to him through an intercom set just below the bell push.

"Who is it, please?"

"Dr. Dyson Manfred?  I'm Clint Karaghiosis.  From Dakota and Dakota."

Half a minute later, Manfred opened the door.  He was at least ten
inches taller than Clint, six feet five or six, and thin.  He was
wearing black slacks, a white shirt, and a green necktie; the top button
of the shirt was undone, and the tie hung loose.

"Good God, man, you're soaked."

"Just damp."

Manfred moved back, opening the door wide, and Clint stepped into the
tile-floored foyer.

As he closed the door, Manfred said, "Ought to have a raincoat or
umbrella on a night like this."

"It's invigorating."

"What is?"

"Bad weather," Clint said.

Manfred looked at him as if he was strange, but in Clint's view it was
Manfred himself who was strange.  The guy was too thin, all bones.  He
could not fill his clothes; his trousers hung shapelessly on his knobby
hips, and his shoulders poked at the fabric of his shirt as if only
bare, sharp bones lay under there.  Angular and graceless, he looked as
if he had been assembled from a pile of dry sticks by an apprentice god.
His face was long and narrow, with a high brow and a lantern and his
well-tanned, leathery skin seemed to be stretched tight over his
cheekbones that it might split.  He had peculiar amber eyes that
regarded Clint with an expression of curiosity no doubt familiar to the
thousands of bugs he had picked to specimen boards.

Manfred's gaze traveled down Clint to the floor,water was puddling
around his running shoes.

"Sorry," Clint said.

"It'll dry.  I was in my study.  Come along."

Glancing into the living room, to his right, Clint noted flowerless
wallpaper, a thick Chinese rug, too many overstuffed chairs and sofas,
antique English furniture, wine-red velvet drapes, and tables cluttered
with bibles that glimmered the lamplight.  It was a very Victorian room,
not in harm with the California lines and layout of the house itself.

He followed the entomologist past the living room, down a short hall to
the study.  Manfred had a singular, stilting Tall and sticklike as he
was, with shoulders hunched and thrust forward slightly, he seemed as
unevolved and prehistoric as a praying mantis.

Clint had expected a university professor's study to be crammed full of
books, but only forty or fifty volumes shelved in one case to the left
of the desk.  There were cabinets with wide, shallow drawers that
probably were filled with creepy-crawlies, and on the walls were insects
in special boxes, framed under glass.

When he saw Clint staring at one collection in particular Manfred said,
"Cockroaches.  Beautiful creatures."

Clint did not reply.

borrow"The simplicity of their design and function, I mean."

He would find them beautiful in appearance, of course."  Clint couldn't
shake the feeling that the bugs were not really alive.

Manfred said, "What do you think of that big fellow in the corner of the
collection?"

"He's big, sir."

"Madagascar hissing roach.  The scientific name's Grod or
rhinaportentosa.  That one's over eight and a half centimeters long,
about three and a half inches.  Absolutely beautiful isn't he?"

Clint said nothing.

Settling into the chair behind his desk, Manfred somehow folded his long
bony arms and legs into that compact space, the way a large spider could
scrunch itself into a tiny ball.

Clint did not sit down.  Having put in a long day, he was eager to go
home.

Manfred said, "I received a call from the university chancellor.  He
asked me to cooperate with your Mr. Dakota in any way I could."

UCI-the University of California at Irvine-had long been striving to
become one of the country's premier universities.  The current
chancellor and the one before him had sought to attain that status by
offering enormous salaries and generous fringe benefits to world-class
professors and researchers at other institutions.  Before committing
substantial resources in the form of a well-upholstered job offer,
however, the university hired Dakota & Dakota to conduct a background
investigation on the prospective faculty remember.  Even a brilliant
physicist or biologist could have too great a thirst for whiskey, a nose
for cocaine, or an unfortunate attraction to underage girls.  UCI wanted
to buy brainpower, respectability, and academic glory, not scandal;
Dakota & Dakota served them well.

Manfred propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his
fingers, which were so long that they looked as if they must have at
least one extra knuckle each.

"What's the problem?"  he asked.

Clint opened the leather flight bag and removed the quartsize,
wide-mouth mason jar.  He put it on the entomologist's desk.

The bug in the jar was at least twice as big as the Madagascar hissing
roach on the wall.

For a moment Dr. Dyson Manfred seemed to have been quick-frozen.  He
didn't move a finger; his eyes didn't blink.  He stared intently at the
creature in the jar.  At last he said,

"What is this-a hoax?"

"It's real."

Manfred leaned forward, hunching over the desk and lowering his head
until his nose almost touched the thick glass behind which the insect
crouched.

"Alive?"

"Dead."

"Where did you find this-not here in southern California?"

"Yes."

"Impossible."

"What is it?"  Clint asked.

Manfred looked up at him, scowling.

"I've never seen anything like it.  And if I haven't seen anything like
it, neither has anyone else.  It's of the phylum Arthropodan I'm
sure,includes such things as spiders and scorpions, but whether can be
classed an insect, I can't say, not until I've exam it.  If it is an
insect, it's of a new species.  Where, exactly, you find it, and why on
earth would it be of interest to private detectives?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't tell you anything about it.  I have to
protect the client's privacy."

Manfred carefully turned the jar around in his hands, staring at the
resident from every side.

"Just incredible.  I must admit."  He looked up, and his amber eyes were
no longer cool appraising, but gleaming with excitement.

"I must have specimen."

"Well, I intended to leave it with you for examination Clint said.

"But as to whether you can have permanent possession-"

"Yes.  Permanent."

"That's up to my boss and the client.  Meanwhile we need to know what it
is, where it comes from, everything you can tell us about it."

With exaggerated care, as if handling the finest crystal instead of
ordinary glass, Manfred put the jar on the blotter.

make a complete photographic and videotape record of specimen from every
angle and in extreme close-up.  Then be necessary to dissect it, though
that'll be done with utmost care, I assure you."

"Whatever."

"Mr. Karaghiosis, you seem terribly blase about this.

you fully understand what I've said?  This would appear to be an
entirely new species, which would be extraordinary.

cause how could any such species, producing individual this size, be
overlooked for so long?  This is going to be big in the world of
entomology, Mr. Karaghiosis, very big indeed.  Clint looked at the bug
in the bottle.

He said, "Yeah, I figured."

FROM THE hospital, Bobby and Julie drove a company Toyota into the
county's western flatlands to Garden Grove, looking for 884 Serape Way,
the address on the driver's license that Frank held in the name of
George Farris.

Julie peered through the rain-dappled side windows and forward between
the thumping windshield wipers, checking house numbers.

The street was lined with bright sodium-vapor lamps and thirty-year-old,
single-story homes.  They had been built in two basic, boxy models, but
an illusion of individuality was provided by a variety of trim.  This
one was stucco with brick accents.  That one was stucco with
cedar-shingle panels-or Bouquet Canyon stone or desert bark or volcanic
rock.

California was not all Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Newport Beach, not
all mansions and seaside villas, which was the television image.
Economies of home design had made the California dream accessible to the
waves of immigrants that for decades had flooded in from back east, and
now from farther shores-as was evident from Vietnamese- and Korean
language bumper stickers on some cars parked along Serape.

"Next block," Julie said.

"My side."

Some people said such neighborhoods were a blot on the land, but to
Bobby they were the essence of democracy.  He had been raised on a
street like Serape Way, north in Anaheim instead of Garden Grove, and it
had never seemed ugly.  He remembered playing with other kids on long
summer evenings, when the sun set with orange and crimson flares, and
the feathery silhouettes of the backlit palms were as black as ink
drawings against the sky; at twilight the air sometimes smelled of star
jasmine and echoed with the cry of a lingering sea gull far to the west.
He remembered what it meant to be a kid with a bicycle in California-the
vistas for exploration, the great possibilities for adventure; every
street of stucco homes, seeing for the first time and from the seat of a
Schwinn, had seem exotic.

Two coral trees dominated the yard at 884 Serape.  The white blooms of
the azalea bushes were softly radiant in the bleak night.

Tinted by the sodium-vapor streetlamps, the falling raid looked like
molten gold.  But as Bobby hurried along the wall way behind Julie, the
rain was almost as cold as sleet on his face and hands.  He was wearing
a warmly lined, nylon jacket with a hood, but he shivered.

Julie rang the doorbell.  The porch light came on, and Bob sensed
someone looking them over through the fisheye lens in the front door. He
pushed back his hood and smiled.

The door opened on a security chain, and an Asian man peered out.  He
was in his forties, short, slender, with black hair fading to gray at
the temples.

"Yes?"

Julie showed him her private investigator's license and explained that
they were looking for someone named George Farris.

"Police?"  The man frowned.

"Nothing wrong, no need police."

"No, see, we're private investigators," Bobby explained.

The man's eyes narrowed.  He looked as if he would close the door in
their faces, but abruptly he brightened, smile

"Oh, you're PI!  Like on TV."  He took the chain off the door and let
them in.

Actually he didn't just let them in, he welcomed them as if they were
honored guests.  Within three minutes flat, they learned his name was
Tuong Tran Phan (the order of his nam having been rearranged to
accommodate the western custom of putting the surname last), that he and
his wife, Chinh, were among the boat people who fled Vietnam two years
after the fall of Saigon, that they had worked in laundries and dry
cleaners, and eventually opened two dry-cleaning stores of their own.
Tuong insisted on taking their coats.  Chinh-a petit woman with delicate
features, dressed in baggy black slacks and a yellow silk blouse-said
she would provide refreshment even though Bobby explained that only a
few minutes of their time was required.

Bobby knew first-generation Vietnamese-Americans were sometimes
suspicious of policemen, even to the extent of being reluctant to call
for help when they were victims of crime.  The South Vietnamese police
often had been corrupt, and the North Vietnamese overlords, who seized
the South after the U.S.  withdrawal, had been murderous.  Even after
fifteen years or longer in the States, many Vietnamese remained at least
somewhat distrustful of all authorities.

In the case of Tuong and Chinh Phan, however, that suspicion did not
extend to private investigators.  Evidently they had seen so many heroic
television gumshoes, they believed all PIs were champions of the
underdog, knights with blazing.3 8s instead of lances.  In their roles
as liberators of the oppressed, Bobby and Julie were conducted, with
some ceremony, to the sofa, which was the newest and best piece of
furniture in the living room.

The Phans marshaled their exceptionally good-looking children in the
living room for introductions: thirteen-year-old Rocky, ten-year-old
Sylvester, twelve-year-old Sissy, and six year-old Meryl.  They were
obviously born-and-raised Americans, except that they were refreshingly
more courteous and well-mannered than many of their contemporaries. When
introductions had been made, the kids returned to the kitchen, where
they had been doing their schoolwork.

In spite of their polite protestations, Bobby and Julie were swiftly
served coffee laced with condensed milk and exquisite little Vietnamese
pastries.  The Phans had coffee as well.

Tuong and Chinh sat in worn armchairs that were visibly less comfortable
than the sofa.  Most of their furniture was in simple contemporary
styles and neutral colors.  A small Buddhist shrine stood in one corner;
fresh fruit lay on the red altar, and several sticks of incense bristled
from ceramic holders.  Only one stick was lit, and a pale-blue ribbon of
fragrant smoke curled upward.  The only other Asian elements were
blacklacquered tables.

"We're looking for a man who might once have lived at this address,"
Julie said, selecting one of the petits fours from the tray on which
Mrs.  Phan had served them.

"His name's George Farris."

"Yes.  He lived here," Tuong said, and his wife nodded.

Bobby was surprised.  He had been certain that the Farris name and the
address had been randomly matched by a document forger, that Frank had
never lived here.  Frank had been equally certain that Pollard, not
Farris, was his real name.

"You bought this house from George Farris?"  Julie asked Tuong said,

"No, he was dead."

"Dead?"  Bobby asked.

"Five or six years ago," Tuong said.

"Terrible cancer."  Then Frank Pollard wasn't Farris and hadn't lived
here.  The ID was entirely fake.

"We bought house just a few months ago from widow, Tuong said.  His
English was good, though occasionally dropped the article before the
noun.

"No, what I mean to say-from widow's estate."  Julie said,

"So Mrs.  Farris is dead too."  Tuong turned to his wife, and a
meaningful look passed between them.  He said,

"It is very sad.  Where do such men come from?"  Julie said,

"What man are you speaking of, Mr. Phan?"

"The one who killed Mrs.  Farris, her brother, two daughters." Something
seemed to slither and coil in Bobby's stomach He instinctively liked
Frank Pollard and was certain of his innocence, but suddenly a worm of
doubt bored into the fin polished apple of his conviction. Could it be
just a coincidence that Frank was carrying the ID of a man whose family
had been slaughtered-or was Frank responsible?'He was chewing a bite of
cream-filled pastry, and though it was tasty, he had trouble swallowing
it.

"It was late July," Chinh said.

"During the heat wave which you may remember."  She blew on her coffee
to cool it.  Bobby noticed that most of the time Chinh spoke perfect
English, and he suspected that her occasional infelicities of language
were conscious mistakes that she inserted in order to seem more
well-spoken than her husband and, a subtle and thoroughly Asian
courtesy.

"We buy house last October."

"They never catch the killer," Tuong Phan said.

"Do they have a description of him?"  Julie asked.

"I don't think so."  Reluctantly Bobby glanced at Julie.  She appeared
to be shaken as he was, but she did not give him an I-told-you-so look.

She said, "How were they murdered?  Shot?  Strangled?"

"Knife, I think.  Come.  I show you where bodies were found."  The house
had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but one bath was being remodeled.
The tile had been torn off the walls, floor, and counter.  The cabinets
were being rebuilt with quality oak.

Julie followed Tuong into the bathroom, and Bobby stayed at the doorway
with Mrs.  Phan.

The rattle-hiss of the rain echoed down through the ceiling vent.

Tuong said, "Body of youngest Farris daughter was here, on the floor.
She was thirteen.  Terrible thing.  Much blood.  The grout between tiles
was permanently stained, all had to come out."  He led them into the
bedroom his daughters shared.  Twin beds, nightstands, and two small
desks left little room for anything else.  But Sissy and Meryl had
squeezed in a lot of books.

Tuong Phan said, "Mrs.  Farris's brother, staying with her for a week,
was killed here.  In his bed.  Blood was on walls, carpet."

"We saw the house before it was listed with a real-estate agent, before
the carpet was replaced and the walls repainted," Chinh Phan said.

"This room was the worst.  It gave me bad dreams for a while."  They
proceeded to the sparely furnished master bedroom: a queen-size bed,
nightstands, two ginger-jar lamps, but no bureau or chest of drawers.
The clothes that would not fit in the closet were arranged along one
wall, in cardboard storage boxes with clear plastic lids.

Their frugality struck Bobby as similar to his and Julie's.  Perhaps
they, too, had a dream for which they were working and saving.

Tuong said, "Mrs.  Farris was found in this room, in her bed.  Terrible
things were done to her.  She was bitten, but they never wrote about
that in newspapers."

"Bitten?"  Julie asked.

"By what?"

"Probably by killer.  On the face, throat...  other places."

"if they didn't write about it in the papers," Bobby said, "how do you
know about the bites?"

"Neighbor who found bodies still lives next door.  She say that both
older daughter and Mrs.  Farris were bitten."  Mrs.  Phan said,

"She's not the kind to imagine such things.

"Where was the second daughter found?"  Julie asked.

"Please follow me."

Tuong led them back the way they had come, through the living room and
dining room, into the kitchen.

The four Phan children were sitting around a breakfast table.  Three of
them were diligently reading textbooks and taking notes.  No television
or radio provided distraction, and they appeared to be enjoying their
studies.  Even Meryl, who was a first-grader and probably had no
homework to speak of, was reading a children's book.

Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall of the
refrigerator.  The first displayed each kid's grades an major test
results since the start of the school year in September.  The other was
a list of household chores for which each child was responsible.

Throughout the country, universities were in a bind, because an
inordinately large percentage of the best applicants for ad mission were
of Asian extraction.  Blacks and Hispanics complained about being aced
out by another minority, and white shouted reverse racism when denied
admission in favor of an Asian student.  Some attributed
Asian-Americans' suggested conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple
explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They
tried harder.  They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been
based-including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented instead of denial, and
the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be.  Ironically, their great
success was partly due to the fact that many born Americans had become
cynical about those same ideals.

The kitchen was open to a family room that was furnished as humbly as
the rest of the house.

Tuong said, "Oldest Farris girl found here by sofa.  Seven teen.

"Very pretty girl," Chinh said sadly.

"She, like mother, was bitten.  So our neighbor says."

Julie said, "What about the other victims, the youngest daughter and
Mrs.  Farris's brother-were they bitten too?"

"Don't know," Tuong said.

"The neighbor didn't see their bodies," Chinh said.

They were silent for a moment, looking at the floor where the dead girl
had been found, as if the enormity of this crime was such that the stain
of it should somehow have reappeared on this brand-new carpet.

Rain droned on the roof.

Bobby said, "Doesn't it sometimes bother you to live here?

Not because murders took place in these rooms, but because the killer
was never found.  Don't you worry about him coming back some night?"

Chinh nodded.

Tuong said, "Everywhere is danger.  Life itself is danger.  Less risky
never being born."  A faint smile flickered across his face and was
gone.  "Leaving Vietnam in tiny boat was more dangerous than this."

Glancing at the table in the adjoining kitchen, Bobby saw the four kids
still deeply involved with their studies.  The prospect of a murderer
returning to the scene of this crime did not faze them.

"In addition to dry-cleaning," Chinh said, "we remodel houses, sell
them.  This is fourth.  We will live here maybe another year, remodeling
room by room, then sell, take a profit."  Tuong said, "Because of
murders, some people would not consider moving here after the Farrises.
But danger is also opportunity."  "When we finish with the house," Chinh
said, "it won't just be remodeled.  It will be clean, spiritually clean.
Do you understand?  The innocence of the house will be restored.  We
will have chased out the evil that the killer brought here, and we'll
have left our own spiritual imprint on these rooms."  Nodding, Tuong
said, "That is a satisfaction."

Removing the forged driver's license from his pocket, Bobby held it so
his fingers covered the name and address, leaving the photograph
visible.

"Do you recognize this man?"

"No," Tuong said, and Chinh agreed.

As Bobby put the license away, Julie said, "Do you know what George
Farris looked like?"

"No," Tuong said.  "As I told you, he died of cancer, many years before
his family was killed."

"I thought maybe you'd seen a photo of him here in the house, before the
Farrises' belongings were removed."

"No. Sorry."

Bobby said, "You mentioned earlier that you didn't buy the house through
a realtor.  You worked with the estates"

"Yes.  Mrs.  Farris's other brother inherited everything."

"Do you happen to have his name and address?"  Bob asked.  "I think
we'll need to talk to him."

DINNERTIME CAME.

Derek woke up.  He was groggy but hungry too.  He leaned on Thomas when
they walked to the dining room.  Food got eaten.  Spaghetti.  Meatballs.
Salad.  Good bread.  Chocolate cake.  Cold milk.

Back in their room, they watched TV.  Derek fell asleep again.  It was a
bad night on TV.  Thomas sighed with disgust.  After an hour or so, he
stopped the set.  None of the shows was smart enough to care about. They
were too stupid-silly even for a moron, which Mary said he was. Maybe
imbeciles would like them.  Probably not.

He used the bathroom.  Brushed his teeth.  Washed his face.  He didn't
look in the mirror.  He didn't like mirrors because they showed him what
he was.

After changing into pajamas, he got in bed and made the lamp go dark,
even though it was only eight-thirty.  He turned on his side, with his
head propped on two pillows, and studied the night sky framed by the
nearest window.  No stars.  Clouds.  Rain.  He liked rain.  When a storm
came down, it was like a lid on the night, and you didn't feel like you
might float up in all that darkness and just disappear.

He listened to the rain.  It whispered.  It cried tears on the window.

Far away, the Bad Thing was loose.  Ugly-nasty waves spread out from it
the way ripples spread across a pond when you dropped a stone in the
water.  The Bad Thing was like a big stone dropped into the night, a
thing that didn't belong in this world, and with a little effort Thomas
could sense the waves from it breaking over him.

He reached out.  Felt it.  A throbbing thing.  Cold and full of anger.
Mean.  He wanted to get closer.  learn what it was.

He tried throwing questions at it.  What are you?  Where you?  What do
you want?  Why are you going to hurt Julie?"

Suddenly, like a big magnet, the Bad Thing began to pull him.  He'd
never felt anything like that before.  When he turned his thoughts to
Bobby or Julie, they didn't grab him pull at him the way this Bad Thing
did.

A part of his mind seemed to unravel like a ball of string and the loose
end sailed through the window and way up the night, through the
darkness, until it found the Bad Thing.

Suddenly Thomas was very close to the Bad Thing, too close.  It was all
around him, big ugly and so strange that Thomas felt like he'd dropped
into a swimming pool full of ice and razor blades.  He didn't know if it
was a man, couldn't see shape, only feel it; it might be pretty on the
outside, but inside it was throbbing and dark and deep nasty.  He could
see what the Bad Thing was eating.  The food was was still alive and
squealing.  Thomas was scared big, and right away he tried to back away,
but for a moment the ugly mind held him tight, an he could get away only
by picturing the mind-string rewinding itself onto the ball.

When the mind-string was all wound up again, Thomas turned away from the
window, onto his stomach.  He was breathing real fast.  He listened to
his heart boom.

He had a sick-making taste in his mouth.  The same taste he got
sometimes when he bit his tongue, not meaning to, the same taste as when
the dentist yanked one of his teeth without meaning to.  Blood.

Sick and scared, he sat up in bed and made the lamp!"  on right away. He
took a tissue from the box on the night stand He spit into it and looked
to see if there was blood.  There wasn't.  Just spit.

He tried again.  No blood.

He knew what that meant.  He'd been too close to the Thing.  Maybe even
inside the bad thing, just for a blink.

ugly taste in his mouth was the same taste the Bad Thing tasted, tearing
with its teeth at some living, squirming thing.  Thomas didn't have
blood in his mouth, he just had mental blood in his mouth.  But that was
bad enough; this time wasn't at all like biting his tongue or getting a
tooth yank because this time what he tasted wasn't his own blood.

Though enough warmth was in the room, he started shivering and couldn't
stop.

CANDY PROWLED the canyons, in the grip of urgent need, grabbing wild
animals out of burrows and nests.  He was kneeling in the mud beside a
huge oak, pummeled by rain, sucking blood from the ravished throat of a
rabbit, when he felt someone place a hand atop his head.

He threw down the rabbit and sprang to his feet, turning around as he
did so.  Nobody was there.  Two of his sisters' blackest cats were
twenty feet behind him, visible only because their eyes were luminous in
the gloom; they had been following him since he'd left the house.
Otherwise he was alone.

For a second or two, he still felt the hand on his head, though no hand
was there.  Then the queer sensation passed.

He studied the shadows on all sides and listened to the rain snapping
through the oak leaves.

Finally, shrugging off the episode, driven by his fierce need, he
proceeded farther east, moving upslope.  A two-foot-wide stream had
formed on the canyon floor, six or eight inches deep, not large enough
to hamper his progress.

The drenched cats followed.  He did not want them with him, but he knew
from experience that he would not be able to chase them away.  They did
not always accompany him, but when they chose to follow in his tracks,
they could not be dissuaded.

After he had gone about a hundred yards, he dropped to his knees again,
held his hands in front of him, and allowed the power to erupt once
more.  Shimmering sapphire light swept through the night.  Brush shook,
trees stirred, and rocks clattered against one another.  In the wake of
the light, clouds of dust flew up, ghostly silver columns that rippled
like wind stirred shrouds, then vanished into the darkness.

A bevy of animals burst from cover, and some raced toward Candy.  He
snatched at a rabbit, missed, but seized a squirrel.  It tried to bite
him, but he swung it hard by one leg, bashing its head against the muddy
ground, stunning it.

VIOLET WAS with Verbina in the kitchen.  They were sitting on the
layered blankets with twenty-three of their twenty cats.

Parts of her mind-and parts of her sister's-were in theirs and Lamia,
the black cats through which they were accompanying their brother.
Watching Candy seize and destroy his prey, Cinders and Lamia were
excited, and Violet was excited too.  Electrified.

The wet January night was deep, illumined only by the brilliant light
from the communities to the west, which was fleeted off the bellies of
the low clouds.  In that wildem Candy was the wildest creature of them
all, a fierce and powerful and merciless predator who crept swiftly and
silently through the rugged canyons, taking what he needed and wanted.
He was so strong and limber that he appeared to fill up the canyon, over
rocks and fallen timber, around prickly brush, as if he were not a man
of flesh and blood, but the pled moonshadow of some flying creature
soaring high above the earth.

When Candy seized the squirrel and bashed its head against the ground,
Violet divided the part of her mind that was Lamia and Cinders, and also
entered the squirrel.  It stunned by the blow.  It struggled feebly and
looked at Candy with unalloyed terror.

Candy's big, strong hands were on the squirrel, but it seemed to Violet
that they were on her, as well, moving over her bare legs, hips, belly,
and breasts.

Candy snapped its spine against his bent knee.

Violet shuddered.  Verbina whimpered and clung to her sister.

The squirrel no longer had any feeling in its extremities.  With a low
growl, Candy bit the animal's throat.  He tore at its hide, chewing open
the blood-rich vessels.

Violet felt the hot blood spurting out of the squirrel, Candy's mouth
fastened hungrily to the wound.  It almost seemed as though no surrogate
lay between them, as if his lips were pressed firmly to Violet's throat
and as if her own blood was flooding into his mouth.  She wished that
she could be in Candy's mind and be on both the giving and receiving end
tasting the blood, but she could only meld with animals.

She no longer had the strength to sit up.  She settled back onto the
blankets, only half aware that she was softly chanting a monotonous
litany:

"Yea, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Verbina rolled atop her sister.

Around them the cats tumbled together in a roiling mass of fur and tails
and whiskered faces.

THOMAS TRIED again.  For Julie's sake.  He reached out toward the cold,
glowing mind of the Bad Thing.  Right away the Bad Thing drew him toward
it.  He let his mind unwind like a big ball of string.  It pierced the
window, zoomed into the night, made contact.

He sent questions: What are you?  Where are you?  What do you want?  Why
are you going to hurt Julie?

JUST AS CANDY threw aside the dead squirrel and got to his feet, he felt
the hand on his head again.  He twitched, turned, and flailed at the
darkness with both fists.

No one was behind him.

With radiant amber eyes, the two cats watched him from about twenty feet
away, dark blots on the pale silt.  All the wildlife in the immediate
vicinity had fled.  If someone was spying on him, the intruder was
concealed in the brush farther back along the canyon or in a niche on
one of the canyon walls, certainly not near enough to have touched him.

Besides, he still felt the hand.  He rubbed at the top of his head, half
expecting to find leaves stuck in his wet hair.  Nothing.

But the pressure of a hand remained, even increased, and was so well
defined that he could feel the outlines of four fingers, a thumb, and
the curve of a palm against his skull.

What...  where...  what...  why...  ?

Those words echoed inside his head.  No voice had broken through the
drizzling sounds of the rain.

What...  where...  what...  why...  ?

Candy turned in a full circle, angry and confused.

A crawling sensation arose in his head, different from any thing he had
ever known before.  As if something was moving in his brain.

"Who are you?"  he said aloud.

What...  where...  what...  why...  ?

"Who are you?"

THE BAD THING was a man.  Thomas knew that now.  An inside man and
something else, too, but still at least part man.

The Bad Thing's mind was like a whirlpool, blacker black, swirling real
fast, sucking Thomas down, down, was to gobble him alive.  He tried to
break loose.  Swimming Wasn't easy.  The Bad Thing was going to pull him
into the Bad Place, and he'd never be able to come back.  He thought he
was a gonner.  But his fear of the Bad Place, of going to loose Julie
and Bobby would never find him and where he'd be a was so big he finally
tore free and rewound himself into the room at Cielo Vista.

He slid down on the mattress and drew the covers over his head, so he
couldn't see the night beyond the window, and nothing out there in the
night could see him.

WALTER HAVALOW, Mrs.  George Farris's surviving brother and their to her
modest estate, lived in a richer neighborhood than the Phans, but he was
poorer in courtesy and good manners.  His English two-story house in
Villa Park had beveled-glass windows filled with a light that Julie
found warm and beckoning, but Havalow stood in the doorway and did not
invite them inside even after he had studied their PI license and
returned it to her.

"What do you want?"

Havalow was tall, potbellied, with thinning blond hair and a thick
mustache that was part blond and part red.  His penetrating hazel eyes
marked him as a man of intelligence, but they were cold, watchful, and
calculating-the eyes of a Mafia accountant.

"As I explained," Julie said, "the Phans told us you could help.  We
need a photograph of your late brother-in-law, George Farris."

"Why?"

"Well, as I said, there's a man going around pretending to be Mr.
Farris, and he's a player in a case we're working on."

"Can't be my brother-in-law.  He's dead."

"Yes, we know.  But this imposter's ID is very good, and it would help
us to have a photo of the real George Farris.  I'm sorry I can't tell
you anything more.  I'd be violating our client's privacy."

Havalow turned away and closed the door in their faces.

Bobby looked at Julie and said, "Mr. Congeniality."

Julie rang the bell again.

After a moment, Havalow opened the door.

"What?"

"I know we arrived unannounced," Julie said, struggling to remain
cordial, "and I apologize for the intrusion, but your-"

"I was just going to get the picture," he said impatiently.

"I'd have it in hand by now if you hadn't rung the bell."

as he turned away from them and closed the door a second time.

"Is it our body odor?"  Bobby wondered.

"What a jerk."

"You think he's really coming back?"

"He doesn't, I'll break the door down."

Behind them, rain dripped off the overhang that sheltered the last ten
feet of the walkway, and water gurgled hollowly through a downspout-cold
sounds.

Havalow returned with a shoe box full of snapshots.

time is valuable.  If you want my cooperation, you'll keep it in mind."

Julie resisted her worst instincts.  Rudeness irritated the hell out of
her.  She fantasized knocking the box out of his grasp and seizing one
of his hands, and bending the index finger as far back as it would go,
thus straining the digital nerve of his hand while simultaneously
pinching the radial nerves on the back, forcing him to kneel.  Then
driven a fist into the underside of his chin, a swift chop to the side
of his neck, a well-placed kick to his soft, protruding belly.  Havalow
rummaged through the box and extracted a photograph of a man and a woman
sitting at a redwood table with a picnic on a sunny day.

"That's George and Irene."

Even in the yellowish light of the porch lamp, Julie could see that
George Farris had been a rangy man with a long rough face, the exact
physical opposite of Frank Pollard.

"Why would someone be claiming he's George?"  Havlow asked.

"We're dealing with a possible criminal who uses multiple fake IDs,"
Julie said.

"George Farris is just one of his identities.  No doubt your
brother-in-law's name was probably selected at random by the document
forger this guy used.  They sometimes use the names and addresses of the
deceased.

Havalow frowned.

"You think it's possible this man George's name is the same guy who
killed Irene, my brother-in-law and my two nieces?"

"No," Julie said immediately.

"We're not dealing with a killer here.  Just a confidence man, a
swindler."

"Besides," Bobby said, "no killer would link himself to murders he'd
committed by getting ID in the name of his victim's husband."

Making eye contact with Julie, clearly trying to determine how much they
were snowing him, Havalow said, "This guy your client?"

"No," Julie lied.

"He ripped off our client, and we've been hired to track him down, so he
can be forced to make restitution."

Bobby said, "Can we borrow this photo, sir?"

Havalow hesitated.  He was still making eye contact with Julie.

Bobby handed Havalow a Dakota & Dakota business card.

"We'll get the picture back to you.  There's our address, phone number.
I understand your reluctance to part with a family photo, especially
since your sister and brother-in-law are no longer alive, but if-"

Apparently deciding that they were not lying, Havalow said, "Hell, take
it.  I'm not sentimental about George.  Never could stand him.  Always
thought my sister was a fool for marrying him."

"Thank you," Bobby said.

"We-"

Havalow stepped back and closed the door.

Julie rang the bell.

Bobby said, "Please don't kill him."

Scowling with impatience, Havalow opened the door.

Stepping between Julie and Havalow, Bobby held out the forged driver's
license bearing George Farris's name and Frank's picture.

"One more thing, sir, and we'll get out of your hair."

"I live to a very tight schedule," Havalow said.

"Have you seen this man before?"

Irritated, Havalow took the driver's license and inspected it.

"Doughy face, bland features.  There're a million like him within a
hundred miles of here-wouldn't you say?"

"And you've never seen him?"

"Are you slow-witted?  Do I have to put it in short, simple sentences?
No. I have never seen him."

Retrieving the license, Bobby said, "Thanks for your time and-"

Havalow closed the door.  Hard.

Julie reached for the bell.

Bobby stayed her hand.

"We've got everything we came for."

"I want-"

"I know what you want," Bobby said, "but torturing a man to death is
against the law in California."

He hustled her away from the house, into the rain.

In the car again, she said, "That rude, self-important bastard!"

Bobby started the engine and switched on the windshield wipers.

"We'll stop at the mall, buy you one of those GI teddy bears, paint
Havalow's name on it, let you tear the guts out of it.  Okay?"

"Who the hell does he think he is?"

While Julie glowered back at the house, Bobby drove off from it.

"He's Walter Havalow, babe, and he's got to be himself until he dies,
which is a worse punishment than anything you could do to him."  A few
minutes later, when they were out of Villa Park Bobby drove into the lot
at a Ralph's supermarket and tuck the Toyota into a parking space.  He
doused the headlights switched off the wipers, but left the engine
running so they would have heat.

Only a few cars were in front of the market.  Puddles as large as
swimming pools reflected the store lights.

Bobby said, "What've we learned?"

"That we loathe Walter Havalow."

"Yes, but what have we learned that's germane to the case.  Is it just a
coincidence that Frank's been using George Farris name and Farris's
family was slaughtered?"

"I don't believe in coincidence."

"Neither do I. But I still don't think Frank is a killer."

"Neither do I, though anything's possible.  But what I said to Havalow
was true-surely Frank wouldn't kill are Farris and everyone else in the
house, then carry around false ID that links him to them."

Rain began to fall harder than before, drumming noisily on the Toyota.
The heavy curtain of water blurred the super market.

Bobby said, "You want to know what I think?  I think Frank was using
Farris's name, and whoever's after him found out about it."

"Mr. Blue Light, you mean.  The guy who supposedly can make a car fall
apart around you and magically induce street lights to blow out."

"Yeah, him," Bobby said.

"If he exists."

"Mr. Blue Light discovered Frank was using the Farris name, and went to
that address, hoping to find him.  But Frank had never been there.  It
was just a name and address his document forger picked at random.  So
when Mr. Blue didn't find Frank, he killed everyone in the house, maybe
because he thought they were lying to him and hiding Frank, or maybe
just because he was in a rage."

"He'd have known how to deal with Havalow."

"So you think I'm right, I'm on to something?"  She thought about it.

"Could be."  He grinned at her.

"Isn't it fun being a detective?"

"Fun?"  she said incredulously.

"Well, I meant 'interesting."'

"We're either representing a man who killed four people, or we're
representing a man who's been targeted by a brutal murderer, and that
strikes you as fun?"

"Not as much fun as sex, but more fun than bowling."

"Bobby, sometimes you make me nuts.  But I love you."

He took her literally.

"If we're going to pursue the investigation, I'm damned well going to
enjoy it was much as I can.  But I'll drop the case in a minute if you
want."

"Why?  Because of your dream?  Because of the Bad Thing?"  She shook her
head.

"No. We start letting a weird dream spook us, pretty soon anything will
spook us.  We'll lose our confidence, and you can't do this kind of work
without confidence."

Even in the dim backsplash from the dashboard lights, she could see the
anxiety in his eyes.

Finally he said, "Yeah, that's what I knew you'd say.  So let's get to
the bottom of it was fast as we can.  According to his other driver's
license, he's James Roman, and he lives in El Toro."

"It's almost eight-thirty."

"We can be there, find the house...  maybe forty-five minutes.  That's
not too late."

"All right."  Instead of putting the car in gear, he slid his seat back
and stripped out of his down-lined, nylon jacket.

"Unlock the glove box and give me my gun.  From now on I'm wearing it
everywhere."

Each of them had a license to carry a concealed weapon.  Julie struggled
out of her own jacket, then retrieved two shoulder holsters from under
her seat.  She took both revolvers from the glove box: two snub-nosed
Smith & Wesson.38 Chief Specials, reliable and compact guns that could
be carried inconspicuously beneath ordinary clothing with little or no
help from a tailor.

THE HOUSE was gone.  If anyone named James Roman h lived there, he had
new lodgings now.  A bare concrete slab in the middle of the lot,
surrounded by grass, shrubbery, and several trees, as if the structure
had been snared from above by intergalactic moving men and neatly
spirited away.

Bobby parked in the driveway, and they got out of the Toyota to have a
closer look at the property.  Even in the slashing rain, a nearby street
lamp cast enough light to reveal that the lawn was trampled, gouged by
tires, and bare in spots; it was also littered with splinters of wood,
pale bits of Sheet rock crumbled stucco, and a few fragments of glass
that sparkled darkly.

The strongest clue to the fate of the house was to be found in the
condition of the shrubbery and trees.  Those bushes closest to the slab
were all either dead or badly damaged, and closer inspection appeared to
be scorched.  The nearest tree was leafless, and its stark black limbs
lent an anachronistic feeling of Halloween to the drizzly January night.

"Fire," Julie said.

"Then they tore down what was left."

"Let's talk to a neighbor."

The empty lot was flanked by houses.  But lights glowed on at the house
on the north side.

The man who answered the doorbell was about fifty-five, six feet two,
solidly built, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed grey mustache.  His
name was Park Hampstead, and he had the air of a retired military man.
He invited them in, with the proviso that they leave their sodden shoes
on the front porch.  In the socks, they followed him to a breakfast nook
off the kitchen, where the yellow vinyl dinette upholstery was safe from
their damp clothing; even so, Hampstead made them wait while he draped
thick peach-colored beach towels over two of the chairs.

"Sorry," he said, "but I'm something of a fuss-budget."

The house had bleached-oak floors and modern furniture, and Bobby
noticed that it was spotless in every corner.

"Thirty years in the Marine Corps left me with an abiding respect for
routine, order, and neatness," Hampstead explained.

"In fact, when Sharon died three years ago-she was my wife-I think maybe
I got a little crazy about neatness.  The first six or eight months
after her funeral, I cleaned the place top to bottom at least twice a
week, because as long as I was cleaning, my heart didn't hurt so bad.
Spent a fortune on Windex, paper towels, Fantastic, and sweeper bags.
Let me tell you, no military pension can support the industrial habit I
developed!  I got over that stage.  I'm still a fuss-budget but not
obsessed with neatness."

He had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, so he poured for them as well.
The cups, saucers, and spoons were all spotless.

Hampstead provided each of them with two crisply folded paper napkins,
then sat across the table from them.

"Sure," he said, after they raised the issue,

"I knew Jim Roman.  Good neighbor.  He was a chopper jockey out of the
El Toro Air Base.  That was my last station before retirement.  Jim was
a hell of a nice guy, the kind who'd give you the shirt off his back,
then ask if you needed money to buy a matching tie."

"Was?"  Julie asked.

"He die in the fire?"  Bobby asked, remembering the scorched shrubbery
and soot-blackened concrete slab next door.

Hampstead frowned.

"No. He died about six months after Sharon.  Make it...  two and a half
years ago.  His chopper crashed on maneuvers.  He was only forty-one,
eleven years younger than me.  Left a wife, Maralee.  A
fourteen-year-old daughter named Valerie.  Twelve-year-old son, Mike.
Real nice kids.  Terrible thing.  They were a close family, and Jim's
accident devastated them.  They had some relatives back in Nebraska, but
no one they could really turn to."  Hampstead stared past Bobby, at the
softly humming refrigerator, and eyes swam out of focus.

"So I tried to step in, help out, advise Maralee on finances, give a
shoulder to lean on and an ear to listen when the kids needed that. Took
''em to Disneyland and Knott's from time to time, you know, that sort of
thing.

Maralee told me lots of times what a godsend I was, but it was really me
who needed them more than the other way around because doing things for
them was what finally began to turn my mind off from losing Sharon."

Julie said, "So the fire happened more recently?"

Hampstead did not respond.  He got up, went to the sink opened the
cupboard door below, returned with a spray bottle of Windex and a dish
towel, and began to wipe the refrigerator door, which already appeared
to be as clean as the antiseptic surfaces in a hospital surgery.

"Valerie and Mike were their kids.  After a year or so it almost got to
seem like they were my kids, the ones me and Sharon never had.  Maralee
cried for Jim a long time, almost two years, before she began to
remember she was a woman in her prime.  Maybe what started to happen
between her and me would've upset Jim, but I don't think so; I think
he'd have been happy for us, even if I am eleven years older than her."

When he finished wiping the refrigerator, Hampstead inspected the door
from the side, at an angle to the light, apparently searching for a
fingerprint or smudge.  As if he had just heard the question that Julie
had asked a minute ago, Hampsted said,

"The fire was two months ago.  I woke up in the middle of the night,
heard sirens, saw an orange glow at the window, got up, looked out.  -
-."

He turned away from the refrigerator, studied the kitchen for a moment,
then went to the nearest tile-topped counter began to spritz and wipe
that gleaming surface.

Julie looked at Bobby.  He shook his head.  Neither of them said
anything.

After a moment Hampstead continued:

"Got over to the house just ahead of the firemen.  Went in through the
front door.  Made it into the foyer, then to the foot of the steps,
couldn't get up to the bedroom, the heat was too intense, the smoke.  I
called their names, nobody answered.  If I'd heard an answer maybe I
would've found the strength to go up there somehow in spite of the
flames.  I guess I must've blacked out for a few seconds and been
carried out by firemen, 'cause I woke up on the front lawn, coughing,
choking, a paramedic bent over me, giving me oxygen."

"All three of them died?"  Bobby asked.

"Yeah," Hampstead said.

"What caused the fire?"

"I'm not sure they ever figured that out.  I might've heard something
about a short in the wiring, but I'm not sure.  I think they even
suspected arson for a while, but that never led anywhere.  Doesn't much
matter, does it?"

"Why not?"

"Whatever caused it, they're all three dead."

Park"I'm sorry," Bobby said softly.

"Their lot's been sold.  Construction starts on a new house sometime
this spring.  More coffee?"

"No, thank you," Julie said.

Hampstead surveyed the kitchen, then moved to the stainless-steel range
hood, which he began to clean in spite of the fact that it was spotless.

"I apologize for the mess.  Don't know how the place gets like this when
it's just me living here.  Sometimes I think there must be gremlins
sneaking behind my back, messing things up to torment me."

"No need for gremlins," Julie said.

"Life itself gives us all the torment we can handle."

Hampstead turned away from the range hood.  For the first time since he
had gotten up from the table and begun his cleaning ritual, he made eye
contact with them.

"No gremlins," he agreed.

"Nothing as simple and easy to handle as gremlins."

He was a big man and obviously tough from years of military training and
discipline, but the shimmering, watery evidence of grief brimmed in his
eyes, and at the moment he seemed as lost and helpless as a child.

+ IN THE CAR again, staring through the rain-spattered windshield at the
vacant lot where the Roman house had once stood, Bobby said,

"Frank finds out that Mr. Blue Light knows about the Farris ID, so he
gets new ID in the name of James Roman.  But Mr. Blue eventually learns
about that, too, and he goes looking for Frank at the Roman address,
where he discovers only the widow and the kids.  He kills them, same as
he killed the Farris family, but this time he sets fire to the house to
cover the crime.  that the way it looks to you?"

"Could be," Julie said.

"He burns the bodies because he bites them, like Park told us, and the
bite marks help the police to tie his crimes together, so he wants to
throw the cops off the trail."  Julie said,

"Then why doesn't he burn them every time "Because that would be just as
much of a giveaway as bite marks.  Sometimes he burns the bodies,
sometimes he doesn't, and maybe sometimes he disposes of them so they
are never even found."  They were both silent for a moment.  Then she
said, we're dealing with a mass murderer, a serial killer, who's a
raving psychotic."

"Or a vampire," Bobby said.

"Why's he after Frank?"

"I don't know.  Maybe Frank once tried to drive a wooden stake through
his heart."

"Not funny."

"I agree," Bobby said.

"Right now, nothing seems funny."

FRom DYSON Manfred's house full of insect specimens in Irvine, Clint
Karaghiosis drove through the chilly rain to his own house in Placentia.
It was a homey two-bedroom bungalow with a rolled-shingle roof, a deep
front porch in the California Craftsman style, and French windows full
of warm amber light.  By the time he got there, the car heater had
pretty much dried his rain-soaked clothes.

Felina was in the kitchen when Clint entered by way of the connecting
door from the garage.  She hugged him, kissed him, held fast to him for
a moment, as if surprised to see him alive again.

She believed that his job was fraught with danger every day, though he
had often explained that he did mostly boring legwork.  He chased facts
instead of culprits, pursued a trail of paper rather than blood.

He understood his wife's concern, however, because he worried
unreasonably about her too.  For one thing, she was an attractive woman
with black hair, an olive complexion, and startlingly beautiful gray
eyes; in this age of lenient judges, with a surfeit of merciless
sociopaths on the streets, a good looking woman was regarded by some as
fair game.  Furthermore, though the office where Felina worked as a data
processor was only three blocks from their house, an easy walk even in
bad weather, Clint nevertheless worried about the danger she faced at
the busiest of the intersections that she had to cross; in an emergency,
a warning cry or blaring horn would not alert her to onrushing death.

He could not let her know how much he worried, for she was justly proud
that she was so independent in spite of her deafness.  He did not want
to diminish her self-respect by indicating in any way that he was not
entirely confident of her ability to deal with every rotten tomato that
fate threw at her.

he daily reminded himself that she had lived twenty-nine years without
coming to serious harm, and he resisted the urge to be overly
protective.

While Clint washed his hands at the sink, Felina set the kitchen table
for a late dinner.  An enormous pot of homemade vegetable soup was
heating on the stove, and together they ladled out two large bowls of
it.  He got a shaker of Parmesan cheese from the refrigerator, and she
unwrapped a loaf of crusty Italian bread.

He was hungry, and the soup was excellent-thick with vegetables and
chunks of lean beef-but by the time Felina finished her first bowlful,
Clint had eaten less than half of it because he repeatedly paused to
talk to her.  She could not read his lips well when he tried to converse
and eat at the same time and for the moment his hunger was less
compelling than need to tell her about his day.  She refilled her bowl
and freshed his.

Beyond the walls of his own small home, he was only slightly more
talkative than a stone, but in Felina's company he was as loquacious as
a talk-show host.  He didn't just prattle, either but settled with
surprising ease into the role of a polished comedian.  He had learned
how to deliver an anecdote in a way as to sharpen its impact and
maximize Felina's response for he loved to elicit a laugh from her or
watch her eyes with surprise.  In all of Clint's life, she was the first
person whose opinion of him truly mattered, and he wanted her to think
of him as smart, clever, witty, and fun.

Early in their relationship he had wondered if her deafness had anything
to do with his ability to open up to her.  Ever since birth, she had
never heard the spoken word and therefore had not learned to speak
clearly.  She responded to Clint-and would later tell him about her own
day-by way of sign language, which he had studied in order to understand
nimble-fingered speech.  Initially he had thought that the m
encouragement to intimacy was her disability, which ensured that his
innermost feelings and secrets, once revealed to her would go no
further; a conversation with Felina was anyway as private as a
conversation with himself.  In time, however he finally understood that
he opened up to her in spite of deafness, not because of it, and that he
wanted her to understand him.

his every thought and experience-and to share hers in return-simply
because he loved her.

When he told Felina how Bobby and Julie had adjourned to the bathroom
for three private chats during Frank Pollard's appointment, she laughed
delightedly.  He loved that sound; it was so warm and singularly
melodious, as if the great joy in life that she could not express in
spoken words was entirely channeled into her laughter.

"They're some pair, the Dakotas," he said.

"When you first meet them, they seem so dissimilar in some ways, you
figure they can't possibly work well together.  But then you get to know
them, you see how they fit like two pieces of a puzzle, and you realize
they've got a nearly perfect relationship."  Felina put down her soup
spoon and signed: So do we.

"We sure do."

"We fit better than puzzle pieces.  We fit like a plug and socket."

"We sure do," he agreed, smiling.  Then he picked up on the sly sexual
connotation of what she'd said, and he laughed.

"You're a filthy-minded wench, aren't you?"  She grinned and nodded.

"Plug and socket, huh?"  Big plug, tight socket, good fit.

"Later on, I'll check your wiring."  I am in desperate need of a
first-rate electrician.  But tell me more about this new client.

Thunder cracked and clattered across the night outside, and a sudden
gust of wind rattled the rain against the window.  The sounds of the
storm made the warm and aromatic kitchen even more inviting by
comparison.  Clint sighed with contentment, then was touched by a brief
sadness when he realized that the deeply satisfying sense of shelter,
induced by the sounds of thunder and rain, was a specific pleasure that
Felina could never experience or share with him.

From his pants pocket he withdrew one of the red gems that Frank Pollard
had brought to the office.

"I borrowed this one 'cause I wanted you to see it.  The guy had a
jarful of them."  She pinched the grape-sized stone between thumb and
index finger and held it up to the light.  Beautiful, she signed with
her free hand.  She put the gem beside her soup bowl, on the cream-white
Formica surface of the kitchen table.  Is it very valuable?

"We don't know yet," he said.

"We'll get an opinion from a gemologist tomorrow."  I think it's
valuable.

"When you take it back to them make sure there's no hole in your pocket.
I have a hunch YOU'D have to work a long time to pay for it if You lost
it.

The stone took in the kitchen light, bounced it from prism to prism, and
cast it back with a bright tint, painting Felina's face with luminous
crimson spots and smears.  She seem to be spattered with blood.

A queer foreboding overtook Clint.

She signed, What are you frowning about?

He didn't know what to say.  His uneasiness was out of proportion to the
cause of it.  A cold prickling sweat swiftly progressed from the base of
his spine all the way to the back of his neck as if dominoes of ice were
falling in a row.  He reached out moved the gem a few inches, so the
blood-red reflections on the wall beside Felina instead of on her face.

By ONE-THIRTY in the morning, Hal Yamataka was thoroughly hooked by the
John D. MacDonald novel, The Last One Left The room's only chair wasn't
the most comfort :it.

able seat he'd ever parked his butt in, and the antiseptic smell of the
hospital always made him a bit queasy, and the chili rellenos he'd eaten
for dinner were still coming back on him, but the book was so involving
that eventually he forgot all of those minor discomforts.

He even forgot Frank Pollard for a while, until he heard a brief hiss,
like air escaping under pressure, and felt a sudden draft.  He looked
away from the book, expecting to see Pollard sitting up in the bed or
trying to get out of it, but Pollard was not there.

Startled, Hal sprang up, dropping the book.

The bed was empty.  Pollard had been there all night, asleep for the
last hour, but now he was gone.  The place was not brightly lighted
because the fluorescence behind the bed were turned off, but the shadows
beyond the reading lamp were too shallow to conceal a man.  The sheets
were not tossed aside but were draped neatly across the mattress, and
both of the side railings were locked in place, as if Frank Pollard had
evaporated like a figure carved from Dry Ice.

Hal was certain that he would have heard Pollard lower one of the
railings, get out of bed, then lift the railing into place again. Surely
he would have heard Pollard climbing over it too.

The window was closed.  Rain washed down the glass, glimmering with
silvery reflections of the room's light.  They were on the sixth floor,
and Pollard could not escape by the window, yet Hal checked it, noting
that it was not merely closed but locked.

Stepping to the door of the adjoining bathroom, he said, "Frank?"

When no one answered, he entered.  The bath was deserted.

Only the narrow closet remained as a viable hiding place.  Hal opened it
and found two hangers that held the clothes Pollard had been wearing
when he'd checked into the hospital.  The man's shoes were there, too,
with his socks neatly rolled and tucked into them.

"He can't have gotten past me and into the hall," Hal said as if giving
voice to that contention would magically make true.

He pulled open the heavy door and rushed into the corridor.  No one was
in sight in either direction.

He turned to the left, hurried to the emergency exit at the end of the
hall, and opened the door.  Standing on the sixth floor landing, he
listened for footsteps rising or descending and heard none, peered over
the iron railing, down into the well then up.  He was alone.

Retracing his steps, he returned to Pollard's room an glanced inside at
the empty bed.  Still disheveled, he proceeded to the junction of
corridors, where he turned right an went to the glass-walled nurses'
station.

None of the five night-shift nurses had seen Pollard on the move.  Since
the elevators were directly opposite the nurse station, where Pollard
would have had to wait in full view of the people on duty, it seemed
unlikely that he had left the hospital by that route,

"I thought you were watching over him," said Grace Fugham, the
gray-haired supervisor of the sixth-floor night staff.  Her solid build,
indomitable manner, and life-worn but kin face would have made her
perfect for the female lead if Hollywood ever started remaking the old
Two Gun Annie or Ma an Pa Kettle movies.

"Wasn't that your job?"

"I never left the room, but-"

"Then how did he get past you?"

"I don't know," Hal said, chagrined.

"But the important thing is...  he's suffering from partial amnesia,
somewhat con fused.  He might wander off anywhere, out of the hospital,
God knows where.  I can't figure how he got past me, but we have to find
him."  Mrs.  Fulgham and a younger nurse named Janet Soto, helped make a
swift and quiet inspection of all the rooms along Pollard's corridor.

Hal accompanied Nurse Fulgham.  As they were checking out 604, where two
elderly men snored softly, he heard eerie music, barely audible.  As he
turned, seeking the source, the notes faded away.

If Nurse Fulgham heard the music, she did not remark on it.  A moment
later in the next room, 606, when those strains a rose once more,
marginally louder than before, she whispered,

"What is that?"

To Hal it sounded like a flute.  The unseen flautist produced no
discernible melody, but the flow of notes was haunting nonetheless.

They reentered the hall as the music stopped again, and just as a draft
swept along the corridor.

"Someone's left a window open-or probably a stairway door," the nurse
said quietly but pointedly:

"Not me," Hal assured her.

Janet Soto stepped out of the room across the hall just as the blustery
draft abruptly died.  She frowned at them, shrugged, then headed toward
the next room on her side.

The flute warbled softly.  The draft struck up again, stronger than
before, and beneath the astringent odors of the hospital, Hal thought he
detected a faint scent of smoke.

Leaving Grace Fulgham to her search, Hal hurried toward the far end of
the corridor.  He intended to check the door at the head of the
emergency stairs, to make sure that he hadn't left it open.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the door to Pollard's room beginning
to swing shut, and he realized that the draft must be coming from in
there.  He pushed through the door before it could close, and saw Frank
sitting up in bed, looking confused and frightened.

The draft and flute had given way to stillness, silence.

"Where did you go?"  Hal asked, approaching the bed.

"Fireflies," Pollard said, apparently dazed.  His hair was spiked and
tangled, and his round face was pale.

"Fireflies?"

"Fireflies in a windstorm," Pollard said.

Then he vanished.  One second he was sitting in bed, as real and solid
as anyone Hal had ever known, and the next second he was gone as
inexplicably and neatly as a ghost abandoning a haunt.  A brief hiss,
like air escaping from a punctured tire accompanied his departure.

Hal swayed as if he had been stricken.  For a moment his heart seemed to
seize up, and he was paralyzed by surprise when Nurse Fulgham stepped
into the doorway.

"No sign of him in any of the rooms off this corridor.  He might've gone
up to another floor-don't you think?"

"Uh...."

"Before we check out the rest of this level, maybe I'd better call
security and get them moving on a search of the entire hospital.  Mr.
Yamataka?"  Hal glanced at her, then back at the empty bed.

"Uh.

yeah.  Yeah, that's a good idea.  He might wander off to.

God knows where."  Nurse Fulgham hurried away.

Weak-kneed, Hal went to the door, closed it, put his back against it,
and stared at the bed across the room.  After a while he said,

"Are you there, Frank?"  He received no answer.  He had not expected
one.  Frank Pollard had not turned invisible; he had gone somewhere,
some how.

Not sure as to why he was less wonder struck than frightened of what he
had seen, Hal hesitantly crossed the room to the bed.  He gingerly
touched the stainless-steel railing, as if he thought that Pollard's
vanishing act had tapped some elemental force leaving a deadly residual
current in the bed.  But no spark crackled under his fingertips; the
metal was cool and smooth He waited, wondering how soon Pollard would
reappear wondering if he ought to call Bobby now or wait until Pollard
materialized, wondering if the man would materialize again disappear
forever.

For the first time in memory, Hal Yamataka was gripped by indecision; he
was ordinarily quick to think and quick to act, but he had never come
face to face with the supernatural before.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he must not allow Fulgham or
anyone on the floor, or anyone else in the hospital to find out what had
really happened.

Pollard was caught up in a phenomenon, afraid that word of it would
spread quickly from the hospital staff to the press.  Protecting a
client's privacy was always of Dakota & Dakota's prime objectives, but
in this case it was even more important than usual.  Bobby and Julie had
said that someone was hunting for Pollard, evidently with violent
intentions; therefore, keeping the press out of the case might be
essential if the client was to survive.

The door opened, and Hal jumped as if he'd been stuck with a hatpin.

In the doorway stood Grace Fulgham, looking as if she had just either
guided a tugboat through stormy seas or chopped and carried a couple of
cords of firewood that Pa had been too lazy to deal with.

"Security's putting a man at every exit to stop him if he tries to
leave, and we're mobilizing the nursing staff on each floor to look for
him.  Do you intend to join the search?"

"Uh, well, I've got to call the office, my boss.

"If we find him, where will we find you?"

"Here.  Right here.  I'll be here, making some calls."  She nodded and
went away.  The door eased shut after her.

A privacy curtain hung from a ceiling track that described an arc around
three sides of the bed.  It was bunched against the wall, but Hal
Yamataka drew it to the foot of the bed, blocking the view from the
doorway, in case Pollard materialized just as someone stepped in from
the corridor.

His hands were shaking, so he jammed them in his pockets.

Then he took his left hand out to look at his wristwatch: 1:48.

Pollard had been missing for perhaps eighteen minutes, except, of
course, for the few seconds during which he had flickered into existence
and talked about fireflies in a windstorm.  Hal decided to wait until
two o'clock to call Bobby and Julie.

He stood at the foot of the bed, clutching the railing with one hand,
listening to the night wind crying at the window and the rain snapping
against the glass.  The minutes crawled past like snails on an incline,
but at least the wait gave him time to calm down and think about how he
would tell Bobby what had happened.

As the hands on his watch lined up at two o'clock, he went the rest of
the way around the bed and was reaching for the phone on the nightstand
when he heard the eerie ululation of a distant flute.  The half-drawn
bed-curtain fluttered in a sudden draft.

He returned to the foot of the bed and looked past the end of the
curtain to the hallway door.  It was closed.  That was the source of the
draft.

The flute died.  The air in the room grew still, leaden.

Abruptly the curtain shivered and rippled, gently rattling the bearings
in the overhead track, and a cool breeze swept around the room, ruffling
his hair.  The music rose again.

With the door shut and the window closed tight, the only possible source
of the draft was the ventilation grille in the wall above the
nightstand.  But when Hal stood on his toes and raised his right hand in
front of that outlet, he felt nothing coming from it.  The chilly
currents of air appeared to have sprung up within the room itself.

He turned in a circle, moved this way and that, trying to get a fix on
the flute.  Actually, it didn't sound like a flute.  He listened
closely; it was more like a fluctuation of wind whistling through a lot
of pipes at the same time, big ones and little ones threading together
many vague but separate sounds that loosely sounded like keening that
was simultaneously eerie and, mournful yet somehow...  threatening.  It
faded, returned a third time.  To his surprise and bewilderment,
tuneless notes seemed to be issuing from the empty air around the bed.

Hal wondered if anyone else in the hospital could hear the flute this
time.  Probably not.  Though the music was louder now than when it had
begun, it remained faint; in fact, if he had been asleep, the mysterious
serenade would not have been loud enough to wake him.

Before Hal's eyes, the air over the bed shimmered.  For a moment he
could not breathe, as if the room had become a temporary vacuum chamber.
He felt his ears pop the same way they did during a too-rapid altitude
change.

The strange warbling and the draft died together, and Frank Pollard
reappeared as abruptly as he had vanished.  He was lying on his side,
with his knees drawn up in the fetal position.  For a few seconds he was
disoriented; when he realized who he was, he clutched the bed railing
and pulled himself into a sitting position.  The skin around his eyes
was puffy and dark but otherwise he was dreadfully pale.  His face had a
grey sheen to it, as if it wasn't perspiration pouring from him clear
beads of oil.  His blue cotton pajamas were rumpled, darkly mottled with
sweat, and caked with dirt in places.

He said,

"Stop me."

"What the hell's going on here?"  Hal asked, his voice cracking.

"Out of control."

"Where did you go?"

"For God's sake, help me."  Pollard was still clutching the bed rail
with his right hand, but he reached entreatingly toward Hal with his
left.

"Please, please..."  Stepping closer to the bed, Hal reached out -and
Pollard vanished, this time not only with a hissing sound, as before,
but with a shriek and sharp crack of tortured metal.  The
stainless-steel railing, which he had been gripping so fiercely, had
torn loose of the bed and vanished with him.

Hal Yamataka stared in astonishment at the hinges to which the
adjustable railing had been fixed.  They were twisted and torn, as if
made of cardboard.  A force of incredible power had pulled Pollard out
of that room, snapping quarter-inch steel.

Staring at his own outstretched hand, Hal wondered what would have
happened to him if he had been gripping Pollard.  Would he have
disappeared with the man?  To where?  Not someplace he would want to be:
he was sure of that.

Or maybe only part of him would have gone with Pollard.  Maybe he would
have come apart at a joint, just as the bed railing had done.  Maybe his
arm would have ripped out of his shoulder socket with a crack almost as
sharp as that with which the steel hinges had separated, and maybe he
would have been left screaming in pain, with blood squirting from
snapped vessels.

He snatched his hand back, as if afraid Pollard might suddenly reappear
and seize it.

As he rounded the bed to the phone, he thought that his legs were going
to fail him.  His hands were shaking so badly, he almost dropped the
receiver and had difficulty dialing the Dakotas' home number.

BOBBY AND Julie left for the hospital at 2:45.

The night looked deeper than usual; street lamps and headlights did not
fully penetrate the gloom.  Shatters of rain fell with force, they
appeared to bounce off the blacktop streets, as if they were hard
fragments of a disintegrating vault that had come through the night
above.

Julie drove because Bobby was only three-quarters awake His eyes were
heavy, and he couldn't stop yawning, and thoughts were fuzzy at the
edges.  They had gone to bed three hours before Hal Yamataka had
awakened them.  If Julie had to get by on only that much sleep, she
could do it, Bobby needed at least six-preferably eight-hours in order
to function well.

That was a minor difference between them, no big deal.

because of several such minor differences, Bobby suspected that Julie
was tougher overall than he was, even if he could whip her ten times out
of ten in an arm-wrestling competition.  He chuckled softly.

She said, "What?"

She braked for a traffic light as it phased to red.  Its blood image was
reflected in distorted patterns by the black, murky like surface of the
rain-slick street.

"I'm crazy to give you an advantage by admitting this, I was thinking
that in some ways you're tougher than me."

She said, "That's no revelation.  I've always known I'm tougher."

"Oh, yeah?  If we arm wrestle, I'll whip you every time

"How sad."  She shook her head.

"Do you really think beating up someone smaller than you, and a woman to
boot, makes you a macho man?"

"I could beat up a lot of women bigger than me," Bobby assured her.

"And if they're old enough, I could take them on two or three or four at
a time.  In fact, you throw half a dozen big grandmothers at me, and
I'll take them all on with one hand tied behind my back!"

The traffic light turned green, and she drove on.

"I'm talking big grandmothers," he said.

"Not frail little old ladies.  Big, fat, solid grandmothers, six at a
time."

"That is impressive."

"Damn right.  Though it'd help if I had a tire iron."

She laughed, and he grinned.

But they could not forget where they were going or why, and their smiles
faded to a pair of matching frowns.  They drove in silence.  The thump
of the windshield wipers, which ought to have lulled Bobby to sleep,
kept him awake instead.

Finally Julie said, "You think Frank actually vanished in front of Hal's
eyes, the way he says?"

"I've never known Hal to lie or give in to hysteria."

"Me neither."

She turned left at the next corner.  A few blocks ahead, beyond
billowing curtains of rain, the lights of the hospital appeared to pulse
and flicker and stream like an iridescent liquid, which made it look
every bit was miragelike as a phantom oasis shimmering behind veils of
heat rising from desert sands.

WHEN THEY entered the room, Hal was standing at the foot of the bed,
which was largely concealed by the privacy curtain.  He looked like a
guy who had not only seen a ghost, but had embraced it and kissed it on
its cold, damp, putrescent lips.

"Thank God, you're here."  He looked past them, into the hall.

"The head nurse wants to call the cops, file a missing person-"

"We've dealt with that," Bobby said.

"Dr. Freeborn talked to her by phone, and we've signed a release
absolving the hospital."

"Good."  Gesturing toward the open door, Hal said, "We'll want to keep
this as private as we can."

After closing the door, Julie joined them at the foot of the bed.

Bobby noted the missing railing and broken hinges.

"What's this?"

Hal swallowed hard.  "He was holding the railing when he vanished... and
it went with him.  I didn't mention it on the phone, 'cause I figured
you already thought I was nuts, this would confirm it."

"Tell us now," Julie said quietly.

They were all talking softly, for otherwise Nurse Fulgham was certain to
stop by and remind them that most of the patients on the floor were
sleeping.

When Hal finished his story, Bobby said, "The flute, the peculiar
breeze...  that's what Frank told us he heard shortly after he regained
consciousness that night in the alleyway, somehow he knew it meant
someone was coming."  Some of the dirt that Hal had observed on Frank's
pajamas after his second reappearance, was on the bed sheets.  Julie
plucked up a pinch of it.

"Not dirt exactly."  Bobby examined the grains on her fingertips.

"Black sand."

To Hal, Julie said, "Frank hasn't reappeared since he left with the
railing?"

"No."

"And when was that?"

"A couple of minutes after two o'clock.  Maybe two-oh-t two-oh-three,
something like that."

"About an hour and twenty minutes ago," Bobby said.

They stood in silence, staring at the mountings from which the bed
railing had been torn.

Outside, a squall of wind that rained against the window with sufficient
force to make it so like out-of-season Halloween pranksters pitching
hands full of dried corn.

Finally Bobby looked at Julie.

"What do we do now?"  She blinked.

"Don't ask me.  This is the first case I've worked on that involves
witchcraft."

"Witchcraft?"  Hal said nervously.

"Just a figure of speech," Julie assured him.

Maybe, Bobby thought.  He said, "We've got to assume he'll come back
before morning, perhaps a couple of times, sooner or later he'll stay
put.  This must be what happens every night when he sleeps; this is the
traveling he doesn't remember when he wakes up."

"Traveling," Julie said.  Under the circumstances, that ordinary word
seemed as exotic and full of mystery as any in the language.

CAREFUL NOT to wake the patients, they borrowed two additional chairs
from other rooms along the corridor.  Hal sat tensely just inside the
closed door of room 638, in a position to prevent any of the hospital
staff from walking in unimpeded.  Julie sat at the foot of the bed, and
Bobby stationed himself at the side of it nearest the window, where the
railing was still in place.

They waited.

From her chair, Julie only had to turn her head slightly to look across
the room at Hal.  When she glanced the other way she could see Bobby.
But because of the privacy curtain that was drawn along the side of the
bed with the missing railing, Hal and Bobby were not in each other's
line of sight.

She wondered if Hal would have been astonished to see how quickly Bobby
went to sleep.  Hal was still pumped up by what had happened, and Julie,
only having heard about Frank's sorcerous disappearance second-hand, was
nonetheless eagerly nervously-anticipating the chance to witness the
same bit of magic herself.  Bobby was a man of considerable imaginative
powers, with a childlike sense of wonder, so he was probably more
excited about these events than either she or Hal was; furthermore,
because of his premonition of trouble, he suspected that the case was
going to be full of surprises, some nasty, and these events no doubt
alarmed him.  Yet he could slump against the inadequately padded arm of
his chair, let his chin drop against his chest, and doze off.  He would
never be felled by stress.  At times his sense of proportion, his
ability to put anything in a manageable perspective, seemed superhuman.
When Bobby McFerrin's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" had been a hit a
couple of years ago, she had not been surprised that her own Bobby had
been enamored of it; the tune was essentially his personal anthem.
Apparently by an act of will, he could readily achieve serenity, and she
admired that.

By 4:40, when Bobby had been slumbering contentedly for nearly an hour,
she watched him doze with admiration that rapidly escalated to unhealthy
envy.  She had the urge to give his chair a kick, toppling him out of
it.  She restrained herself only because she suspected that he would
merely yawn, up on his side, and sleep even more comfortably on the
floor at which point her envy would become so all-consuming she would
simply have to kill him where he lay.  She imagined herself in court: I
know murder is wrong, Judge, but he was just too laid-back to live.

A cascade of soft, almost melancholy notes fell out of the air in front
of her.

"The flute!"  Hal said, leaving his chair with the suddeness of a
popcorn kernel bursting off a heated pan.

Simultaneously, a breath of cool air stirred through the room, without
apparent source.

Getting to her feet, Julie whispered,

"Bobby!"  She shook him by the shoulder, and he came awake just as the
music faded and the air turned crypt-still.

Bobby rubbed his eyes with his palms, and yawned.

"What's wrong?"

Even as he spoke, the haunting music swelled again, but louder than
before.  Not music, actually, just noise.  Hal was right: listening
closely, you could also tell it was a flute.

She stepped toward the bed.

Hal had left his station by the door.  He put a hand on her shoulder,
halting her.

"Be careful."  Frank had reported three-maybe four-separate trips of the
faux flute, and as many agitations of the air, before Blue Light had
appeared on his trail that night in Anaheim and Hal had noticed that
three episodes had preceded each of Frank's own reappearances.  However,
those accompanying phenomena evidently could not be expected in an exact
pattern, for when the second rivulet of unharmonious finished spilling
out of the wether, the air immediately above the bed shimmered, as if a
double handful of pale tarnished sand had been swept up and set aflutter
in rising currents of air and suddenly Frank Pollard winked into
existence atop rumpled sheets.

Julie's ears popped.

"Holy cow!"  Bobby said, which was just what Julie would have expected
him to say.

She, on the other hand, was unable to speak.

Gasping, Frank Pollard sat up in bed.  His face was bloodless.  Around
his rheumy eyes, the skin looked bruised.  Sour perspiration glistened
on his face and beaded in his beard stubble.

He was holding a pillowcase half filled with something.  The end was
twisted and held shut with a length of cord.  He let go of it, and it
fell off the side of the bed where the railing was missing, striking the
floor with a soft plop.

When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strange.

"Where am I?"

"You're in the hospital, Frank," Bobby said.

"It's all right.  You're where you belong now."

"Hospital...  " Frank said, savoring the word as if he had just heard
it-and was now pronouncing it-for the first time.  He looked around,
obviously bewildered; he still didn't know where he was.

"Don't let me slip-" He vanished mid-sentence.  A brief hiss accompanied
his abrupt departure, as if the air in the room was escaping through a
puncture in the skin of reality.

"Damn!"  Julie said.

"Where were his pajamas?"  Hal said.

"What?"

"He was wearing shoes, khaki pants, a shirt and sweater," Hal said,

"but the last time I saw him, a couple of hours ago, he still had on his
pajamas."  At the far end of the room, the door began to open but bumped
against Hal's empty chair.  Nurse Fulgham poked her head through the
gap.  She looked down at the chair, then across the room at Hal and
Julie, then at Bobby, who stepped to the foot of the bed to peer past
his two associates and the half-drawn privacy curtain.

Their astonishment at Frank's vanishing act must have been ill
concealed, for the woman frowned and said,

"What's wrong?"

Julie quickly crossed the room as Grace Fulgham slid the chair aside and
opened the door all the way.

"Everything's fine.  We just spoke by phone with our man heading up the
search, and he says they've found someone who saw Mr. Pollard earlier
tonight.  We know which way he was heading, so now it's only a matter of
time until we find him."

"We didn't expect you'd be here so long," Fulgham said frowning past
Julie at the curtained bed.

Even through the heavy door, maybe she had heard the faint warble of the
flute that wasn't a flute.

"Well," Julie said, "this is the easiest place from which to coordinate
the search."  By standing just inside the door, with Hal's empty chair
between them, Julie was trying to block the nurse's advance with out
appearing to do so.  If Fulgham got past the curtain, she might notice
the missing railing, the black sand in the bed, a the pillowcase that
was filled with God-knew-what.  Questions about any of those things
might be difficult to answer convincingly, and if the nurse remained in
the room too long, she might be there when Frank returned.

Julie said, "I'm sure we haven't disturbed any of the other patients.
We've been very quiet."

"No, no," Nurse Fulgham said,

"you haven't disturbed any one.  We just wondered if you might like some
coffee to help keep you awake."

"Oh."

Julie turned to look at Hal and Bobby.

"Coffee?'

"No,"

the two men said simultaneously.  Then, speaking over each other, Hal
said, "No, thank you,"

and Bobby said, "Very kind of you."

"I'm wide awake," Julie said, frantic to be rid of the nurse but trying
to sound casual,

"and Hal doesn't drink coffee, and Bobby, my husband, can't handle
caffeine because of prostrate problems."  I'm babbling, she thought.

"Anyway, we'll be leaving soon now, I'm sure."

"Well," the nurse said, "if you change your mind.

After Fulgham left, letting the door close behind her, Bobby whispered,
"Prostate trouble?"

Julie said, "Too much caffeine causes prostate trouble Seemed like a
convincing detail to explain why, with everything going on, you didn't
want coffee."

"But I don't have a prostate problem.  Makes me sound like an old fart."

"I have it," Hal said.

"And I'm not an old fart."

"What is this?"  Julie said.

"We're all babbling."  She pushed the chair in front of the door and
returned to the bed, where she picked up the pillowcase-bag that Frank
Pollard had brought from...  from where ever he had been

"Careful," Bobby said.

"Last time Frank mentioned a pillowcase, it was the one he trapped that
insect in."  Julie gingerly set the bag on a chair and watched it
closely.

"Doesn't seem to be anything squirming around in it."  She started to
untie the knotted cord from the neck of the sack.

Grimacing, Bobby said, "If you let out something big as a house cat,
with a lot of legs and feelers, I'm going straight to a divorce lawyer."

The cord slipped free.  She pulled open the pillowcase, and looked
inside.

"Oh, God."  Bobby took a couple of steps backward.

"No, not that," she assured him.

"No bugs.  Just more cash."  She reached into the sack and withdrew a
couple of bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

"If it's all hundreds, there could be as much as a quarter of a million
in here."

"What's Frank doing?"  Bobby wondered.

"Laundering money for the mob in the Twilight Zone?"  Hollow, lonely,
tuneless piping pierced the air again, and like a needle pulling thread,
the sound brought with it a draft that rustled the curtain.

Shivering, Julie turned to look at the bed.

The flowerlike notes faded with the draft, then soon rose again, faded,
rose, and faded a fourth time as Frank Pollard reappeared.  He was on
his side, arms against his chest, hands fisted, grimacing, his eyes
squeezed shut, as if he were preparing himself to receive the killing
blow of an ax.

Julie stepped toward the bed, and again Hal stopped her.

Frank sucked in a deep breath, shuddered, made a low anguished mewling,
opened his eyes-and vanished.  Within two or three seconds, he appeared
yet again, still shuddering.  But immediately he vanished, reappeared,
vanished, reappeared, vanished, as if he were an image flickering on a
television set with poor signal reception.  At last he stuck fast to the
fabric of reality and lay on the bed, moaning.

After rolling off his side, onto his back, he gazed at the ceiling.  He
raised his fists from his chest, uncurled them, and stared at his hands,
baffled, as if he had never seen fingers before.

"Frank?"  Julie said.  He did not respond to her.  With his fingertips
he explored the contours of his face, as if a Braille reading of his
features would recall to him the forgotten specifics of his appearance.

Julie's heart was racing, and every muscle in her body felt as if it had
been twisted up as tight as an overwound clock spring.  She was not
afraid, really.  It was not a tension engineered by fear but by the
sheer strangeness of what had happened.

"Frank, are you okay?"

Blinking through the interstices of his fingers, he said, "O It's you,
Mrs.  Dakota.  Yeah...  Dakota.  What's happened Where am I?"

"You're in the hospital now," Bobby said.

"Listen, the important question isn't where you are, but where the hell
had you been?"

"Been?  Well...  what do you mean?"  Frank tried to sit up in bed, but
he seemed to temporarily lack the strength to get off his back.

Picking up the bed controls, Bobby elevated the upper half of the
mattress.

"You weren't in this room during most of the last few hours.  It's
almost five in the morning, and you've been jumping in and out of here
like...  like...  like a crew remember of the Starship Enterprise who
keeps beaming back up to the mothership!"

"Enterprise?  Beaming up?  What're you talking about?"

Bobby looked at Julie.  "Whoever this guy is, wherever he comes from, we
now know for sure that he's been living past the edge of modern culture,
on the fringe.  You ever know a modern American who hasn't at least
heard of Star Trek?

To Bobby, Julie said, "Thanks for your analysis, Mr. Spock."

"Mr. Spock?"  Frank said.

"See!"  Bobby said.

"We can question Frank later," Julie said.

"He's confuse right now, anyway.  We've got to get him out of here.  If
the nurse comes back and sees him, how do we explain his reappearance?
Is she really going to believe he wandered back into the hospital, past
security and the nursing staff, up six floors with nobody spotting him?"

"Yeah," Hal said,

"and though he seems to be back good, what if he pops away again, in
front of her eyes?"

"Okay, so we'll get him out of bed and sneak him dow those stairs at the
end of the hall," Julie said,

"out to the car.

As they talked about him, Frank turned his head back and forth,
following the conversation.  He appeared to be watching a tennis match
for the first time, unable to comprehend the rules of the game.

Bobby said, "Once we've gotten him out of here, we can tell Fulgham he's
been found just a few blocks away and that we're meeting with him to
determine whether he wants-or even needs-to be returned to the hospital.
He's our client, after all, not our ward, and we have to respect his
wishes."

Without having to wait for tests to be conducted, they now knew that
Frank was not suffering strictly from physical ailments like cerebral
abscesses, clots, aneurysms, cysts, or neoplasms.  His amnesia did not
spring from brain tumors, but from something far stranger and more
exotic than that.  No malignancy, regardless of how singular its nature,
would invest its victim with the power to step into the fourth dimension
or to wherever Frank was stepping when he vanished.

"Hal," Julie said, "get Frank's other clothes from the closet, bundle
them up, and stuff them in the pillowcase with the money."

"Will do."

"Bobby, help me get Frank out of bed, see if he can stand on his own
feet.  He looks awful weak."  The remaining bed railing stuck for a
moment when Bobby tried to lower it, but he struggled with it because
they could not take Frank out of bed on the other side without drawing
back the privacy curtain and exposing him to anyone who might push open
the door.

"You could've done me a big favor and packed this rail off to Oz with
the other one," Bobby told Frank, and Frank said,

"Oz?"

When the railing finally folded down, out of the way, Julie found that
she was hesitant to touch Frank, for fear of what might happen to her-or
parts of her-if he pulled another disappearing act.  She had seen the
shattered hinges of the bed railing; she was also keenly aware that
Frank had not brought the railing back with him, but had abandoned it in
the other world or wherever to which he traveled.

Bobby hesitated, too, but overcame his apprehension, grabbing the man's
legs and swinging them over the edge of the bed, taking hold of his arm
and helping him into a sitting position, In some ways she might be
tougher than Bobby, but when it came to encounters with the unknown, he
was clearly moor flexible and quick to adapt than she was.

Finally she quelled her fear, and together she and Bobby assisted Frank
off the bed and onto his feet.  His legs buckle under him, and they had
to support him.  He complained of weakness and dizziness.

Stuffing the other set of clothes in the pillowcase, Hal said "if we
have to, Bobby and I can carry him."

"I'm sorry to be so much trouble," Frank said.

To Julie, he had never sounded or looked more pathetic, an she felt a
flush of guilt about her reluctance to touch him.

Flanking Frank, their arms around him to provide support Julie and Bobby
walked him back and forth, past the rain washed window, giving him a
chance to recover the use of his legs.  Gradually his strength and
balance returned.

"But my pants keep trying to fall down," Frank said.

They propped him against the bed, and he leaned on Julie while Bobby
lifted the blue cotton sweater to see if they be needed to be cinched in
one notch.  The tongue end of the bell was weakened by scores of small
holes, as if industrious insect had been boring at it.  But what insects
ate leather?  When Bobby touched the tarnished brass buckle, it crumbled
a though it was made of flaky pastry dough.

Gaping at the glittering crumbs of metal on his finger Bobby said,
"Where do you shop for clothes, Frank?  In dumpster?"

In spite of Bobby's light tone, Julie knew he was unnerve What substance
or circumstances could so profoundly alter the composition of brass?
When he brushed his fingers against the bed sheets to wipe off the
curious residue, she flinched, not expecting his flesh to have been
contaminated by the contact with the brass, and to crumble as the buckle
had done.

AFTER CINCHING Frank's pants with the belt that he had worn when he'd
checked into the hospital, Hal helped Bobby slip their client out of the
room.  With Julie scouting the way, they went quickly and quietly along
the hall and through the fire door at the head of the emergency stairs.

Frank's skin remained cold to the touch, and he was still clammy with
perspiration; but the effort brought a flush to his cheeks, which made
him look less like a walking corpse.

Julie hurried to the bottom of the stairwell to see what lay beyond the
lower door.  With the thump and scrape of their footsteps echoing
hollowly off the bare concrete walls, the three men went down four
flights without much difficulty.  At the fourth-floor landing, however,
they had to pause to let Frank catch his breath.

"Are you always this weak when you wake up and don't remember where
you've been?"  Bobby asked.

Frank shook his head.  His words issued in a thing wheeze: "No. -Always
frightened...  tired, but not as bad...  as this.  I feel like...
whatever I'm doing...  wherever I'm going...  it's taking a bigger and
bigger toll.  I'm not...  not going to survive...  a lot more of this."

As Frank was talking, Bobby noticed something peculiar about the man's
blue cotton sweater.  The pattern of the cable knit was wildly irregular
in places, as if the knitting machine had briefly gone berserk.  And on
the back, near his right shoulder blade, a patch of fibers was missing;
the hole was the size of a block of four postage stamps, though with
irregular rather than straight edges.  But it wasn't just a hole.  A
piece of what appeared to be khaki filled the gap, not merely sewn on
but woven tightly into the surrounding cotton yarn, as if at the garment
factory itself.  Khaki of the same shade and hard finish as the pants
that Frank was wearing.

A shiver of dread pierced Bobby, although he was not sure why.  His
subconscious mind seemed to understand how the patch had come to be and
what it meant, and grasped some hideous consequence not yet fulfilled,
while his conscious mind was baffled.

He saw that Hal, on the other side of Frank, had noticed the patch, too,
and was frowning.

Julie ascended the stairs while Bobby was staring in puzzlement at the
khaki swatch.

"We're in luck," she said.

"There're two doors at the bottom.  One leads into a hallway off the
lobby, where we'd probably run into a security man, even though they
aren't looking for Frank any more.  But the other door leads into the
parking garage, the same level our car's on.  How you doing, Frank?  You
going to be okay?"

"Getting my...  second wind," he said less wheezingly than before.

"Look at this," Bobby said, calling Julie's attention to the khaki woven
into the blue cotton sweater.

While Julie studied the peculiar patch, Bobby let go of Frank and, on a
hunch, stooped down to examine the legs of his client's pants.  He found
a corresponding irregularity: blue cotton yarn from the sweater was
woven into the slacks.  It was now one spot of the same size and shape
as that in the sweater, near a series of three smaller holes near the
cuff on the right leg however, he was sure that more accurate
measurements would confirm what he knew from a quick look-that the tot
amount of blue yarn in those three holes would just about fill the hole
in the shoulder of the sweater.

"What's wrong?"  Frank asked.

Bobby didn't respond but took hold of the somewhat baggy leg of the
pants and pulled it taut, so he could get a better look at the three
patches.  Actually,

"patches" was an inaccurate word because these abnormalities in the
fabric did not look like repairs; they were too well blended with the
material around them to be handwork.

Julie squatted beside him and said, "First, we've got to get Frank out
of here, back to the office."

"Yeah, but this is real strange," Bobby said, indicating the
irregularities in the pants.

"Strange and...  important some how."

"What's wrong?"  Frank repeated.

"Where'd you get these clothes?"  Bobby asked him.

"Well...  I don't know."

Julie pointed to the white athletic sock on Frank's right foot and Bobby
saw at once what had caught her attention: several blue threads,
precisely the color of the sweater.  They were now loose, clinging to
the sock.  They were woven into the very fabric of it.

Then he noticed Frank's left shoe.  It was a dark brown hiking shoe, but
a few thing, squiggly white lines marred the leather on the toe.  When
he studied them closely, he saw that the line appeared to be coming
sparse threads like those in the athletic socks scraping at them with
one fingernail, he discovered they were not stuck to the shoe, but were
an integral part of the surface of the leather.

The missing yarn of the sweater had somehow become a part of both the
khaki pants and one of the socks; the displaced threads of the sock had
become part of the shoe on the other foot.

"What's wrong?"  Frank repeated, more fearfully than before.

Bobby hesitated to look up, expecting to see that the filaments of
displaced shoe leather were embedded in Frank's face, and that the
displaced flesh was magically entwined with the cable knit of the
sweater.  He stood and forced himself to confront his client.

Aside from the dark and puffy rings around is eyes, the sickly pallor
relieved only by the flush on his upper cheeks, and the fear and
confusion that gave him a tormented look, nothing was wrong with his
face.  No leather ornamentation.  No khaki stitched into his lips.  No
filaments of blue yarn or plastic shoelace tips or button fragments
bristling from his eyeballs.

Silently castigating himself for his overactive imagination, Bobby
patted Frank's shoulder.

"It's okay.  It's all right.  We'll figure it out later.  Come on, let's
get you out of here."

IN THE embrace of darkness, enwrapped by the scent of Channel No. five
under the very blankets and sheets that had once warmed his mother and
that he had so carefully served, Candy dozed and awakened repeatedly
with a fear though he could not remember any nightmares.

Between periods of fitful sleep, he dwelt on the incident at the canyon,
earlier that night, when he had been hunting and had felt an unseen
presence put a hand on his head.  He'd never before experienced anything
like that.  He was disturbed by the encounter, unsure whether it was
threatening or benign, anxious to understand it.

He first wondered if it had been his mother's angelicence, hovering
above him.  But he quickly dismissed that explanation.  If his mother
had stepped through the veil between this world and the next, he would
have recognized her spirit, singular aura of love, warmth, and
compassion.  He would have fallen to his knees under the weight of her
ghostly hand wept with joy at her visitation.

Briefly he had considered that one or both of his inscrutable sisters
possessed a heretofore unrevealed talent for psychic contact and reached
out to him for unknown reasons.  They had, somehow like they controlled
their cats and appeared to have equal influence over other small
animals.  Maybe they!"  enter human minds as well.  He didn't want that
pale, cold pair invading his privacy.  At times he looked at them and
thought of snakes-sinuous albino snakes, silent and filled-with desires
as alien as any that motivated reptiles.

possibility that they could intrude into his mind was chill even if they
could not control him.

But between bouts of sleep, he abandoned that idea.  If Violet and
Verbina possessed such abilities, they would have enslaved him long ago,
as thoroughly as they had enslaved the cats.  They would have forced him
to do degrading, obscene things; they did not possess his self-control
in matters of the flesh and would live, if they could, in constant
violation of God's most fundamental commandments.

He could not understand why his mother had sworn him to keep and protect
them, any more than he could understand how she could love them.  Of
course her compassion for those miscreant offspring was only one more
example of her saintly nature.  Forgiveness and understanding flowed
from her like clear, cool water from an artesian well.

For a while he dozed.  When he woke with a start again, he turned on his
side and watched the faint light of dawn appear along the edges of the
drawn blinds.

He considered the possibility that the presence in the canyon had been
his brother Frank.  But that was also unlikely.  If Frank had possessed
telepathic abilities, he would have found a way to employ them to
destroy Candy a long, long time ago.  Frank was less talented than his
sisters and much less talented than his brother Candy.

Then who had approached him twice in the canyon, insistently pressing
into his mind?  Who sent the disconnected words that echoed in his head:
What...  where...  what...

why...  what...  where...  what...  why...  ?

Last night, he'd tried to get a mental grip on the presence.  When it
hastily withdrew from him, he had tried to let part of his consciousness
soar up into the night with it, but he had been unable to sustain a
pursuit on that psychic plane.  He sensed, however, that he might be
able to develop that ability.

If the unwelcome presence ever returned, he would try to knot a filament
of his mind to it and trace it to its source.  In his twenty-nine years,
his own siblings were the only people he had encountered with what might
be called psychic abilities.  If someone out there in the world was also
gifted, he must learn who it was.  Such a person, not born of his
sainted mother, was a rival, a threat, an enemy.

Though the sun beyond the blinded windows had not fully risen, he knew
that he would not be able to doze again.  He threw back the covers,
crossed the dark and furniture-crowded room with the assurance of a
blind man in a familiar place, and went into the adjoining bath.  After
locking the door, he undressed without glancing in the mirror.  He peed
force without looking down at his hateful organ.  When he showered he
soaped and rinsed the sex thing only with the washcloth mitten that he'd
made and that protected his innocent from being corrupted by the
monstrous, wicked flesh.

FROM THE hospital in Orange, they went directly to their offices in
Newport Beach.  They had a lot of work to do on Frank's behalf, and his
worsening plight evoked in them a greater sense of urgency than ever.
Frank strode with Hal, and Julie followed in order to be able to offer
assistance if unforeseen developments occurred during the trip.  The
entire case seemed to be a series of unforeseen developments.

By the time they reached their deserted offices-the Dakota & Dakota
staff would not arrive for a couple of hours yet-the sun was fully risen
behind the clouds in the east.  A thing strip of blue sky, like a crack
under the door of the storm, was visible over the ocean to the west.  As
the four of them passed through the reception lounge into their inner
sanctum, the rain halted abruptly, as if a godly hand had turned a
celestial lever; the water on the big windows stopped flowing in
shimmering sheets, and coalesced into hundreds of small beads that
glimmered with a mercury-gray sheen in the cloud-dulled morning light.

Bobby indicated the bulging pillowcase that Hal was carrying.

"Take Frank into the bathroom, help him change into the clothes he was
wearing when we checked him into the hospital.  Then we'll have a real
close look at the clothes he's wearing now."  Frank had recovered his
balance and most of his strength.  He did not need Hal's assistance. But
Julie knew Bobby wouldn't let Frank go anywhere unchaperoned from now
on.  They needed to keep an eye on him constantly, in order not to miss
any clues that might lead to an explanation of his sudden vanishments
and reappearances.

Before attending to Frank, Hal removed the rumpled clothes from the
pillowcase.  He left the rest of its contents on Julie's desk.

"Coffee?"  Bobby asked.

"Desperately," Julie said.

He went out to the pantry that opened off the lounge, to stir up one of
their two Mr. Coffee machines.

Sitting at her desk, Julie emptied the pillowcase.  It contained thirty
bundles of hundred-dollar bills in packs bound by rubber bands.  She
fanned the edges of the bills in ten bundles to ascertain if lower
denominations were included; they were all hundreds.  She chose two
packets at random and counted them.  Each contained one hundred bills.
Ten thousand in each.

By the time Bobby returned with mugs, spoons, cream, sugar, a pot of hot
coffee, all on a tray, Julie had concluded that it was the largest of
Frank's three hauls to date.

"Three hundred K," she said, as Bobby put the tray on the desk.

He whistled softly.

"What's that bring the total to?"

"With this, we'll be holding six hundred thousand for him

"Soon have to get a bigger office safe."

HAL YAMATAKA put Frank's other set of clothes on the coffee table.
"Something's wrong with the zipper in the pants.  I don't mean just that
it doesn't work, which it doesn't.  I mean, something's very wrong with
it."

Hal, Frank, and Julie pulled up chairs around the low glass topped
table, and drank strong black coffee while Bobby sat on the couch and
carefully inspected the garments.  In addition to the oddities he had
noticed at the hospital, he discovered that most of the teeth in the
pants zipper were metal, as it should have been, while about forty
others, interspersed at random, appeared to be hard black rubber; in
fact, the slide jammed on a couple of the rubber ones.

Bobby stared in puzzlement at the anomalous zipper, slowly moving a
finger up and down one of the notched tracks,he was suddenly struck by
inspiration.  He picked up one of the shoes Frank had been wearing and
examined the heel.

It looked perfectly normal, but in the heel of the second shoe thirty or
forty tiny, brass-bright bits of metal were embedded in the rubber,
flush with the surface of it.

"Anybody have a pen knife?"  Bobby asked.

Hal withdrew one from his pocket.

Bobby used it to pry loose a couple of the shiny rectangles, which
appeared to have been set in the rubber when it was still molten. Zipper
teeth.  They fell onto the glass table: tink...  tink.  At a glance he
estimated that the amount of rubber displaced by those teeth was equal
to what he had found in the zipper.

Sitting around IN the Dakotas' Disney-embellished office, Frank Pollard
was overwhelmed by a weariness that was cartoonish in its extremity, the
degree of utter exhaustion sufficient to render Donald Duck so limp that
he might slip off a chair and pour onto the floor in a puddle of mallard
flesh and feathers.  It had been seeping into him day by day, hour by
hour, since he had awakened in that alleyway last week; but now it
suddenly poured through him as if a dike had broken.  This surging flood
of weariness had a density not of water but of liquid lead, and he felt
enormously heavy; he could lift a foot or move a limb only with effort,
and even keeping his head up was a strain on his neck.  Virtually every
joint in his body ached dully, even his elbow and wrist and finger
joints, but especially his knees, hips, and shoulders.  He felt
feverish, not acutely ill, but as if his strength had been steadily
sapped by a low-grade viral infection from which he had been suffering
his entire life.  Weariness had not dulled his senses; on the contrary,
it abraded his nerve endings as surely as a fine-grade sandpaper might
have done.  Loud sounds made him cringe, bright light made him squint in
pain, and he was exquisitely sensitive to heat and cold and the textures
of everything he touched.

His exhaustion seemed only in part a result of his inability to sleep
more than a couple of hours a night.  If Hal Yamataka and the Dakotas
could be believed-and Frank saw no reason for them to lie to him-he
performed an incredible vanishing act several times during the night,
though upon returning to his bed and staying put there, he could recall
nothing of what he had done.  Whatever the cause of those
disappearances, no matter where he had gone or how or why, the very act
of vanishing seemed likely to require an expenditure of energy surely as
walking or running or lifting heavy weights or any other physical act;
therefore, perhaps his weakness and profound weariness were largely the
result of his mysterious journeys.

Bobby Dakota had pried only a couple of the brass teeth from the heel of
the shoe.  After studying them for a moment he put down the penknife,
leaned back against the sofa, and looked thoughtfully at the gloomy but
rainless sky beyond the office's big windows.  They were all silent,
waiting to hear what had been deduced from the condition of those
clothes and shoes Even exhausted, preoccupied with his own fears, and
only a one-day association with the Dakotas, Frank realized that Bobby
was the more imaginative and mentally nimble the two.  Julie was
probably smarter than her husband; but was also a more methodical
thinker than he was, far less likely than he was to make sudden leaps of
logic to arrive at insight deductions and imaginative solutions.  Julie
would more likely be right than Bobby was, but on those occasions when
they resolved a client's problems quickly, the resolution would be
attributable to Bobby.  They made a good pair, and Frank was relying on
their complementary natures to help him.

Turning to Frank again, Bobby said, "What if, somehow you can teleport
yourself, send yourself from here to there in a wink?"

"But that's...  magic," Frank said.

"I don't believe magic."

"Oh, I do," Bobby said.

"Not witches and spells and genies in bottles, but I believe in the
possibility of fantastic thing The very fact that the world exists, that
we're alive, that we can laugh and sing and feel the sun on our skin...
that seems like a kind of magic to me."

"Teleport myself.?  If I can.  I don't know I can.  Even if I have to
fall asleep first.  Which means teleportation must be a function of my
subconscious mind, essentially involuntary."

"You weren't asleep when you reappeared in the hospital room or any of
the other times you vanished," Hal stared.

"Maybe the first time, but not later.  Your eyes were open.

spoke to me."

"But I don't remember it," Frank said frustratedly-

"I remember going to sleep, then suddenly I was lying awake in bed, in a
lot of distress, confused, and you were all there."

Julie sighed.  "Teleportation.  How can that be possible?"

"You saw it."  Bobby shrugged.  He picked up his coffee and took a sip,
more relaxed than anyone in the room, as though having a client with an
astonishing psychic power was, if not an ordinary occurrence, at least a
situation that all of them should have realized was simply inevitable,
given enough years in the private security business.

"I saw him disappear," Julie agreed,

"but I'm not sure that proves he...  teleported."

"When he disappeared," Bobby said, "he went somewhere.  Right?"

"Well...  yes.

"And going from one place to another, instantaneously, as an act of
sheer willpower...  as far as I'm concerned, that's teleportation."

"But how?"  Julie asked.

Bobby shrugged again.  "Right now, it doesn't matter how.

Just accept the assumption of teleportation as a place to start."

"As a theory," Hal said.

"Okay," Julie agreed.

"Theoretically, let's assume Frank can teleport himself."

To Frank, who was sealed off from his own experience by amnesia, that
was like assuming iron was lighter than air in order to allow an
argument for the possibility of steel-plated blimps.  But he was willing
to go along with it.

Bobby said, "Good, all right, then that assumption explains the
condition of these clothes."

"How?"  Frank asked.

"It'll take a while to get to the clothes.  Stay with me.  First,
consider that maybe teleporting yourself requires that the atoms of your
body temporarily disassociate themselves from one another, then come
together again an instant later at another place.  Same thing goes for
the clothes you're wearing and for anything on which you've got a firm
grip, like the bed railing."

"Like the teleportation pod in that movie," Hal said.

"The Fly.

"Yeah," Bobby said, clearly getting excited now.  He put down his coffee
and slid forward on the edge of the sofa, gesticulating as he spoke.
"Sort of like that.  Except the power to this is maybe all in Frank's
mind, not in a futuristic machine He just sort of thinks himself
somewhere else, disassembles himself in a fraction of a second-poof!-and
reassembles him self at his destination.  Of course, I'm also assuming
the remains intact even during the time the body is dispersed
disconnected atoms, because it would have to be the sheer power of the
mind that transports those billions of particles and keeps them together
like a shepherd collie herding she then welds them to one another again
in the right configurations at the far end."

Though his weariness was sufficient to have resulted from an impossibly
complex and strenuous task like the one Bobby had just described, Frank
was unconvinced.

"Well, gee, I don't know....  This isn't something you go to school to
learn about doesn't have a course in teleportation.  So it's...

Instinct?  Even supposing I instinctively know how to break body down
into a stream of atomic particles and send it some where else, then put
it together again...  how can any human mind, even the greatest genius
ever born, be powerful enough to keep track of those billions of
particles and get them all exactly as they belong?  It'd take a hundred
geniuses, a thousand years, and I'm not even one.  I'm no dummy, but I'm
no brighter than the average guy."

"You've answered your own question," Bobby said.

don't need superhuman intelligence for this, 'cause teleportation isn't
primarily a function of intelligence.  It's not instinct either.  It's
just...  well, an ability programmed into your genetic makeup like
vision or hearing

or the sense of smell.  Think of it this way.  You look at things with
your eyes.  Your eyes are composed of billions of separate points of
color and light and shade and texture, yet your eyes instantly order
those billions of bits of input into a coherent scene.  You don't have
to think about seeing.  You just see, automatic.  You understand what I
meant about magic?  This is almost magical.  With teleportation, there's
probably a mechanism you have to pull-like wishing yourself to
elsewhere-but thereafter the process is pretty much automatic; the mind
makes it happen the way it makes instantaneous sense of all the data
coming in through your eyes." Frank closed his eyes tight and
concentrated on wishing himself into the reception lounge.  When he
opened his eyes and was still in the inner office, he said, "It doesn't
work.  It's not that easy.  I can't do it at will."

Hal said, "Bobby, are you saying all of us have this ability, and only
Frank has figured out how to use it?"

"No, no.  This is probably a scrap of genetic material unique to Frank,
maybe even a talent that sprung from genetic damage-"

They were all silent, absorbing what Bobby had conjectured.

Outside, the layer of clouds was cracking, peeling, and the old blue
paint of the sky was showing through in more places every minute.  But
the brightening day did not lift Frank's spirits.

Finally Hal Yamataka indicated the pile of garments on the coffee table.

"How does all this explain the condition of those clothes?"

Bobby picked up the blue cotton sweater and held it so they could see
the khaki swatch on the back.

"Okay, let's suppose the mind can automatically shepherd all the
molecules of its own body through the teleportation process without a
single error.  It can also deal with other things Frank wants to take
with him, like his clothes-"

"And bags full of money," Julie said.

"But why the bed railing?"  Hal asked.

"No reason for him to want to take that with him."

To Frank, Bobby said, "You can't remember it now, but you clearly knew
what was happening while you were caught up in that series of
teleportations.  You were trying to stop, you asked Hal to help you
stop, and you seized the railing to stop yourself, to anchor yourself to
the hospital room.  You were concentrating on your grip on that railing,
so when you went, you took it with you.  As for the clothes getting
scrambled the way they are...  Maybe your mind concentrates first on
getting your body back together in the proper order because error-free
physical re-creation is crucial to your survival, but then sometimes you
might not have the energy left to do as good a job on secondary things
like clothes."

"Well," Frank said, "I can't remember prior to last week, but this is
the first time anything like this has happened since then, even though
I've apparently been...  traveling more nights than not.  Then again,
even if my clothes have come through okay, I seem to be getting more
weary, weaker, and more confused day by day....  He did not have to
finish the thought, because the worry in their eyes and faces made clear
their understanding.  If he was teleporting, and if it was a strenuous
act that bled him strength that could not be restored by rest, he was
gradually going to get less meticulous about the reconstitution of
clothes and whatever other items he tried to carry with him But more
important-he might begin to have difficulty reinstituting his body, as
well.  He might return from one of his late-night rambles and find
fragments of his sweater woven into the back of his hand, and the skin
replaced by that piece of cotton might turn up as a pale patch in the
dark leather of his shoe and the displaced leather from the shoe might
appear as integral part of his tongue...  or as strands of alien cells
twist through his brain tissue.  Fear, never far away and circling like
a shark in the dept of Frank's mind, abruptly shot to the surface,
called forth the worry and pity that he saw in the faces of those on who
he was depending for salvation.  He closed his eyes, but it was a rotten
idea because he had a vision of his own face when he shut out theirs,
his face as it might look after a disastrous reconstitution at the end
of a future telekinetic journey: eyes or ten misplaced teeth sprouting
from his right eye socket;evicted eye staring lidlessly from the middle
of the cheek below; his nose smeared in hideous lumps of flesh and
gristle across the side of his face.  In the vision he opened his
misshapen mouth, perhaps to scream, and within his sight were two
fingers and a portion of his hand, rooted where the tongue should had
been.

He opened his eyes as a low cry of terror and misery escaped him.

He was shuddering.  He couldn't stop.

HAVING FRESHENED everyone's coffee and, at Bobby's suggestion, having
laced Frank's mug with bourbon in spite of the early hour, Hal went to
the nook off the reception lounge to brew another pot.

After Frank had been fortified with a few sips of the spiked coffee,
Julie showed the photograph to him and watched his reaction carefully.

"You recognize either of the people in this?"

"No. They're strangers to me."

"The man," Bobby said, "is George Farris.  The real George Farris.  We
got the picture from his brother-in-law."

Frank studied the photograph with renewed interest.  "Maybe I knew him,
and that's why I borrowed his name but I can't recall ever seeing him
before."

"He's dead," Julie said, and thought that Frank's surprise was genuine.
She explained how Farris had died, years ago...  and then how his family
had been slaughtered far more recently.  She told him about James Roman,
too, and how Roman's family died in a fire in November.

With what appeared to be sincere dismay and confusion, Frank said, "Why
all these deaths?  Is it coincidence?"

Julie leaned forward.  "We think Mr. Blue killed them /."

"Who?"

"Mr. Blue Light.  The man you said pursued you that night in Anaheim,
the man you think is hunting you for some reason.  We believe he
discovered you were traveling under the names Farris and Roman, so he
went to the addresses he got for them, and when he didn't find you
there, he killed everyone, either while trying to squeeze information
out of them or...  just for the hell of it."

Frank looked stricken.  His pale face grew even paler, as if it were an
image doing a slow fade on a movie screen.  The bleak look in his eyes
intensified.  "If I hadn't been using that fake ID, he never would've
gone to those people.  It's because of me they died."

Feeling sorry for the guy, ashamed of the suspicion that had driven her
to approach the issue in this manner, Julie said, "Don't let it eat you,
Frank.  Most likely, the paper artist who forged your documents took the
names at random from a list of recent deaths.  If he'd used another
approach, the Farris and Roman families would never have come to Mr.
Blue's attention.  But it's not your fault the forger used the quick and
lazy method."

Frank shook his head, tried to speak, could not.

"You can't blame yourself," Hal said from the doorway, where he had
evidently been standing long enough to have gotten the gist of the
photo's importance.  He seemed genuinely distressed to see Frank so
anguished.  Like Clint, Hal had been won over by Frank's gentle voice,
self-effacing manner, and cherubic demeanor.

Frank cleared his throat, and finally the words broke out.  "No, no,
it's on me, my God, all those people dead because of me."

IN DAKOTA & DAKOTA'S computer center, Bobby and Frank sat in two
spring-backed, typist chairs with rubber wheels, Bobby switched on one
of the three state-of-the-art IBM each of which was outlinked to the
world through its modern and phone line.  Though bright enough to work
by, overhead lights it was soft and diffuse to prevent glare on terminal
screens, and the room's one window was covered with blackout drapes for
the same reason.

Like policemen in the silicon age, modern private detectives and
security consultants relied on the computer to make the work easier and
to compile a breadth and depth of information that could never be
acquired by the old-fashioned gum methods of Sam Spade and Philip
Marlowe.  Pounding pavement, interviewing witnesses and potential
suspects, conducting surveillances were still aspects of their job of
course, but without the computer they would be as ineffective as a
blacksmith trying to fix a flat tire with a hammer and nail and other
tools of his trade.  As the twentieth century progressed through its
last decade, private investigators who were ignorant of the microchip
revolution existed only in television dramas and the curiously dated
world of most PI novels.  Lee Chen, who had designed and now operated
their data-gathering system, would not arrive in the office until around
nine o'clock.  Bobby did not want to wait the hour to start putting the
computer to work on "Frank's case!"  He was not a primo hacker, as Lee
was, but he knew all the hardware, had the ability to learn new software
quickly and was almost as comfortable tracking down information in
cyberspace as he was poring through file age-yellowed newspapers.

Using Lee's code book, which he removed from a locked desk drawer, Bobby
first entered a Social Security Administration data network that
contained files to which broad public access was legal.  Other files in
the same system were restricted and supposedly inaccessible behind walls
of security codes required by various right-to-privacy laws.

From the open files, he inquired as to the number of men named Frank
Pollard in the Administration's records, and within seconds the response
appeared on the screen: counting variations of Frank, such as Franklin
and Frankie and Franco-plus names like Francis, for which Frank might be
a diminutive-there were six hundred and nine Frank Pollards in
possession of Social Security numbers.

"Bobby," Frank said anxiously,

"does that stuff on the screen make sense to you?  Are those words, real
words, or jumbled letters?"

"Huh?  Of course they're words."

"Not to me.  They don't look like anything to me.  Gibberish."  Bobby
picked up a copy of Byte magazine that was lying between two of the
computers, opened it to an article, and said,

"Read that."  Frank accepted the magazine, stared at it, flipped ahead a
couple of pages, then a couple more.  His hands began to shake.  The
magazine rattled in his grip.

"I can't.  Jesus, I've lost that too.  Yesterday, I lost the ability to
do math, and now I can't read any more, and I get more confused, foggy
in the head, and I ache in every joint, every muscle.  This
teleporting's wearing me down, killing me.  I'm falling apart, Bobby,
mentally and physically, faster all the time."

"It's going to be all right," Bobby said, though his confidence was
largely feigned.  He was pretty sure they would get to the bottom of
this, would learn who Frank was and where he went at night and how and
why; however, he could see that Frank was declining fast, and he would
not have bet money that they'd find all the answers while Frank was
still alive, sane, and able to benefit from their discoveries.
Nevertheless, he put his hand on Frank's shoulder and gave it a gentle
reassuring squeeze.

"Hang in there, buddy.  Everything's going to be okay.  I really think
it is.  I really do."  Frank took a deep breath and nodded.  Turning to
the display terminal again, feeling guilty about the lie he'd just told,
Bobby said,

"You remember how old you are, Frank?

"No."

"You look about thirty-two, thirty-three."

"I feel older."

Softly whistling Duke Ellington's "Satin Doll," Bobby thought a moment,
then asked the SSA computer to eliminate those Frank Pollards younger
than twenty-eight and older than thirty-eight.  That left seventy-two of
them.

"Frank, do you think you've ever lived anywhere else are you a
dyed-in-the-wool Californian?"

"I don't know."

"Let's assume you're a son of the sunshine state."  He asked the SSA
computer to whittle down the remaining Frank Pollards to those who
applied for their Social security numbers while living in California
(fifteen), then to whose current addresses on file were in California
(six).

The public-access portion of the Social Security Administrations data
network was forbidden by law to reveal Social security numbers to casual
researchers.  Bobby referred to instructions in Lee Chen's code book and
entered the restricted files through a complicated series of maneuvers
that circumvented SSA security.

He was unhappy about breaking the law, but it was the way of high-tech
life that you never got the maximum benefit your data-gathering system
if you played strictly by the rules.  Computers were instruments of
freedom, and government were to one degree or another instruments of
repression; two and could not always exist in harmony.

He obtained the six numbers and addresses for the Frank Pollards living
in California.

"Now what?"  Frank wondered.

"Now," Bobby said, "I'll use these numbers and addresses to cross
reference with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, all of the
armed forces, state police, major city police, other government agencies
to get descriptions of these Frank Pollards.  As we learn their height,
weight, hair color of their eyes, race...  we'll gradually eliminate
them one by one.  Better yet, if one of them is you, and if you've
served in the military or been arrested for a crime, we might even be
able to turn up a picture of you in one of those and confirm your
identity with a photo match."  StarTING AT the desk, cadicorner from
each other, Julie and Hal removed the rubber bands from more than half
of the packets of cash.  They sorted through the hundred-dollar bills,
trying to determine if some of them had consecutive serial numbers that
might indicate they were stolen from a bank, savings and loan, or other
institution.

Suddenly Hal looked up and said,

"Why do those flowerlike sounds and drafts precede Frank when he
teleports himself?"

"Who knows?"  Julie said.  "Maybe it's displaced air following him down
some tunnel in another dimension, from the place he left to the place
he's going."

"I was just thinking....  If this Mr. Blue is real, and if he's
searching for Frank, and if Frank heard those flutes and felt those
gusts in that alleyway...  then Mr. Blue is also able to teleport."

"Yeah.  So?"

"So Frank's not unique.  Whatever he is, there's another one like him.
Maybe even more than one."

"Here's something else to think about," Julie said.  "If Mr. Blue can
teleport himself, and if he finds out where Frank is, we won't be able
to defend a hiding place from him.  He'll be able to pop up among us.
And what if he arrived with a submachine gun, spraying bullets as he
materialized?"  After a moment of silence, Hal said, "You know,
gardening has always seemed like a pleasant profession.  You need a
lawnmower, a weed whacker, a few simple tools.  There's not much
overhead, and you hardly ever get shot at."

BOBBY FOLLOWED Frank into the office, where Julie and Hal were examining
the money.  Putting a sheet of paper on the desk, he said,

"Move over, Sherlock Holmes.  The world now has a greater detective."

Julie angled the page so she and Hal could read it together.  It was a
laser-printed copy of the information that Frank had filed with the
California Department of Motor Vehicles when he had last applied for an
extension of his driver's license.

"The physical statistics match," she said.

"Is your first name really Francis and your middle name Ezekiel?"

Frank nodded.

"I didn't remember until I saw it.  But it is me, all right.  Ezekiel."
Tapping the printout, she said,

"This address in El Encanto Heights-does it ring a bell?"

"No. I can't even tell you where El Encanto is."

"It's adjacent to Santa Barbara," Julie said.

"So Bobby tells me.  But I don't remember being their Except..."

"What?"  Frank went to the window and looked out toward the distant sea,
above which the sky was now entirely blue.  A few early gulls swooped in
arcs so huge and smoothly that their exuberance was thrilling to watch.

Clearly, Frank was neither thrilled by the birds nor charmed by the
view.

Finally, still facing the window, he said, "I don't recall being in El
Encanto Heights...  except that every time I hear the name, my stomach
sort of sinks, you know, like I'm on a roller coaster that's just taken
a plunge.  And when I try to think about El Encanto, strain to remember
it, my heart pounds, and my mouth goes dry, and it's a little harder to
get my breath So I think I must be repressing any memories I have of the
place, maybe because something happened to me there, some thing bad...
something I'm too scared to remember."

Bobby said, "His driver's license expired seven years ago and according
to the DMV's records, he never tried to renew it.  In fact, sometime
this year he'd have been weeded out even from their dead files, so we
were lucky to find this before they expunged it."  He laid two more
printouts on the desk.

"Move over, Holmes and Sam Spade."

"What're these?"

"Arrest reports.  Frank was stopped for a traffic violation once in San
Francisco a little more than six years ago.  The second time was on
Highway 101, north of Ventura, five years ago.  He didn't have a valid
driver's license either time and, because of his odd behavior, he was
taken into custody."  The photographs that were a part of both arrest
reports showed a slightly younger, even pudgier man who was without a
doubt their current client.

Bobby pushed aside some of the money and sat on the edge of her desk.

"He escaped from jail both times, so they're looking for him even after
all these years, though probably not too hard, since he wasn't arrested
for a major crime."

Frank said, "I draw a blank on that too."

"Neither report indicates how he escaped," Bobby said,

"but I suspect he didn't saw his way through the bars or dig a tunnel or
whittle a gun out of a bar of soap or use any of the long accepted,
traditional methods of jailbreak.  Oh, no, not our Frank."

"He teleported," Hal guessed.

"Vanished when no one was looking."

"I'd bet on it," Bobby agreed.

"And after that he began to carry false ID good enough to satisfy any
cop who pulled him over."  Looking at the papers before her, Julie said,
"Well, Frank, at least we know this is your real name, and we've nailed
down a real address for you up there in Santa Barbara County, not just
another motel room."

"We're beginning to make headway" Bobby said,

"Move over, Holmes, Spade, and Miss Marple."  Unable to embrace their
optimism, Frank returned to the chair in which he'd been sitting
earlier.

"Headway.  But not enough.  And not fast enough."  He leaned forward
with his arms on his thighs, hands clasped between his spread knees, and
stared morosely at the floor.

"Something unpleasant just occurred to me.  What if I'm not only making
mistakes with my clothes when I reconstitute myself'.?  What if I've
already begun to make mistakes with my own biology too?  Nothing major.
Nothing visible.  Hundreds or thousands of tiny mistakes on a cellular
level.  That would explain why I feel so lousy, so tired and sore.  And
if my brain tissue isn't coming back together right...  that would
explain why I'm confused, fuzzy-headed, unable to read or do math."

Julie looked at Hal, at Bobby, and knew that both men wanted to allay
Frank's fear but were unable to do so because the scenario that he had
outlined was not only possible but likely.

Frank said, "The brass buckle looked perfectly normal until Bobby
touched it...  then it turned to dust."

ALL NIGHT long, when sleep made Thomas's head empty, ugly dreams filled
it up.  Dreams of eating small little things.  Dreams of drinking blood.
Dreams of being the Bad Thing.

He finished sleeping all of a sudden, sitting up in bed, trying to
scream but unable to find any sounds in himself.  For a while he sat
there, shaking, being afraid, breathing so hard that his chest ached.

The sun was back, and the night was gone away, and that made him feel
better.  Getting out of bed, he stepped into slippers.  His pajamas were
cold with sweat.  He shivered.

He pulled on a robe.  He went to the window, looked out and liking the
blue sky very much.  Leftover rain made the grey lawn look soggy, the
sidewalks darker than usual, and the dirt in the flowerbeds almost
black, and in the puddles you could see the blue sky again like a face
in a mirror.  He liked all that, too, because the whole world looked
clean and new all the rain had emptied out of the sky.

He wondered if the Bad Thing was still far away, or close but he didn't
reach out to it.  Because last night it tried to hurt him.  Because it
was so strong he almost couldn't get away from it.  And because even
when he did get away, it tried to follow him.  He'd felt it hanging on,
coming back across the night with him, and he'd shaken it off real quick
like, but maybe next time he wouldn't be so lucky, and maybe it would
come all the way right into his room with him, not just its mind but the
Bad Thing itself.  He didn't understand how that could happen, somehow
he knew it might.  And if the Bad Thing came to his Home, being awake
would be like being asleep with a nightmare filling up your head.
Terrible things would happen, and there would be no hope.

Turning away from the window, starting toward the closed door to the
bathroom, Thomas glanced at Derek's bed and saw Derek dead.  He was on
his back.  His face was bashed, bruised, swollen.  His eyes were open
big, you could see them shine in the light from the window and the low
light from the lamp beside the bed.  His mouth was open, too, like he
was shouting, but all the sound was out of him like air out of a popped
balloon, and he would not have any more sound in him ever again, you
could tell.  Blood was let out of him, too, lots of it, and a pair of
scissors were stuck in his belly, deep in, with not much more than the
handles showing, the same scissors Thomas used to clip pictures from
magazines for his poems.

He felt a big twist of pain in his heart, like maybe somebody was
sticking scissors in him too.  But it wasn't hurt-pain so much as what
he called "feel-pain," because it was losing Derek that he was feeling,
not real hurt.  It was as bad as real hurt, though, because Derek was
his friend, he liked Derek.  He was scared, too, because he somehow knew
the Bad thing had let the life out of Derek, the Bad Thing was here at
The Home.  Then he realized this could happen just the way things
sometimes happened in TV stories, with the cops coming and believing
that Thomas killed Derek, blaming Thomas, and everyone hating Thomas for
what he'd done, but he hadn't done it, and all the while the Bad Thing
was still loose to do more killing, maybe even doing to Julie what it'd
done to Derek.

The hurt, the fear for himself, the fear for Julie-all of it was too
much.  Thomas gripped the footboard of his own bed and closed his eyes
and tried to get air into himself.  It wouldn't come.  His chest was
tight.  Then the air came in, and so did an ugly-nasty smell, which in a
while he realized was the stink of Derek's blood, so he gagged and
almost puked.

He knew he had to Get Control of Himself.  The aides didn't like it when
you Lost Control of Yourself, so they Gave You Something For Your Own
Good.  He'd never Lost Control before and didn't want to lose it now.

He tried not to smell the blood.  Took long deep breaths.  Made himself
open his eyes to look at the dead body.  He figured looking at it the
second time wouldn't be as bad as the first.  He knew it was going to be
there this time, so it wouldn't be such a big surprise.

The surprise was-the body was gone.

Thomas closed his eyes, put one hand to his face, looked again between
spread fingers.  The body still wasn't there.

He started shaking because what he thought, first, was that this was
like some other TV stories he'd seen where nasty-dead bodies were
walking around like live bodies, rotting and getting wormy, with bones
showing in places, killing people for no reason and even sometimes
eating them.  He wasn't much for one of those stories.  He sure didn't
want to be in one.  He was so scared he almost sent to Bobby-Dead
people, look out, look out, dead people hungry and mean and walking
around-but stopped himself when he saw there wasn't blood on Derek's
blankets and sheets.  The bed wasn't rumpled, their.  Neatly made.  No
walking dead person was quick enough to get out of bed, change sheets
and blankets, make everything right just in the few little seconds while
Thomas's eyes were closed.  Then he heard the shower pouring down on the
floor of the stall in the bathroom, and he heard Derek singing the way
he always did when he washed himself.  For just a moment, in his head,
Thomas had a picture of a dead person taking a shower, trying to be
neat, but rotten chunks were falling off with the dirt, showing more
bones, clogging the drain.  Then he realized Derek was never really
dead, Thomas hadn't really seen a body on the bed.  What he'd seen was
something he'd learned from TV stories-he'd seen a vision.  A Psychic
vision.  He was a sidekick.

Derek hadn't been killed.  What Thomas saw, just for a moment, was Derek
being dead tomorrow or some other day a tomorrow.  It might be something
that would happen no matter what Thomas did to stop it, or it might be
something would happen only if he let it happen, but at least it was
something that already happened.

He let go of the footboard and went to his worktable.

His legs were shaky.  He was glad to sit down.  He opened the drawer of
the cabinet that stood beside the table.  He saw scissors in there,
where they should be, with his colored pen and pens and paper clips and
Scotch tape and stapler-an half-eaten Hershey's bar in an open wrapper,
which shouldn't be in there because it would Draw Bugs.  He took the
candy out of the drawer and stuffed it in a pocket of his robe,
reminding himself to put it in the refrigerator later.

For a while he stared at the scissors, listened to Derek in the shower,
and thought how the scissors were jammed in Derek's belly, letting all
the music and other sounds out of him forever, sending him to the Bad
Place.  Finally he touched the black plastic handles.  They felt all
right, so he touched the metal blades, but that was bad, real bad, as if
leftover lightning from a storm was in the blades and jumped into him
when he touched them.  Sizzling, crackling white light flashed through
him.  He snatched his hand back.  His fingers tingled.  He closed the
drawer and hurried back to bed and sat there with the covers pulled
around his shoulders the way TV Indians wrapped themselves in blankets
when they sat at TV campfires.

The shower stopped.  So did the singing.  After a while Derek came out
of the bathroom, followed by a cloud of damp, soapy smelling air.  He
was dressed for the day.  His wet hair was combed back from his
forehead.

He was not a rotting dead person.  He was all alive, every part of him,
at least every part you could see, and no bones poked out anywhere.

"Good morning," Derek said, the words slurred and muffled by his crooked
mouth and too-big tongue.  He smiled.

"Good morning."

"You sleep good?"

"Yeah," Thomas said.

"Breakfast soon."

"Yeah."

"Maybe sticky buns."

"Maybe."  "I like sticky buns."

"Derek?"  'Huh?"

"If I ever tell you.

Derek waited, smiling.

Thomas thought out what he wanted to say, then continued:

"If I ever tell you the Bad Thing's coming, and I tell you to run, don't
just stand around like a dumb person.  You just run.

" Derek stared at him, thinking about it, still smiling, then after a
while he said, "Sure, okay."

"Promise?"

"Promise.  But what's a bad thing?"

"I don't know really, for sure, but I'll feel it when it's coming, I
think, and tell you, and you'll run."

"Where?"

"Anywhere.  Down the hall.  Find some aides, stay with them."

"Sure.  You better wash.  Breakfast soon.  Maybe sticky buns."

Thomas unwrapped himself from the blanket and got out of bed.  He
stepped into his slippers again and walked to the bathroom.

Just as Thomas was opening the bathroom door, Derek said.

"You mean at breakfast?"  Thomas turned.

"Huh?"

"You mean a bad thing might come at breakfast?"

"Might," Thomas said.

"Could it be...  poached eggs?"

"Huh?"

"The bad thing-could it be poached eggs?  I don't like poached eggs, all
slimy, yuck, that'd be real bad, not good all like cereal and bananas
and sticky buns."

"No, no," Thomas said.

"The bad thing isn't poached egg It's a person, some funny-weird person.
I'll feel it when it's coming, and tell you, and you'll run."

"Oh. Yeah, sure.  A person."

Thomas went into the bathroom, closed the door.  He didn't have much
beard.  He had an electric razor, but he only used it a couple-few times
a month, and today he didn't need it.

He brushed his teeth, though.  And he peed.  He made the water start in
the shower.  Only then did he let himself laugh, because enough time had
passed so Derek wouldn't even wonder why Thomas was laughing at him.

Poached eggs!

Though Thomas usually didn't like seeing himself, see how lumpy and
wrong and dumb his face was, he peeked into the steam-streaked mirror.
One time long ago, past when he could remember, he'd been laughing when
he'd happened to see himself in a mirror, and for once-surprise-he
hadn't felt so bad about how he looked.  When he laughed he looked like
a normal person.  Just pretending to laugh didn't make him look more
normal, it had to be real laughing, and a smile didn't do it, either,
because a smile wasn't enough of a laugh to change his face.  In fact, a
smile could sometimes look sad, he couldn't stand seeing himself at all.

Poached eggs.

Thomas shook his head, and when his laughter finished he turned from the
mirror.

To Derek the most worst bad thing he could think of was poached eggs and
no sticky buns, which was very funny ha-ha.  You try to tell Derek about
walking dead people and scissors sticking out of bellies and something
that eats little live animals, and old Derek would look at you and smile
and nod and not get it at all.

For as long as he could remember, Thomas had wished he was a normal
person, not dumb, and many times he thanked God for at least making him
not as dumb as poor Derek.  But now he half wished he was dumber, so he
could get those ugly nasty vision-pictures out of his mind, so he could
forget about Derek going to die and the Bad Thing coming and Julie being
in danger, so he'd have nothing to worry about except poached eggs,
which wouldn't be much of a worry at all, since he sort of liked poached
eggs.

WHEN Clint Karaghiosis arrived at Dakota & Dakota shortly before nine
o'clock, Bobby took him by the shoulder, turned him around, and went
back to the elevator with him.

"You drive, and I'll fill you in on what's happened during the night.  I
know you've got other cases to tend to, the Pollard thing is getting
hotter by the minute."

"Where're we going?"

"First, Palomar Labs.  They called.  Test results are in."

a few clouds remained in the sky, and they were far off toward the
mountains, moving away like the billow sails of great galleons on an
eastward journey.  It was a quintessential southern California day:
blue, pleasantly warm, everything green and fresh, and rush-hour traffic
so hideously snarled that it could transform an ordinary citizen into a
foaming-at-the-mouth sociopath with a yearning to pull a trigger of a
semiautomatic weapon.

Clint avoided freeways, but even surface streets were clogged.  By the
time Bobby recounted everything that transpired since they had seen each
other yesterday afternoon they were still ten minutes from Palomar in
spite of the questions occasionally asked by Clint's amazement-subdued
like a o reactions, but amazement none the less at the discovery that
Frank was evidently able to teleport himself.

Finally Bobby changed the subject because talking too Clint about
psychic phenomena to a phlegmatic guy like Clint made him feel like an
airhead, as if he had lost his grip on reality.  While they inched along
Bristol Avenue, he said,

"I can remember when you could go anywhere in Orange County and never
get caught in traffic."

"Not so long ago."

"I remember when you didn't have to sign a developer's waiting list to
buy a house.  Demand wasn't five times the supply."

"Yeah."

"And I remember when orange groves were all over Orange County."

"Me too."

Bobby sighed.  "Hell, listen to me, like an old geezer, babbling about
the good old days.  Pretty soon, I'll be talking about how nice it was
when there were still dinosaurs around."

"Dreams," Clint said.  "Everyone's got a dream, and the one more people
have than any other is the California dream, so they never stop coming,
even though so many have come now that the dream isn't really quite
attainable any more, not the original dream that started it all.  Of
course, maybe a dream should be unattainable, or at least at the outer
limits of your reach.  If it's too easy, it's meaningless."

Bobby was surprised by the long burst of words from Clint, but more
surprised to hear the man talking about something as intangible as
dreams.

"You're already a Californian, so what's your dream?"  After a brief
hesitation, Clint said,

"That Felina will be able to hear someday.  There're so many medical
advancements these days, new discoveries and treatments and techniques
all the time."

As Clint turned left off Bristol, onto the side street where Palomar
Laboratories stood, Bobby decided that was a good dream, a damned fine
dream, maybe even better than his and Julie's dream about buying time
and getting a chance to bring Thomas out of Cielo Vista and into a
remade family.

They parked in the lot beside the huge concrete-block building in which
Palomar Laboratories was housed.  As they were walking toward the front
door, Clint said, "Oh, by the way, the receptionist here thinks I'm gay,
which is fine with me."

"What?"

Clint went inside without saying more, and Bobby followed him to the
reception window.  An attractive blonde sat at the counter.

"Hi, Lisa," Clint said.

"Hi!"  She punctuated her response by cracking her chewing gum.

"Dakota and Dakota."

"I remember," she said.

"Your stuff's ready.  I'll get it." She glanced at Bobby and smiled, and
he smiled, too, although her expression seemed a little peculiar to him.

When she returned with two large, sealed manila envelopes-one labeled
SAMPLES, the other ANALYSES-she handed the second one to Bobby.  They
stepped to one side of the lounge, away from the counter.

Bobby tore open the envelope and skimmed the document inside.

"Cat's blood."

"You serious?"

"Yeah.  When Frank woke up in that motel, he was cover with cat's
blood."

"I knew he was no killer."

Bobby said, "The cat may have an opinion about that."

"The other stuff is?"

"Well...  bunch of technical terms here...  but what it comes down to is
that it's what it looks like.  Black sand."

Stepping back to the reception counter, Clint said, "You remember we
talked about a black-sand beach in Hawaii

"Kaimu," she said.  "It's a dynamite place."

"Yeah, Kaimu.  Is it the only one?"

"Black-sand beach, you mean?  No. There's Punaluu, which is a real sweet
place too.  Those are on the big island.  I agree there must be more on
the other islands, 'cause there's volcanoes all over the place, aren't
there?"

Bobby joined them at the counter.  "What do volcanoes had to do with
it?"

Lisa took her chewing gum out of her mouth and put it waside on a piece
of paper.  "Well, the way I heard it, really hot lava flows into the
sea, and when it meets the water, there're huge explosions, which throw
off zillions and zillions of the really teeny-tiny beads of black glass,
and then over a long period of time the waves rub all the beads together
until they ground down into sand."

"They have these beaches anywhere but Hawaii?"  Bobby wondered.

She shrugged.  "Probably.  Clint, is this fella your...  friend?"

"Yeah," Clint said.

"I mean, you know, your good friend?"

"Yeah," Clint said, without looking at Bobby.

Lisa winked at Bobby.  "Listen, you make Clint take you to Kaimu, 'cause
I'll tell you something-it's really terrific to go out on a black beach
at night, make love under the stars, because it's soft, for one thing,
but mainly because black sand doesn't reflect moonlight like regular
sand.  It seems like you're floating in space, darkness all around, it
really sharpens your senses,.if you know what I mean."

"Sounds terrific," Clint said.

"Take care, Lisa."  He headed for the door.

As Bobby turned to follow Clint, Lisa said, "You make him take you to
Kaimu, you hear?  You'll have a good time."

Outside, Bobby said, "Clint, you've got some explaining to do."

"Didn't you hear her?  These little beads of black glass-"

"That's not what I'm talking about.  Hey, look at you, you're grinning.
I don't think I've ever seen you grinning.  I don't think I like you
grinning."

BY NINE o'clock, Lee Chen had arrived at the office, opened a bottle of
orange-flavored seltzer, and settled into the computer room a midst his
beloved hardware, where Julie was waiting for him.

He was five six, slender but wiry,a warm brass complexion and jet-black
hair that bristled in a modified punk style.  He wore red tennis shoes
and socks, black cotton pants with a white belt, a black and
charcoal-grey shirt with a subtle leaf pattern, and a black jacket with
narrow lapels and big shoulder pads.  He was the most stylishly dressed
employee at Dakota & Dakota, even compared to Cassie H ley, their
receptionist, who was an unashamed clotheshor.

While Lee sat in front of his computers, sipping seltzer, Julie filled
him in on what had happened at the hospital and showed him the printouts
of the information Bobby had acquired earlier that morning.

Frank Pollard sat with them, in the chair, where Julie could keep an eye
on him.  Throughout the conversation, Lee exhibited no surprise at what
he was being told, as if his computers had bestowed on him such enormous
restrain and resignation nothing-not even a man capable of
teleportation-could surprise him.  Julie knew that Lee, well as everyone
else in the Dakota & Dakota family, would never leak a word of any
client's business to anyone; but didn't know how much of his supercooled
demeanor was real and how much was a conscious image that he put on
every moment with his ultra-voguish clothes.

Though his unshakable nonchalance might be partially feigned, his talent
for computers was unquestionably real.

When Julie had finished her condensed version of recent events, Lee
said, "Okay, what do you need from me now?"

There was no doubt on either his part or hers that eventually he could
provide whatever she required.

She gave him a steno pad.  Double rows of currency serial numbers filled
the first ten pages.

"Those are random samplings of the bills in each of the bags of cash
we're holding for Frank.  Can you find out if it's hot money-stolen,
maybe an extortion or ransom payment?"

Lee quickly paged through the lists.

"No consecutive numbers?  That makes it harder.  Usually cops don't have
a record of the serial numbers of stolen money unless it was brand-new
bills, which are still bound in packets, consecutively numbered, right
off the press."

"Most of this cash is fairly well circulated."

"There's an outside chance it might still be from a ransom or extortion
payoff, like you said.  The cops would've taken down all the numbers
before they let the victim make the drop, just in case the perp made a
clean getaway.  It looks bleak, but I'll try.  What else?"

Julie said, "An entire family in Garden Grove, last name Farris, was
murdered last year."

"Because of me," Frank said.

Lee propped his elbows on the arms of his chair, leaned back, and
steepled his fingers.  He looked like a wise Zen master who had been
forced to don the clothes of an avant-garde artist after getting the
wrong suitcase at the airport.

"No one really dies, Mr. Pollard.  They just go on from here.  Grief is
good, but guilt is pointless."

Though she knew too few computer fanatics to be certain, Julie suspected
that not many found a way to combine the hard realities of science and
technology with religion.  But in fact, Lee had arrived at a belief in
God through his work with computers and his interest in modern physics.
He once explained to her why a profound understanding of the
dimensionless space inside a computer network, combined with a modern
physicist's view of the universe, led inevitably to faith in a Creator,
but she hadn't followed a thing he'd said.

She gave Lee Chen the dates and details of the Farris and Roman murders.
"We think they were all killed by the same man.  I haven't got a clue to
his real name, so I call him Mr. Blue.  Considering the savagery of the
murders, we suspect he's a serial killer with a long list of victims. If
we're right, the murders have been so widely spread or Mr. Blue has
covered his tracks so well that the press has never made the connections
between the crimes."

"Otherwise," Frank said, "they'd have sensationalized it on their front
pages.  Especially if this guy regularly bites his victims."

"But since most police agencies are computer-linked these days," Julie
said, "they might've made the connections across jurisdictions, saw what
the press didn't.  There might be one more quiet, ongoing investigations
between local, state, and federal authorities.  We need to know if any
police in California-or the FBI nationally-are on to Mr. Blue, and we
need to know anything they've learned about him, no matter how trivial."
Lee smiled.  In the middle of his brass-hued face, his teeth were like
pegs of highly polished ivory.

"That means going through public-access files in their computers.  I'll
have to breech their security, one agency after another, all the way
into the FBI."

"Difficult?"

"Very.  But I'm not without experience."  He pushed his jacket sleeves
farther up on his arms, flexed his fingers, and turned to the terminal
keyboard as if he were a concert pianist about to interpret Mozart.  He
hesitated and glanced sideways at Julie.

"I'll work into their systems indirectly to discourage tracebacks.  I
won't damage any data or breach national security, so I probably won't
even be noticed.  But if someone spys me snooping and puts a tracer on
me that I don't see or can't shake, they might pull your PI license for
this."

"I'll sacrifice myself, and take the blame.  Bobby's license won't be
pulled, too, so the agency won't go down.  How long will this take?"

"Four or five hours, maybe more, maybe a lot more.  Can somebody bring
me lunch at noon?  I'd rather eat here and take a break."

"Sure.  What would you like?"

"Big Mac, double order of fries, vanilla shake."

Julie grimaced.

"How come a high-tech guy like you never heard of cholesterol?"

"Heard of it.  Don't care.  If we never really die, cholesterol can't
kill me.  It can only move me out of this life a little sooner."

ARCHER VAN CORVAIRE cracked open the Levolor blind and peered through
the thick bulletproof glass in the front door of his Newport Beach shop.
He squinted suspiciously at Bobby and Clint, though he knew and expected
them.  At last he unlocked the door and let them in.

Van Corvaire was about fifty-five but invested a lot of time and money
in the maintenance of a youthful appearance.  To thwart time, he'd
undergone dermabrasion, face-lifts, and liposuction; to improve on
nature, he'd had a nose job, cheek implants, and chin restructuring.  He
wore a toupee of such exquisite craftsmanship, it would have passed for
his own dyed-black hair-except that he sabotaged the illusion by
insisting on not merely a replacement but a lush, unnatural pompadour.
If he ever got into a swimming pool wearing that toupee, it would look
like the conning tower of a submarine.

After reengaging both dead bolts, he turned to Bobby.

"I never do business in the morning.  I take only afternoon
appointments."

"We appreciate the exception you've made for us," Bobby said.

Van Corvaire sighed elaborately.

"Well, what is it?"

"I have a stone I'd like you to appraise for me."  He squinted, which
wasn't appealing, since his eyes were already as narrow as those of a
ferret.  Before his name change thirty years ago, he'd been Jim Bob
Spleener, and a friend would have told him that when he squinted
suspiciously he looked very much like a Spleener and not at all like a
van Corvaire.

"An appraisal?  That's all you want?"

He led them through the small but plush salesroom: handtextured plaster
ceiling; bleached suede walls; whitewashed oak floors; custom area
carpet by Patterson, Flynn & Martin in shades of peach, pale blue and
sandstone; a modern white sofa flanked by pickled-finish, buriwood
tables by Bau; elegant rattan chairs encircling a round table with a
glass thick enough to survive a blow from a sledgehammer.

one small merchandise display case stood off to the left.  Corvaire's
business was conducted entirely by appointment, his jewelry was custom
designed for the very rich and tasteful people who would find it
necessary to buy hundred-thousand dollar necklaces to wear to a
thousand-dollar-a-plate char dinner, and never grasp the irony.

The back wall was mirrored, and van Corvaire watched him self with
obvious pleasure all the way across the room.  He hardly took his eyes
off his reflection until he passed through the door into the workroom.

Bobby wondered if the guy ever got so entranced by his image that he
walked smack into it.  He didn't like Jim van Corvaire, but the
narcissistic creep's knowledge of gems and jewelry was often useful.

Years ago, when Dakota & Dakota Investigations was julie Dakota
Investigations, without the ampersand and the red dancy (better never
put it that way around Julie, who wouldn't appreciate the clever
wordplay but would make him eat redundancy.  Bobby had helped van
Corvaire recover a fortune in unmounted diamonds stolen by a lover.  Old
Bob desperately wanted his gems but didn't want the woman sent to
prison, so he went to Bobby instead of to the police That was the only
soft spot Bobby had ever seen in van vaire; in the intervening years the
jeweler no doubt had grown a callus over it too.

Bobby fished one of the marble-size red stones from his pocket.  He saw
the jeweler's eyes widen.

With Clint standing to one side of him, with Bobby behind him and
looking over his shoulder, van Corvaire sat on a high stool at a
workbench and examined the rough-cut stone through a loupe.  Then he put
it on the lighted glass table with a microscope and studied it with that
more powerful instrument.

"Well?"  Bobby asked.

The jeweler did not respond.  He rose, elbowing them out of the way, and
went to another stool, farther along the work bench.  There, he used one
scale to weigh the stone and another to determine if its specific
gravity matched that of any known gems.

Finally, he moved to a third stool that was positioned in front of a
vise.  From a drawer he withdrew a ring box in which three large, cut
gems lay on a square of blue velvet.

"Junk diamonds," he said.

"They look nice to me," Bobby said.

"Too many flaws."

He selected one of those stones and fixed it in the vise with a couple
of turns of the crank.  Gripping the red beauty in a small pair of
pliers, he used one of its sharper edges to attempt to score the
polished facet of the diamond in the vise, pressing with considerable
effort.  Then he put the pliers and red gem aside, picked up another
jeweler's loupe, leaned forward, and studied the junk diamond.

"A faint scratch," he said.  "Diamond cuts diamond."

He held the red stone between thumb and forefinger, staring at it with
obvious fascination-and greed.

"Where did you get this?"

"Can't tell you," Bobby said.

"So it's just a red diamond?"

"Just?  The red diamond may be the rarest most precious stone in the
world!  You must let me market it for you.  I have clients who'd pay
anything to have this as the centerstone of a necklace or pendant. It'll
probably be too big for a ring even after a final cut.  It's huge!"

"What's it worth?"  Clint asked.

"Impossible to say until it's finish-cut.  Millions, certainly."

"Millions?"  Bobby said doubtfully.

"It's big but not that big."  Van Corvaire finally tore his gaze from
the stone and looked up at Bobby.

"You don't understand.  Until now, there were only seven known red
diamonds in the world.  This is the eighth.  And when it's cut and
polished, it'll be one of the two largest.  This comes as close to
priceless as anything gets."

OUTSIDE Archer van Corvaire's small shop, where heavy traffic roared
past on Pacific Coast Highway, with disco-frenetic flares of sunlight
flashing off the chrome and glass, it was hard to believe that the
tranquility of Newport Harbor and its burden of beautiful yachts were
just beyond the building far side of the street.  In a sudden moment of
enlightenment Bobby realized that his entire life (and perhaps nearly
every one else's) was like this street at this precise point in time:
all busy and noise, glare and movement, a desperate rush to break out of
the herd, to achieve something and transcend the whirl of commerce,
thereby giving respite for reflection a shot at serenity-when all the
time serenity was only a step away, on the far side of the street, just
out of sight.

That realization contributed to a heretofore subtle feeling that the
Pollard case was somehow a trap-or, more accurately, a squirrel cage
that spun faster and faster even as he scampered frantically to get a
footing on its rotating floor.

Bobby stood for a few seconds by the open door of the car, feeling
ensnared, caged.  At that moment he was not sure why, even with the
obvious dangers, he had been so eager to take on Frank's problems and
put all that he cared about at risk.  He knew that the reasons he had
quoted to Julie and to himself-sympathy for Frank, curiosity, the
excitement of a wildly different kind of job-were merely justifications,
not reasons, and his true motivation was something he did not yet
understand.  Unnerved, he got in the car and pulled the door shut as
Clint started the engine.

"Bobby, how many red diamonds would you say are in that mason jar?  A
hundred?"

"More.  A couple hundred."

"Worth what-hundreds of millions?"

"Maybe a billion or more."

They stared at each other, and for a while neither of them spoke.  It
wasn't that no words were adequate to the situation instead, there was
too much to say and no easy way to determine where to begin.

At last Bobby said, "But you couldn't convert the stones into cash, not
quickly anyway.  You'd have to dribble them onto the market over a lot
of years to prevent a sudden dilution of their rarity and value, but
also to avoid causing a sensation by drawing unwanted attention, and
maybe having to answer some unanswerable questions."

"After they've mined diamonds for hundreds of years, over the world, and
only found seven red ones...  where in the hell did Frank come up with a
jarful?"

Bobby shook his head and said nothing.

Clint reached into his pants pocket and withdrew one of the diamonds,
smaller than the specimen that Bobby had brought for Archer van
Corvaire's appraisal.

"I took this home to show it to Felina.  I was going to return it to the
jar when I got to the office, but you hustled me out before I had a
chance.  Now that I know what it is, I don't want it in my possession a
minute longer."

Bobby took the stone and put it in his pocket with the larger diamond.
"Thank you, Clint."

DR.  DYSON MANFRED'S study, in his house in Turtle Rock, was the most
uncomfortable place Bobby had ever been.  He had been happier last week,
flattened on the floor of his van, trying to avoid being chopped to bits
by automatic weapons fire than he was among Manfred's collection of
many-legged, carapaced, antenna-bristled, mandibled, and thoroughly
repulsive exotic bugs.

Repeatedly, in his peripheral vision, Bobby saw something move in one of
the many glass-covered boxes on the wall, but every time he turned to
ascertain which hideous creature was about to slip out from under the
frame, his fear proved unfounded.  All of the nightmarish specimens were
pinned and motionless, lined up neatly beside one another, none missing.
He also would have sworn that he heard things skittering and slithering
inside the shallow drawers of the many cases that he knew contained more
insects, but he supposed that those sounds were every bit was imaginary
as the phantom movement glimpsed from the corners of his eyes.

Though he knew Clint to be a born stoic, Bobby was impressed by the
apparent ease with which the guy endured the creepy-crawly decor.  This
was an employee he must never lose.  He decided on the spot to give
Clint a significant raise in salary before the day was out.

Bobby found Dr. Manfred nearly as disquieting as his collection.  The
tall, thing, long-limbed entomologist seemed to be the offspring of a
professional basketball player and one of those African stick insects
that you saw in nature films and hoped never to encounter in real life.

Manfred stood behind his desk, his chair pushed out of the way, and they
stood in front of it.  Their attention was direct upon a two-foot-long,
one-foot-wide, white-enamel, inch-lab tray which occupied the center of
the desktop and over which was draped a small white towel.

"I have had no sleep since Mr. Karaghiosis brought this me last night,"
Manfred said,

"and I won't sleep much tonight either, just turning over all the
remaining questions in mind.  This dissection was the most fascinating
of my care and I doubt that I'll ever again experience anything in my I
to equal it."  The intensity with which Manfred spoke-and the
implication that

neither good food nor good sex, neither a beautiful sunset nor a fine
wine, could be a fraction as satisfying as ins dismemberment-gave Bobby
a queasy stomach.

He glanced at the fourth man in the room, if only to divide his
attention briefly from their bugophile host.  The guy in his late
forties, as round as Manfred was angular, as pi as Manfred was pale,
with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and freckles.  He sat on a chair in the
corner, straining the seams of gray jogging suit, with his hands fisted
on his heavy thigh looking like a good Boston Irish fellow who had been
trying to eat his way into a career as a Sumo wrestler.  The
entomologist hadn't introduced or even referred to the well-padded
server.  Bobby figured that introductions would be made who Manfred was
ready.  He decided not to force the issue-if on because the round man
silently regarded them with a mixture of wonder, suspicion, fear, and
intense curiosity that encouraged Bobby to believe they would not be
pleased to hear who he had to tell them when, at last, he spoke.

With long-fingered, spidery hands-which Bobby might have sprayed with
Raid if he'd had any-Dyson Manfred moved the towel from the white-enamel
tray, revealing the mains of Frank's insect.  The head, a couple of the
legs,of the highly articulated pincers, and a few other unidentified
parts had been cut off and put aside.  Each grisly piece rest on a soft
pad of what appeared to be cotton cloth, almost a jeweler might present
a fine gem on velvet to a prospective buyer.  Bobby stared at the
plum-size head with its small reddish-blue eye, then at its two large
muddy-yellow eyes that were too similar in color to Dyson Manfred's.  He
shivered.  T main part of the bug was in the middle of the tray, on its
back.  The exposed underside had been slit open, the outer layers of
tissue removed or folded back, and the inner workings revealed.

Using the gleaming point of a slender scalpel, which he handled with
grace and precision, the entomologist began by showing them the
respiratory, ingestive, digestive, and excretory systems of the bug.
Manfred kept referring to the

"great art" of the biological design, but Bobby saw nothing that equaled
a painting by Matisse; in fact, the guts of the thing were even more
repellent than its exterior.  One term-"polishing chamber"-struck him as
odd, but when he asked for a further explanation, Manfred only said,

"in time, in time," and went on with his lecture.

When the entomologist finished, Bobby said,

"Okay, we know how the thing ticks, so what does that tell us about it
that we might want to know?  For instance, where does it come from?"
Manfred stared at him, unresponding.

Bobby said,

"The South American jungles?"  Manfred's peculiar amber eyes were hard
to read, and his silence puzzling.

"Africa?"  Bobby said.  The entomologist's stare was beginning to make
him twitchier than he already was.

"Mr. Dakota,"

Manfred said finally,

"you're asking the wrong question.  Let me ask the interesting ones for
you.  What does this creature eat?  Well, to put it in the simplest
terms that any layman can understand-it eats a broad spectrum of
minerals, rock, and soil.  What does it ex-"

"It eats dirt?"  Clint asked.

"That's an even simpler way to express it," Manfred said.

"Not precise, mind you, but simpler.  We don't yet understand how it
breaks down those substances or how it obtains energy from them.  There
are aspects of its biology that we can see perfectly clearly but that
still remain mysterious."

"I thought insects ate plants or each other or...  dead meat," Bobby
said.

"They do," the entomologist confirmed.

"This thing is not an insect or any other class of the phylum
Arthropodan for that matter."

"Sure looks like an insect to me," Bobby said, glancing dow at the
partly dismantled bug and grimacing involuntarily.

"No," Manfred said,

"this is a creature that evidently e through soil and stone, capable of
ingesting that material i chunks as large as fat grapes.  And the next
question is, that's what it eats, what does it excrete?" And the answer,
M Dakota, is that it excretes diamonds."  Bobby jerked as if the
entomologist had hit him.

He glanced at Clint, who looked as surprised as Bobby t The Pollard case
had induced several changes in the y and now it had robbed him of his
poker face.

In a tone of voice that suggested Manfred was playing the for fools,
Clint said,

"You're telling us it turns dirt into diamonds?"

"No, no," Manfred said.

"It methodically eats through vein of diamond-bearing carbon and other
material, until it find the gems.  Then it swallows them in their
encrusted jackets minerals, digests those minerals, passes the rough
diamond into the polishing chamber, where any remaining extraneous
mortar is worn away by vigorous contact with these hundreds of fine,
wirelike bristles that line the chamber."  With the scalpel he pointed
to the feature of the bug that he had just describe

"Then it squirts the raw diamond out the other end."  The entomologist
opened the center drawer of his desk,moved a white handkerchief,
unfolded it, and revealed three red diamonds, all considerably smaller
than the one Bobby had taken to van Corvaire, but probably worth
hundreds of thou sands, maybe millions, apiece.

"I found these at various points in the creature's system.

The largest of the three was still partially encased in a mottled
brown-black-gray mineral crust.

"They're diamonds?"  Bobby said, playing ignorant.

"I've never seen red diamonds."

"Neither had I. So I went to another professor, a geologist who happens
to be a gemologist as well, got him out of be at midnight to show these
to him."  Bobby glanced at the would-be Irish Sumo wrestler, but the man
did not rise from his chair or speak, so he evidently was not the
geologist.

Manfred explained what Bobby and Clint already knew that these scarlet
diamonds were among the rarest on things earth-while they pretended that
it was all news to them.

"This discovery strengthened my suspicions about the creature, so I went
straight to Dr. Gavenall's house and woke him shortly before two o'clock
this morning.  He threw on sweats and sneakers, and we came right back
here, and we've been here ever since, working this out together, unable
to believe our own eyes."  At last the round man rose and stepped to the
side of the desk.

"Roger Gavenall," Manfred said, by way of introduction.

"Roger is a geneticist, a specialist in recombinant DNA, and widely
known for his creative projections of microscopy genetic engineering
that might conceivably progress from current knowledge."

"Sorry," Bobby said,

"I lost you at 'Roger is..." We'll need some more of that layman's
language, I'm afraid."

"I'm a geneticist and futurist," Gavenall said.  His voice was
unexpectedly melodic, like that of a television game-show host.

"Most genetic engineering, for the foreseeable future, will take place
on a microscopic scale-creating new and useful bacteria, repairing
flawed genes in the cells of human beings to correct inherited
weaknesses and prevent inherited disease.  But eventually we'll be able
to create whole new species of animals and insects, macroscopic
engineering-useful things like voracious mosquito eaters that will
eliminate the need to spray Malathion in tropical regions like Florida.
Cows that are maybe half the size of today's cows and a lot more
metabolically efficient, so they require less food, yet produce twice as
much milk."  Bobby wanted to suggest that Gavenall consider combining
the two biological inventions to produce a small cow that ate only
enormous quantities of mosquitoes and produced three times as much milk.
But he kept his mouth shut, certain that neither of the scientists would
appreciate his humor.  Anyway, he had to admit that his compulsion to
make a joke of this was an attempt to deal with his own deep-seated fear
of the everincreasing weirdness of the Pollard case.

"This thing," Gavenall said, indicating the deconstructed bug in the lab
tray,

"isn't anything that nature created.  It's clearly an engineered life
form, so astonishingly task-specific in every aspect of its biology that
it's essentially a biological chine.  A diamond scavenger."  Using a
pair of forceps and the scalpel, Dyson Man gently turned over the insect
that wasn't an insect, so he could see its midnight-black shell rimmed
with red markings.  Bobby thought he heard whispery movement in many pa
of the study, and he wished Manfred would let some sun into the room.
The windows were covered with interior shutters, and the slats were
tightly shut.  Bugs liked darkness and shadows, and the lamps here
seemed insufficiently bright to dissuade them from scurrying out of the
shallow draw over Bobby's shoes, up his socks, and under the legs of
pants.

Hanging his pendulous belly over the desk, indicating crimson edging on
the carapace, Gavenall said,

"On a few Dyson and I shared, we showed a representation of this pattern
to an associate in the mathematics department, and he confirmed that
it's an obvious binary code."

"Like the universal product code that's on everything you buy at the
grocery store," the entomologist explained.

Clint said,

"You mean the red marks are the bug's number?"

"Yes."

"Like...  well, like a license plate?"

"More or less," Manfred said.

"We haven't taken a chip the red material for analysis yet, but we
suspect it'll prove be a ceramic material, painted onto the shell or
spray-bonded in some fashion."  Gavenall said,

"Somewhere there are a lot of these thing industriously digging for
diamonds, red diamonds, all of them carries a coded serial number that
identifies it whomever created it and set it to work."  Bobby grappled
with that concept for a moment, trying find a way to see it was a part
of the world in which he lived but it simply did not fit.  "Okay, Dr.
Gavenall, you're able envision engineered creatures like this-"

"I couldn't have envisioned this," Gavenall said adamant

"It never would've occurred to me.  I could only recognize it for what
it was, for what it must be."

"All right, but nevertheless you recognized what it must which is
something neither Clint nor I could've done.  Sotell me-who could make
something like this damned thing Manfred and Gavenall exchanged a
meaningful look and were both silent for a long moment, as if they knew
the answer to his question but were reluctant to reveal it.  Finally,
lowering his game-show-host voice to an even more mellifluous note,
Gavenall said,

"The genetic knowledge and engineering skill required to produce this
thing do not yet exist.  We're not even close to being able to...  to
...  not even close.

" Bobby said,

"How long until science advances far enough to make this thing
possible?"

"No way of arriving at a precise answer," Manfred said.

"Guess."

"Decades?"  Gavenall said.

"A century?  Who knows?"  Clint said,

"Wait a minute.  What're you telling us?  That this thing comes from the
future, that it came through some...

some time warp from the next century?"

"Either that," Gavenall said,

"or...  it doesn't come from this world at all."  Stunned, Bobby looked
down at the bug with no less revulsion but with considerably more wonder
and respect than he'd had a moment ago.

"You really think this might be a biological machine created by people
from another world?  An alien artifact?"  Manfred worked his mouth but
produced no sound, as if rendered speechless by the prospect of what he
was about to say.

"Yes," Gavenall said,

"an alien artifact.  Seems more likely to me than the possibility that
it came tumbling back to us through some hole in time."  Even as
Gavenall spoke, Dyson Manfred continued to work his mouth in a
frustrated attempt to break the silence that gripped him, and his
lantern jaw gave him the look of a praying mantis masticating a grisly
lunch.  When words at last issued from him, they came in a rush:

"We want you to understand, we will not, flatly will not, return this
specimen.  We'd be derelict as scientists to allow this incredible thing
to reside in the hands of laymen, we must preserve and protect it, and
we will, even if we have to do so by force."  A flush of defiance lent a
glow of health to the entomologist's pale, angular face for the first
time since Bobby had met him.

"Even if by force," he repeated.

Bobby had no doubt that he and Clint could beat the crap out of the
human stick bug and his rotund colleague, but the was no reason to do
so.  He didn't care if they kept the thing in the lab tray-as long as
they agreed to some ground rules about how and when they would go public
with it.

All he wanted right now was to get out of that bughouse into warm
sunlight and fresh air.  The whispery sounds from the specimen drawers,
though certainly imaginary, grew louder and more frenzied by the minute.
His entomophobia would soon kick him off the ledge of reason and send
him screaming from the room; he wondered if his anxiety was a parent or
if he was sufficiently self-controlled to conceal it.

felt a bead of sweat slip down his left temple, and had the answer.

"Let's be absolutely frank," Gavenall said.

"It's not only obligation to science that requires us to maintain
possession of this specimen.  Revelation of this find will make us,
academically and financially.  Neither one of us is a slouch in his
field but this will catapult us to the top, the very top, and we're
willing to do whatever is necessary to protect our interests here His
blue eyes had narrowed, and his open Irish face had closed up into a
hard mask of determination.

"I'm not saying I'd k to keep that specimen...  but I'm not saying I
wouldn't, their."  Bobby sighed.

"I've done a lot of research for UCI into backgrounds of prospective
faculty members, so I know the academic world can be as competitive and
vicious and dirty dirtier-than either politics or show business.  I'm
not going to fight you on this.  But we've got to reach an agreement
about when you can go public with it.  I don't want you doing anything
that would bring my client to the attention of the press until we've
resolved his case and are sure he's...  out of danger.

"And when will that be?"  Manfred asked.

Bobby shrugged.

"A day or two.  Maybe a week.  I doubt it drag on much longer than
that."  The entomologist and geneticist beamed at each other, obviously
delighted.  Manfred said,

"That's no problem at all.  We need much longer than that to finish
studying the specimen and preparing our first paper for publication, and
devise a straight way to deal with both the scientific community and the
media." Bobby imagined that he heard one of the shallow drawers sliding
open in the case behind him, forced outward by the weight of a vile
torrent of giant, squirming Madagascar roaches.

"But I'll take the three diamonds with me," he said.

"They're quite valuable, and they belong to my client."  Manfred and
Gavenall hesitated, made a token protest, but quickly agreed.  Clint
took the stones and rewrapped them in the handkerchief.  The scientists'
capitulation convinced Bobby there had been more than three diamonds in
the bug, probably at least five, leaving them with two stones to support
their thesis regarding the bug's origins and purpose.

"We'll want to meet your client, interview him," Gavenall said.

"That's up to him," Bobby said.

"It's essential.  We must interview him."

"That's his decision," Bobby said.

"You've gotten rid of what you wanted.  Eventually he may agree, and
then you'll have everything you're after.  But don't push it now."  The
round man nodded.

"Fair enough.  But tell me...  where did he find the thing?"

"He doesn't remember.  He has amnesia."  The drawer behind him was open
now.  He could hear the shells of the huge roaches clicking and scraping
together as they poured out of confinement and down the front of the
cabinet, swarming toward him.

"We really have to go," he said.

"We don't have another minute to spare."  He left the study quickly,
trying not to look as if he was bolting for his life.

Clint followed him, as did the two scientists, and at the front door,
Manfred said,

"I'm going to sound as if I ought to be writing stories for some
sensational tabloid, but if this is an alien artifact that came into
your client's hands, do you think he could've gotten it inside a...
well, a spaceship?  Those people who claim to have been abducted and
forced to undergo examinations aboard spaceships...  they always seem to
go through a period of amnesia first, before learning the truth '

"

"Those people are crackpots or frauds," Gavenall said sharply.

"We can't let ourselves be associated with that sort of thing."  He
frowned, and the frown deepened into a scowl, and he said,

"Unless in this case it's true."  Looking back at them from the stoop,
grateful to be outside, Bobby said, "Maybe it is.  I'm at a point where
I'll believe any thing till it's disproved.  But I'll tell you this...
my feel is that whatever is happening to my client is something a
stranger than alien abduction."

"A lot," Clint agreed.

Without further elaboration, they went down the front was way to the
car.  Bobby opened his door and stood for a moment reluctant to get into
Clint's Chevy.  The mild breeze wash down the Irvine hills felt so clean
after the stale air in M fred's study.

He put one hand in his pocket, felt the three red diamond and said
softly,

"Bug shit."  When he finally got into the car and slammed the door,
barely resisted the urge to reach under his shirt to determine if the
things he still felt crawling on him were real.

Manfred and Gavenall stood on the front stoop, watching Bobby and Clint,
as if half expecting their car to tip back its rear bumper and shoot
straight into the sky to rendezvous with some great glowing craft out of
a Spielberg movie.

Clint drove two blocks, turned at the corner, and pulled the curb as
soon as they were out of sight.

"Bobby, where the hell did Frank get that thing?"  Bobby could only
answer him with another question:

"H many different places does he go when he teleports?

money, the red diamonds and the bug, the black sand-a how far away are
some of those places?  Really far away?'

"And who is he?"

Clint asked.

"Frank Pollard from El Encanto Heights."

"But I mean, who is that?"  Clint thumped one fist again the steering
wheel.

"Who the hell is Frank Pollard from El canto?"

"I think what you really want to know is not who he is.  More important
...  what is he?"  By SURPRISE Bobby came to visit.

Lunch was eaten before Bobby came.  Dessert was still in Thomas's mind.
Not the taste of it.  The memory.  Vanilla ice cream, fresh
strawberries.  The way dessert made you feel.

He was alone in his room, sitting in his armchair, thinking about making
a picture poem that would have the feeling of eating ice cream and
strawberries, not the taste but the good feeling, so some day when you
didn't have any ice cream or strawberries, you could just look at the
poem and get that same good feeling even without eating anything.  Of
course, you couldn't use pictures of ice cream or strawberries in the
poem, because that wouldn't be a poem, that would be only saying how
good ice cream and strawberries made you feel.  A poem didn't just say,
it showed you and made you feel.

Then Bobby came through the door, and Thomas was so happy he forgot the
poem, and they hugged.  Somebody was with Bobby, but it wasn't Julie, so
Thomas was disappointed.  He was embarrassed, too, because it turned out
he'd met the person with Bobby a couple times before, over the years,
but he didn't remember him right away, which made him feel dumb.  It was
Clint.  Thomas said the name to himself, over and over, so maybe he'd
remember next time: Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint.

"Julie couldn't come," Bobby said,

"she's babysitting a client."  Thomas wondered why a baby would ever
need a private eye, but he didn't ask.  In TV only grownups needed
private eyes, which were called private eyes because they looked out for
you, though he wasn't sure why they were called private.  He also
wondered how a baby could pay for a private eye, because he knew eyes
like Bobby and Julie worked for money like everyone else, but babies
didn't work, they were too little to do anything.  So where'd this one
get the money to Bobby and Julie?  He hoped they didn't get cheated out
of their money, they worked hard for it.

Bobby said,

"She told me to tell you she loves you even more than she did yesterday,
and she'll love you even more torn row."  They hugged again because this
time Thomas was giving hug to Bobby for Julie.

Clint asked if he could see the latest scrapbook of poe He took it
across the room and sat in Derek's armchair, who was okay because Derek
wasn't in it, he was in the wreck room Bobby moved the chair from the
worktable, putting it close to the armchair that belonged to Thomas.  He
sat, and talked about what a big blue day it was and how nice the
flowers looked where they were all bright outside Thomas's room.

For a while they talked about lots of things, and Bobby funny-except
when they talked about Julie, he changed.

was worried for Julie, you could tell.  When he talked about her, he was
like a good picture poem-he didn't say his words but he showed it and
made you feel it.

Thomas was already worried for Julie, so Bobby's worry made him feel
even worse, made him scared for her.

"We've got our hands full with the current case," Bob said,

"so neither one of us might be able to visit again this weekend or the
first of the week."

"Okay, sure," Thomas said, and a big coldness rushed from somewhere and
filled him up.  Each time Bobby mentioned the new case, the one with the
baby, his picture of worry was even easier to read.

Thomas wondered if this was the case where they were going to meet up
with the Bad Thing.  He was pretty sure it was.

thought he should tell Bobby about the Bad Thing, but couldn't find a
way.  No matter how he told it, he'd sound I the dumbest dumb person who
ever lived at The Home.  It better to wait until the danger was coming a
lot nearer,TV to Bobby a real hard warning that'd scare him into looking
out for the Bad Thing and shooting it when he saw it.  Bob would pay
attention to a sent warning because he would know where it came from,
that it came from just a dumb person.

And Bobby could shoot, too, all private eyes could shoot because most
days it was bad out there in the world, and you knew you were going to
meet up with somebody who was going to shoot at you first or try to run
you down with a car or stab you or strangle you or, once in a while, try
to throw you off a building, or even Try To Make It Look Like Suicide,
and since most good guys didn't carry guns around with them, private
eyes who watched over them had to be good shooters.

After a while Bobby had to go.  Not to the bathroom but back to work. So
they hugged again.  And then Bobby and Clint were gone, and Thomas was
alone.

He went to the window.  Looked out.  The day was good, better than
night.  But even with the sun pushing most darkness out past the edge of
the world, and even with the rest of the darkness hiding from the sun
behind trees and buildings, there was badness in the day.  The Bad Thing
hadn't gone out past the edge of the world with the night.  It was still
there, somewhere in the day, you could tell.

Last night, when he got too close to the Bad Thing and it tried to grab
him, he was so afraid, he pulled away quick like.  He had a feeling the
Bad Thing was trying to find out who he was and where he was, and then
was going to come to The Home and eat him like it ate the little
animals.  So he pretty much made up his mind not to get real close to it
again, stay far away, but now he couldn't do that because of Julie and
the baby.  If Bobby, who never worried, was so worried for Julie, then
Thomas needed to be even more worried for her than he was.  And if Julie
and Bobby thought the baby should be watched over, then Thomas had to
worry about the baby, too, because what was important to Julie was
important to him.

He reached out into the day.

It was there.  Far away yet.

He didn't get close.

He was scared.

But for Julie, for Bobby, for the baby, he'd have to stop being scared,
get closer, and be sure he knew all the time where the Bad Thing was and
whether it was coming this way.

JACKIE JAxx did not arrive at the offices of Dakota & Dakota until ten
past four that Tuesday afternoon full hour after Bobby and Clint
returned, and to Julie's annoyance he spent half an hour creating an
atmosphere that found conducive to his work.  He felt the room was too
bright so he closed the blinds on the large windows, though the
approaching winter twilight and an incoming bank of clouds the Pacific
had already robbed the day of much of its light.  He tried different
arrangements with the three brass lam each of which was equipped with a
three-way bulb, giving what seemed an infinite number of combinations;
he finally one of them at seventy watts, one at thirty, and one off
completely.  He asked Frank to move from the sofa to one of chairs,
decided that wasn't going to work, moved Julie's chair out from behind
the desk and put him in that, then ranged four other chairs in a
semicircle in front of it.

Julie suspected that Jackie could have worked effectively with the
blinds open and all of the lamps on.  He was a former, however, even
when off the stage, and he could resist being theatrical.

In recent years magicians had forsaken fake shows like The Great
Blackwell and Harry Houdini in favor of names that at least seemed like
real ones, but Jackie was a throw back.  Just as Houdini's real name was
Erich Weiss, Jackie had been baptized David Carver.  Because he
preferred comic magic, he had avoided mysterious-sounding names.

because, since puberty, he had yearned to be part of the night club and
Vegas scene, he had chosen a new identity that, him and those in his
social circle, sounded like Nevada royal While other kids thought about
being teachers, doctors, realestate salesmen or auto mechanics, young
Davey Carver dreamed of being someone like Jackie Jaxx; now, God help
him, he was living his dream.

Although he was currently between a one-week engagement in Reno and a
stint as the opening act for Sammy Davis in Vegas, Jackie showed up not
in blue jeans or an ordinary suit, but in an outfit he could have worn
during performances: a black leisure suit with emerald-green piping on
the lapels and cuffs of the jacket, a matching green shirt, and black
patentleather shoes.  He was thirty-six years old, five feet eight,
thing, cancerously tanned, with hair that he dyed ink-black and teeth
that were unnaturally,ferociously white, thanks to the modern miracle of
dental bonding.

Three years ago Dakota & Dakota had been hired by the Las Vegas hotel
with which Jackie had a long-term contract, and charged with the sticky
task of uncovering the identity of a blackmailer who was trying to
extort most of the magician's income.  The case had many unexpected
twists and turns, but by the time they reached the end, the thing that
most surprised Julie was that she had gotten over her initial distaste
for the magician and had come to sort of like him.  Sort of.

Finally Jackie settled on the chair directly in front of Frank.

"Julie, you and Clint sit to my right.  Bobby, to my left, please."
Julie saw no good reason why she couldn't sit in whichever of the three
chairs she chose, but she played along.

Half of Jackie's Vegas act involved the hypnotizing and comic
exploitation of audience members.  His knowledge of hypnotic technique
was so extensive, and his understanding of the functioning of the mind
in a trance state was so profound, that he was frequently invited to
participate in medical conferences with physicians, psychologists, and
psychiatrists who were exploring practical uses of hypnosis.  Perhaps
they could have persuaded a psychiatrist to help them pierce Frank's
amnesia with hypnotic regression therapy.  But it was doubtful that any
doctor was as qualified for the task as Jackie Jaxx.

Besides, no matter what fantastic things Jackie learned about Frank, he
could be counted on to keep his mouth shut.  He owed a lot to Bobby and
Julie, and in spite of his faults, he was a man who paid his debts and
had at least a vestigial sense of loyalty that was rare in the me-me-me
culture of show business.

In the moody amber light of the two brass lamps, with the world
darkening rapidly beyond the drawn blinds, Jack smooth and
well-projected voice, full of low rounded tones an occasional dramatic
vibrato, commanded not just Frank's attention but everyone else's as
well.  He used a beveledrop crystal on a gold chain to focus Frank's
attention, a suggesting that the others look at Frank's face rather than
the bauble, to avoid unwanted entrancement.

"Frank, please watch the light winking in the crystal, a soft and lovely
light fluttering from one facet to another, facet to another, a very
warm and appealing light, was fluttering.  - -."  After a while, lulled
somewhat herself by Jackie's calculated patter, Julie noticed Frank's
eyes glaze over.

Beside her, Clint switched on the small tape recorder he had used when
Frank had told them his story yesterday afternoon.

Still twisting the chain back and forth between his thumb and forefinger
to make the crystal spin on the end of it, Jack said,

"All right, Frank, you are now slipping into a very relaxed state, a
deeply relaxed state, where you will hear my voice, no other, and will
respond only to my voice, other...."  When he had conveyed Frank into a
deep trance and finished giving him instructions related to the
interrogation ahead, Jackie told him to close his eyes.  Frank obliged.

Jackie put the crystal down.  He said,

"What is your nam "Frank Pollard."

"Where do you live?"

"I don't know."

Having been briefed on the phone by Julie earlier in the day, aware of
the information they were seeking from their client Jackie said,

"Have you ever lived in El Encanto?"  A hesitation.  Then:

"Yes."  Frank's voice was strangely flat.  His face was so haggard
deathly pale that he seemed almost like an exhumed corpse that had been
sorcerously revitalized for the purpose of serving as a bridge between
the members of a sayonce and those whom they wished to speak in the land
of the dead.

"Do you recall your address in El Encanto?"

"No."

"Was your address 1458 Pacific Hill Road?"  I. 'i A frown flickered
across Frank's face and was gone almost as soon as it came.

"Yes.  That's what...  Bobby found...

with the computer."

"But do you actually remember that place?"

"No."  Jackie adjusted his Rolex watch, then used both hands to smooth
back his thick, black hair.

"When did you live in El Encanto, Frank?"

"I don't know."

"You must tell me the truth."

"Yeah."

"You cannot lie to me, Frank, or hide anything from me.

That is impossible in your current state.  When did you live there?"

"I don't know."

"Did you live there alone?"

"I don't know."

"Do you remember being in the hospital last night, Frank)"

"Yeah."

"And you...  disappeared?"  :'They say I did."  'Where did you disappear
to, Frank?"  Silence.

"Frank, where did you disappear to?"

"I...  I'm afraid."

"Why?"

"I...  don't know.  I can't think."

"Frank, do you remember waking up in your car last Thursday morning,
parked along a street in Laguna Beach?"

"Yeah.

"Your hands were full of black sand."

"Yeah."  Frank wiped his hands on his thighs, as if he could feel the
black grains clinging to his sweaty palms.

"Where did you get that sand, Frank?"

"I don't know."

"Take your time.  Think about it."

"I don't know."

"Do you remember checking into a motel later...

napping...  then waking up with blood all over yourself.?"

"I remember,"

Frank said, and he shuddered.

"Where did that blood come from, Frank?"

"I don't know," he said miserably.

,It was cat blood, Frank.  Did you know it was cat blood?"

"No."  His eyelids fluttered, but he did not open his eyes.  "I just cat
blood?  Really?"

"Do you remember encountering a cat that day?"

"No."  Clearly, a more aggressive technique would be require get the
answers they needed.  Jackie began to talk Frank!"  ward in time,
gradually regressing him to his admission to hospital yesterday evening,
-then farther back toward the moment when he had awakened in that
Anaheim alleyway in the early hours of Thursday morning, knowing nothing
but his name Beyond that point might lie his memory, if he could be
induced to step through the veil of amnesia and recover his past.

Julie leaned slightly forward in her chair and looked Jackie Jaxx,
wondering how Bobby was enjoying the show.

figured the spinning crystal and other hocus-pocus would peal to his
boyish spirit of adventure, and that he would smiling and bright-eyed.

Instead he was somber.  His teeth must have been clenched for his jaw
muscles bulged.  He had told her what they learned at Dyson Manfred's
house, and she had been as astonished and shaken as he and Clint.  But
that didn't seem to explain his mood.  Maybe he was still unnerved by
the memory of bugs in the entomologist's study.  Or maybe he continued
to be troubled by that dream he'd had last week: the bad Thing is
coming, the bad thing...

She had dismissed his dream as unimportant.  Now she wondered if it had
been genuinely prophetic.  After all the mess that Frank had brought
into their lives, she was willing to give credence to such things as
omens, visions, prescient dreams.

The bad thing is coming, the bad thing...

Maybe the bad thing was Mr. Blue.

Jackie regressed Frank to the alleyway, to the very morning when he had
first awakened in a strange place, disoriented confused.

"Now go back further, Frank, just a little further back just a few more
seconds, and a few more, back, back, beyond the total darkness in your
mind, beyond that black in your mind...."  Since the questioning had
begun, Frank had appeared to dwindle in Julie's desk chair, as if made
of wax and subjected to a flame.  He had grown paler, too, if that was
possible, as white as candle paraffin.  But now, as he was forced
backward through the darkness in his mind, toward the light of memory on
the other side, he sat up straighter, put his hands on the arms of the
chair and clutched the vinyl almost tightly enough to cause the
upholstery to split.  He seemed to be growing, returning to his former
size, as if he had drunk one of the magic elixirs that Alice had
consumed in her adventures at the far end of the rabbit hole.

"Where are you now?"  Jackie asked.

Frank's eyes twitched beneath his closed lids.  An inarticulate,
strangled sound issued from him.

"Uh...  uh...

"Where are you now?"  Jackie insisted gently but firmly.

"Fireflies," Frank said shakily.

"Fireflies in a windstorm!"  He began to breathe rapidly, raggedly, as
if he were having trouble drawing air into his lungs.

"What do you mean by that, Frank?"

"Fireflies.

"Where are you, Frank?"

"Everywhere.  Nowhere."

"We don't have fireflies in southern California, Frank, so you must be
somewhere else.  Think, Frank.  Look around yourself now and tell me
where you are."

"Nowhere."  Jackie made a few more attempts to get Frank to describe his
surroundings and be more specific as to the nature of the fireflies, all
to no avail.

"Move him on from there," Bobby said.

"Farther back."  Julie glanced at the recorder in Clint's hand and saw
the spools turning behind the plastic window in the tapedeck.

With his melodic and vibrant voice, in seductively rhythmic cadences,
Jackie ordered Frank to regress past the firefly speckled darkness.

Suddenly Frank said,

"What am I doing here?"  He was not referring to the offices of Dakota &
Dakota, but to the place that Jackie Jaxx had drawn him to in his
memory.

"Why here?"

"Where are you, Frank?"

"The house.  What in the hell am I doing here, why did I come here? This
is crazy, I shouldn't be here."

"Whose house is it, Frank?"  Bobby asked.

Because he had been instructed to hear only the hypnotists voice, Frank
did not respond until Jackie repeated the question.  Then:

"Her house.  It's her house.  She's dead, of course, been dead seven
years, but it's still her house, always will, the bitch will haunt the
place, you can't destroy that kind of evil, not entirely, part of it
lingers in the rooms where she lived, in everything she touched."

"Who was she, Frank?",Mother."  -Your mother?  What was her name?"

"Roselle.  Roselle Pollard."

"This is the house on Pacific Hill Road?"

"Yeah.  Look at it, my God, what a place, what a dark place what a bad
place.  Can't people see what a bad place it is?  can't they see that
something terrible lives in there?"

He was crying.  Tears glimmered in his eyes, then streamed down his
cheeks.  Anguish twisted his voice.

"Can't they see what's in their what lives there, what hides there and
breeds in that bad place?  Are people blind?  Or do they just not want
to see?"

Julie was riveted by Frank's tortured voice and by the agony that had
wrenched his face into an approximation of the pain countenance of a
lost and frightened child.  But she turned away from him and peered past
the hypnotist to see if Bobby had reacted to the words

"bad place."  He was looking at her.  The expression of distress that
darkened his blue eyes was proof enough that the reference had not
escaped him.

At the other end of the room, carrying a sheaf of printout Lee Chen
entered from the reception lounge.  He closed the door quietly.  Julie
put a finger to her lips, then motioned him to the sofa.

Jackie spoke soothingly to Frank, trying to allay the fear that had
electrified him.

Suddenly Frank let out a sharp cry of fear.  He sounded more like a
frightened animal than like a man.  He sat up even straighter.  He was
trembling.  He opened his eyes, but obviously did not see anything in
the room; he was still in a trance

"Oh, my God, he's coming, he's coming now, the twins must've told him
I'm here, he's coming!"

Frank's unalloyed terror was so pure and intense that some of it was
communicated to Julie.  Her heartbeat speeded up, and she began to
breathe more rapidly, shallowly.

Trying to keep his subject relaxed enough to be cooperative, Jackie
said,

"Calm down, Frank.  Relax and be calm.  Nobody can hurt you.  Nothing
unpleasant will happen.  Be calm, relaxed, calm.

Frank shook his head.

"No. No, he's coming, he's coming, he's going to get me this time.
Dammit, why did I come back here?  Why did I come back and give him a
chance at me?"

"Relax now-"

"He's there!"  Frank tried to rise to his feet, seemed unable to find
the strength, and dug his fingers even deeper into the vinyl padding on
the arms of the chair.

"He's right there, and he sees me, he sees me."

Bobby said, "Who is he, Frank?"

and Jackie repeated the question.

"Candy.  It's Candy!"

When he was asked again for the name of this person he feared, he
repeated:

"Candy."

"His name is Candy?"

"He sees me!"

In a more forceful and commanding voice than before, Jackie said,

"You will relax, Frank.  You will be calm and relaxed."  But Frank only
grew more agitated.  He had broken into a sweat.  Fixed on something in
a far place and time, his eyes were wild.  His terror seemed to be
sweeping him into a heartbursting panic.

"I don't have much control of him," Jackie said worriedly.

"I'm going to have to bring him out of it."

Bobby slid forward to the edge of his chair.

"No, not yet' In a minute but not yet.  Ask him about this Candy.  Who
is the guy?"

Jackie repeated the question.

Frank said, "He's death."

Frowning, Jackie said, "That's not a clear answer, Frank."

"He's death walking, he's death living, he's my brother, her child, her
favorite child, her spawn, and I hate him, he wants to kill me, here he
comes!"  With a wretched bleat of terror, Frank started to push up from
the chair.

Jackie ordered him to stay where he was.

Frank sat down reluctantly, but his terror only grew, cause he could
still see Candy coming toward him.

Jackie tried to bring him out of that place in the past, toward the
present, and out of his trance, but to no avail.

"Got to get away now, now, now, " Frank said desperately.

Julie was frightened for him.  She'd never seen anyone more pathetic or
vulnerable.  He was drenched in sweat, shivering violently.  His hair
had fallen over his forehead, into his eyes, but it did not interfere
with the vision of terror that had been called up from his past.  He
clutched the arms of the chair so fiercely that a fingernail on his
right hand finally punctured the vinyl upholstery.

"I've got to get out of here," Frank repeated urgently.

Jackie told him to stay put.

"No, I've got to get away from him!"

To Bobby, Jackie Jaxx said, "This has never happened to me, I've lost
control of him.  Jesus, look at him, I'm afraid the guy's going to have
a heart attack."

"Come on, Jackie, you've got to help him," Bobby said sharply.  He got
off his chair, squatted beside Frank, putt his hand on Frank's in a
gesture of comfort and reassurance.

"Bobby, don't," Clint said, standing up so fast that he dropped the tape
recorder he'd been balancing on his thigh.

Bobby didn't respond to Clint, for he was too focused on Frank, who
seemed to be shaking himself to pieces in front of them.  The guy was
like a boiler with a jammed release valve filled to the bursting point
not with steam pressure but manic terror.  Bobby was trying to calm him,
where Jackie failed.

For an instant Julie didn't understand what had made Clint shoot to his
feet, But she realized that Bobby had seen some thing the rest of them
had missed: fresh blood on Frank's right hand.  Bobby hadn't put his
hand over Frank's merely to comfort; he was trying, as gently as
possible, to loosen Frank's grip on the arm of the chair, because Frank
had torn open the vinyl and cut himself, perhaps repeatedly, on an
exposed tack or upholstery tack.

"He's coming, got to get away!"

Frank let go of the chair and grabbed Bobby's hand, and got to his feet,
pulling Bobby with him.

Suddenly Julie understood what Clint feared, and she stood up so fast
that she knocked her chair over.

"Bobby, no!"

Thrown into a panic by the vision of his murderous brother, Frank
screamed.  With a hiss like steam escaping from a locomotive engine, he
vanished.  And took Bobby with him.

FIREFLIES IN a windstorm.

Bobby seemed to be floating in space, for he had no sense of his body's
position, couldn't tell if he was lying or sitting or standing, right
side up or upside down, as if weightless in an immense void.  He had no
sense of smell or taste.  He could hear nothing.  He could feel neither
heat nor cold nor texture nor weight.  The only thing he could see was
limitless blackness that seemed to stretch to the ends of the
universe-and millions upon millions of tiny fireflies, ephemeral as
sparks, that swarmed around him.  Actually, he was not sure he saw them
at all, because he was not aware of having eyes with which to look at
them; it was more as if he was...  aware of them, through any of the
usual senses but through some inner sight of the mind's eye.

At first he panicked.  The extreme sensory deprivation convinced him
that he was paralyzed, without feeling an inch of skin, felled by a
massive cerebral hemorrhage, and blinded and trapped forever in a
damaged brain that had severed all its connections to the outside world.

Then he became aware that he was in motion, not drifting in the
blackness as he had first thought, but speeding through it, rocketing at
a tremendous, frightening speed.  He became aware of being drawn forward
as if he were a bit of lint flying toward some vacuum cleaner of cosmic
power, and all around him the fireflies swirled and tumbled.  It was
like being on amusement park ride so huge and fast that only God could
have designed it for His own pleasure, though there was Pleasure
whatsoever in it for Bobby as he roller-coaster through the pitch
blackness, trying to scream.

He hit the forest floor on his feet, swayed, and almost slammed against
Frank, in front of whom he was standing.  Frank still had a painfully
tight grip on his hand.

Bobby was desperate for air.  His chest ached; his lungs seemed to have
shriveled up.  He sucked in a deep breath, another, exhaling
explosively.

He saw the blood, which was on both of their hands now.  An image of
torn upholstery flashed through his mind.  Jackie Jaxx.  Bobby
remembered.

When Bobby tried to pull loose of his client, Frank held him fast and
said,

"Not here.  No, I can't risk this.  Too dangerous.  Why am I here?"

Steeped in the scent of pines, Bobby surveyed the surrounding primeval
forest, which was thick with shadows as dusk introduced night to the
world.  The air was frigid, and the bristling boughs of the giant
evergreens drooped under a weight of snow, but he saw nothing
frightening in that scene.

Then he realized that Frank was staring past him.  He turned to discover
they were on the edge of the forest.  A snow-covered meadow sloped up
gently behind them.  At the top was a log cabin, not a rustic shack but
an elaborate structure that clearly showed the input of an architect, a
vacation retreat for someone with plenty of disposable income.  A mantle
of snow was draped over the main roof, another over the porch roof, each
decorated with a fringe of icicles that glittered in the last beams of
cold sunlight.  No lights glowed at the windows.  No smoke curled up
from any of the three chimneys.  The place appeared to be deserted.

"He knows about this," Frank said, still panicked.

"I bought it under another name, but he found out about it, and he came
here, almost killed me here, and he's probably keeping tabs on it,
checking in regularly, hoping to catch me again."  Bobby was numbed less
by the subzero cold than by the realization that he had teleported out
of their office and onto this slope in the Sierras or some other
mountains.  He finally found his voice and said,

"Frank, what-" Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

He hit the floor rolling, slammed into a coffee table, and felt Frank
let go of his hand.  The table crashed over, spilling a vase and other
decorative-and breakable-items onto a hard floor.

He'd sustained a solid knock to the head.  When he pushed himself onto
his knees and tried to stand, he was too dizzy to get up.  Frank was
already on his feet, looking around, breathing hard.

"San Diego.  This was my apartment once.  He found out about it.  Had to
get out fast."  When Frank reached down to help Bobby get up, Bobby
unthinkingly accepted his hand, the uninjured one.

"Someone else lives here now," Frank said.

"Must be working, we're lucky."  Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Bobby found himself standing at a rusted iron gate between two stone
pilasters, looking at a Victorian-style house wit sagging porch roof,
broken balusters, and swaybacked steps.  The sidewalk was cracked and
canted, and weeds flourished in an unmown lawn.  In the gloaming it
looked like every kids conception of a seriously haunted house, and he
suspected it would look even worse in broad daylight.

Frank gasped.

"Jesus, no, not here!"  Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Papers fluttered to the floor from a massive mahogany desk as if a wind
had swept through the room, though the air was still now.  They were in
a book-lined study with French windows.  An old man had risen from a
wing-backed leather chair.  He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white
shirt, a blue cardigan, and a look of surprise.

Frank said, "Doc," and with his free hand reached toward the startled
elder.

Darkness.

Bobby had figured out that all was lightless and featureless because,
for the moment, he did not exist as a coherent entity; he had no eyes,
no ears, no nerve endings with which to feel.  But understanding brought
no diminishment of his fears.

Fireflies.

The millions of tiny, whirling points of light were probably the atomic
particles of which his flesh was constructed, being shepherded along
sheerly by the power of Frank's mind.

Velocity.

They were teleporting, and the process was probably just about
instantaneous, requiring only microseconds from physical dissolution to
reconstitution, though subjectively it seemed longer.

The decrepit house again.  It must be the place in the hills north of
Santa Barbara.  They were upslope from the gate, along the Eugenia hedge
that encircled the property.

Frank let out a low cry of terror the instant that he saw where he was.

Bobby was afraid of running into Candy just as much as Frank was, but
also afraid of Frank, and of teleporting.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

This time they didn't materialize with the balance and stability of
their arrival in the old man's study or at the peeling house with the
rusted gate, but with the clumsiness of their intrusion into that
apartment in San Diego.  Bobby stumbled a few steps up a slope, still in
Frank's grip as firmly as if they had been handcuffed, and they both
fell to their knees on the plush, well cropped grass.

Frantically Bobby tried to wrench loose of Frank.  But Frank held fast
with superhuman strength and pointed to a gravestone only a few feet in
front of them.  Bobby looked around and saw that they were alone in a
cemetery, where massive coral trees and palms loomed eerily in the
purple-gray twilight.

"He was our neighbor," Frank said.

Gasping for breath, unable to speak, still twisting his hand in an
attempt to escape Frank's iron grip, Bobby saw the name NORBERT JAMES
KOLREEN in the granite headstone.

"She had him killed," Frank said,

"had her precious Candy kill him just because she felt he'd been rude to
her.  Rude to her!  The crazy bitch."

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

The book-lined study.  The old man in the doorway now, looking into the
room at them.

Bobby felt as if he had been on a corkscrewing roller coaster for hours,
turning upside down at high speed, again and again until he couldn't be
sure any more if he was actually moving or standing still while the rest
of the world spun and loo around him.

"I shouldn't have come here, Dr. Fogarty," Frank said unsteadily.  Blood
dripped off his injured hand, spotting a pale green section of the
Chinese carpet.

"Candy might've seen us at the house, might be trying to follow.  Don't
want to lead him to YOU."

Fogarty said, "Frank, wait-",

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were in the backyard of the decaying house, thirty or forty feet
from steps and a porch that were as dilapidated as those at the front of
the place.  Lights shone in the first-floor windows.

"I want to go, I want to be out of here," Frank said.

Bobby expected to teleport at once, and steeled himself against it, but
nothing happened.

"I want out of here," Frank said again.

When they did pop from that place to another, Frank cursed in
frustration.  Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a woman stepped into
sight.  She stopped on the threshold and stared at them.

The fading, muddy purple twilight barely exposed her, and the light from
the kitchen silhouetted her but did not reveal any details of her face.
Whether it was a trick of the strange illumination or an accurate
revelation of her form, Bobby couldn't know, but when starkly outlined,
she presented a powerful erotic picture: sylphlike, gracefully thing yet
clearly and feminine, a smoky phantom that seemed either thinly clad
nude, and that issued a call of desire without making a sound.

There was a powerful lubricity in this mysterious woman which made her
the equal of any siren that had ever induced sail to run their ships
onto hull-gouging rocks.

"My sister Violet," Frank said with obvious dread and disgust.

Bobby noticed movement, around her feet, a swarming of shadows.  They
poured down the steps, onto the lawn, and he saw they were cats.  Their
eyes were iridescent in the gloom.  He was gripping Frank every bit was
hard as Frank was gripping him, for now he feared release as much as he
had previously feared continued captivity.

"Frank, get us out of here."

"I can't.  I don't have control of this, of myself."

There were a dozen cats, two dozen, still more.  As they rushed off the
porch and across the first few yards of unmown grass, they were silent.
Then, simultaneously, they cried out, as if they were a single creature.
Their wail of anger and hunger instantly cured Bobby of his nausea and
made his stomach quiver, instead, with terror.

"Frank!"

He wished he hadn't taken off his shoulder holster back at the office.
His gun was back there on Julie's desk, of no use to him, but as he
glimpsed the bared teeth of the oncoming horde, he figured the revolver
wouldn't stop them anyway, at least not enough of them.

The nearest of the cats leaped.

JULIE WAS standing by her office chair, where it had been moved into the
center of the room for the session of hypnotic therapy.  She was unable
to step away from it because she had last seen Bobby when he had been
next to that chair, and it was where she felt closest to him.

"How long now?"

Clint was standing at her side.  He looked at his watch.

"Less than six minutes."

Jackie Jaxx was in the bathroom, splashing his face with cold water.
Still on the sofa with a sheaf of printouts, Lee Chen was not as relaxed
as he had been six and a half minutes ago.  His Zen calm had been
shattered.  He was holding those papers in both hands, as if afraid they
would vanish from his grasp, and his eyes were as wide now as they had
been the moment that Bobby and Frank disappeared.

Julie was lightheaded with fear, but she was determined not to lose
control of herself.  Though there seemed to be nothing that she could do
to help Bobby, an opportunity for action might arise when she least
expected it, and she wanted to be calm and ready.

"Last night, Hal said that Frank returned the first time about eighteen
minutes after he'd left."  Clint nodded.

"Then we've twelve minutes to go."

"After his second disappearance, he didn't return for hours."

"Listen," Clint said,

"if they don't show up here again in twelve minutes or an hour or three
hours, that doesn't me anything terrible has happened to Bobby.  It's
not going to be the same every time."

"I know.  What I'm more worried about is...  the damn railing."  Clint
said nothing.

Unable to keep her voice even, she said,

"Frank never did bring it back.  What happened to it?"

"He'll bring Bobby back," Clint said.

"He won't let Bobby out there...  wherever he goes."  She wished she
felt confident about that.

DARKNESS.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Rain poured straight down in warm torrents, as if Bobby and Frank had
materialized under a waterfall.  It pasted their clothes to them in an
instant.  There was no wind whatsoever as if the tremendous weight and
ferocity of the rainfall had drowned the wind as it would a fire; the
air was steamy-humid They had traveled far enough around the globe to
have left twilight behind; the sun was up there somewhere behind steely
plating of gray clouds.

They were on their sides this time, facing each other like inebriates
who had been arm wrestling and had fallen drunkenly off their stools
onto the floor of the barroom, where they still lay with their hands
locked in competition.  They were in a bar, however, but in lush
tropical foliage: ferns; dark grey plants with rubbery, deeply
granulated foliage; ground hugging succulent vines with leaves as plump
as gum candy and berries the same shade as the flesh of a Mandarin
orange.

Bobby pulled away from Frank, and this time his client let him go
without a struggle.  He scrambled to his feet and push through the
slick, spongy, clinging flora.

He didn't know where he was going and didn't care.  He just had to put a
little space between himself and Frank, distance himself from the danger
that Frank now represented to him.  He was overwhelmed by what had
happened, overloaded with new experiences that he needed to consider and
to which he had to adapt before he could go on.

Within half a dozen steps he broke out of the tropical brush and onto a
dark expanse of land, the nature of which at first eluded him.  The rain
came down not in droplets and not in sheets, but in roaring, silver-gray
cascades that dramatically reduced visibility; it swept his hair over
his eyes, too, which didn't help.  He supposed some people, sitting by
windows in dry rooms, might even have seen beauty in the storm, but
there was just too damned much rain, a flood; it met the earth and the
greenery with a cacophonous roar that threatened to deafen him.  The
rain not only exhausted him but made him wildly and irrationally angry,
as if he was being pelted not by rain but by spittle, great gobs of
phlegm spit, and as if the roar was actually the combined voices of
thousands of onlookers showering him with insults and other abuse.  He
stumbled forward through the peculiarly mushy soil-not muddy, but
mushy-looking for someone to blame for the rain, someone to shout at and
shake and maybe even punch.  In six or eight steps, however, he saw the
breakers rolling ashore in a tumult of white foam, and he knew he was
standing on a black-sand beach.  That realization stopped him cold.

"Frank!"  he shouted, and when he turned to look back the way he had
come, he saw that Frank was following him, a few steps behind and
round-backed, as if he were an old man unable to stand up to the force
of the rain, or as if his spine had been warped by all the moisture.

"Frank, dammit, where are we?"

Frank stopped, unbent his back slightly, lifted his head, and blinked
stupidly.

"What?"

Raising his voice even further, Bobby shouted above the tumult: "Where
are we!"

Pointing to Bobby's left, Frank indicated an enigmatic, rain shrouded
structure that stood like the ancient shrine of a long dead religion,
perhaps a hundred feet farther down the black beach.

"Lifeguard station!"  He pointed the other direction, up the beach,
indicating a large wooden building considerably farther from them but
less mysterious because its size made it easier to see.

"Restaurant.  One of the most popular on the island."

"What island?"

"The big island."

"What big island?"

"Hawaii.  We're standing on Punaluu Beach."

"This was where Clint was supposed to take me," Bobby said.  He laughed,
but it was a strange, wild laugh that spooked him, so he stopped.

Frank said, "The house I bought and abandoned is over there."  He
indicated the direction from which they had come.

"Overlooking a golf course.  I loved the place.  I was happy there for
eight months.  Then he found me.  Bobby, we have to get out of here."

Frank took a few steps toward Bobby, out of the mushy mire and onto that
section of the beach where the sand was compacted.

"That's far enough," Bobby ordered when Frank was six or eight feet from
him.

"Don't come any closer."

"Bobby, we have to go now, right away.  I can't teleport correctly when
I want.  That'll happen when it happens, but at least we have to get
away from this part of the island.  He knows I lived here.  He's
familiar with this area.  And he may be following us."

The fiery anger in Bobby was not quenched by the rain; grew hotter than
ever.

"You lying bastard."

"It's true, really," Frank said, obviously surprised by Bobby's
vehemence.

They were close enough to converse wit out shouting now, but Frank still
spoke louder than usual to be heard over the crackle-hiss-patter-rumble
of the deluge

"Candy came here after me, and he was worse than I'd ever seen him, more
horrible, more evil.  He came into my house with a baby, an infant he'd
picked up somewhere, only a month old, he'd probably killed its parents.
He bit into that poor baby's throat, Bobby, then laughed and offered me
its blood, taunted me with it.  He drinks blood, you know, she taught
him to drink blood, and he relishes it now, thrives on it.  And when I
wouldn't join him at the baby's throat, he threw it waside the way you'd
discard an empty beer can, and he came for me but I...  traveled.

"I didn't mean you were lying about him."

A wave broke closer to shore than the others, washing around Bobby's
feet and leaving short-lived, lacelike traceries of foam on the black
sand.

"I mean you lied to us about your amnesia.  You remember everything. You
know exactly who you are."

"No, no."  Frank shook his head and made negating gestures with his
hands.

"I didn't know.  It was a blank.  And maybe it'll be a blank again when
I stop traveling and stay put someplace."

"Lying shit!"  Bobby said.

He stooped, scooped up handsful of wet black sand and threw it at Frank
in a blind fury, two more sopping handsful, then two more.  He began to
realize that he was behaving like a child throwing a tantrum.

Frank flinched from the wet sand but waited patiently for Bobby to stop.

"This isn't like you," he said, when at last Bobby relented.

"To hell with you."

"Your rage is all out of proportion to anything you imagine I've done to
you."  Bobby knew that was true.  As he wiped his wet sand covered hands
on his shirt and tried to catch his breath, he began to understand that
he was not angry at Frank but at what Frank represented to him.  Chaos.
Teleportation was a fun house ride in which the monsters and dangers
were not illusory, in which the constant threat of death was to be taken
seriously, in which there were no rules, no verities that could be
relied upon, where up was down and in was out.  Chaos.  They had ridden
the back of a bull named Chaos, and Bobby had been flat-out terrified.

"You okay?"  Frank asked.

Bobby nodded.

More than fear was involved.  On a level deeper than intellect or even
instinct, perhaps as deep as the soul itself, Bobby had been offended by
that chaos.  Until now he had not realized what a powerful need he had
for stability and order.  He'd always thought of himself as a free
spirit who thrived on change and the unexpected.  But now he saw that he
had limits and that, in fact, beneath the devil-may-care attitude he
sometimes struck, beat the steady heart of a stability-loving
traditionalist.  He suddenly understood that his passion for swing music
had roots of which he'd never been aware: the elegant and complex
rhythms and melodies of big-band jazz appealed to his bebop surface and
to the secret seeker of order who dwelt in his heart.

No wonder he liked Disney cartoons, in which Donald might run wild and
Mickey might get in a tangled mess Pluto, but in which order triumphed
in the end.  Not for the chaotic universe of Warner Brothers' Looney
Tune which reason and logic seldom won more than a tempo victory.

"Sorry, Frank," he said at last.

"Give me a second.  This isn't the place for it, but I'm having an
epiphany."

"Listen, Bobby, please, I'm telling the truth.  Evidently I remember
everything when I travel.  The very fact of traveling tears down the
wall blocking my memory, but as soon as I begin traveling, the wall goes
up again.  It's part of the degeneration I'm undergoing, I guess.  Or
maybe it's just a desperate attempt to forget what's happened to me in
the past, what's happening now, and what will sure as hell happen to me
in the days to come."

Though no wind had risen, some of the breakers were large now, washing
deep onto the beach.  They battered the bottoms of Bobby's legs and, on
retreating, buried his feet in coal.

Struggling to explain himself, Frank said, "See, traveling isn't easy
for me, like it is for Candy.  He can control where he wants to go, and
when.  He can travel just by deciding to do it, virtually by wishing
himself someplace, like you suggested I might be able to do.  But I
can't.  My talent for portation isn't really a talent, it's a curse."
His voice was shaky.

"I didn't even know I could do it until seven years ago, the day that
bitch died.  All of us who came from her are cursed, we can't escape it.
I thought I could escape by killing her, but that didn't release me."
After the events of the past hour, Bobby thought nothing could surprise
him, but he was startled by the confession Frank had made.  This
pathetic, sad-eyed, dimpled, comic-fat pudgy man seemed an unlikely
perpetrator of matricide.

killed your own mother?"

"Never mind about her.  We haven't time for her."

Frank looked back toward the brush out of which they had come and both
ways along the beach, but they were still alone in the downpour.

"If you'd known her, if you'd suffered under her hand," Frank said, his
voice shaking with anger, "if you had known the atrocities she's capable
of, you'd have picked up an ax and chopped at her too."

"You took an ax and gave your mother forty whacks?"  That crazy sound
burst from Bobby again, a laugh as wet as the rain but not as warm, and
again he was spooked by himself

"I discovered I could teleport when Candy had me backed into a corner,
going to kill me for having killed her.  And that's the only time I can
travel-when it's a matter of survival."

"Nobody was threatening you last night in the hospital."

"Well, see, when I start traveling in my sleep, I think maybe I'm trying
to escape from Candy in a dream, which triggers teleportation. Traveling
always wakes me, but then I can't stop, I keep popping from place to
place, sometimes staying a few seconds, sometimes an hour or more, and
it's beyond my control, like I'm being bounced around inside a goddamn
cosmic pinball machine.  It exhausts me.  It's killing me.  You can see
how it's killing me."

Frank's earnest persistence and the numbing, relentless roar of the rain
had washed away Bobby's rage.  He was still somewhat afraid of Frank, of
the potential for chaos that Frank represented, but he was no longer
angry.

"Years ago," Frank said, "dreams started me traveling maybe one night a
month, but gradually the frequency increased, until the last few weeks
it happens almost every time I go to sleep.  And when we finally wind up
in your office or wherever this episode is going to come to an end,
you'll remember everything that's happened to us, but I won't.  And not
only because I want to forget, but because what you suspected is
true-I'm not always putting myself back together without mistakes."

"Your mental confusion, loss of intellectual skills, amnesia-they're
symptoms of those mistakes."

"Yeah.  I'm sure there's sloppy reconstruction and cell damage every
time I travel, nothing dramatic in any one trip, but the effect is
incremental...  and accelerating.  Sooner or later it's going to go
critical, and I'll either die or experience some weird biological
meltdown.  Coming to you for help was pointless, no matter how good you
are at what you do, because nobody can help me.  Nobody-

Bobby had already reached that conclusion, but he was still curious.

"What is it with your family, Frank?  Your brother has the power to make
that car disintegrate around you, then A power to blow out those street
lamps, and he can teleport.

what was that business with the cats?"

"My sisters, the twins, they have this thing with animals."

"How come all of you possess these...  abilities?  Who your mother, your
father?"

"We don't have time for that now, Bobby.  Later.  I'll try and explain
later."

He held out his cut hand, which had even stopped bleeding or was sluiced
free of blood by the rain could pop out of here any moment, and you'd be
stranded."

"No thanks," Bobby said, shunning his client's hand.

" me an old fuddy-duddy, but I'd prefer an airliner."  He pa his hip
pocket.

"Got my wallet, credit cards.  I can be back in Orange County tomorrow,
and I don't have to take a chance that I'll arrive there with my left
ear where my nose should be."

"But Candy's probably going to follow us, Bobby.  If you're here when he
shows up, he'll kill you,"

Bobby turned to his right and started to walk toward the distant
restaurant.

"I'm not afraid of anyone named Candy."

"You better be," Frank said, grabbing his arm and halting him.

Jerking away as if making contact with his client was tantamount to
contracting the bubonic plague, Bobby said, could he follow us anyway?"

When Frank worriedly surveyed the beach again, Bobby realized that
because of the pounding rain and the underly crash of the surf, they
might not hear the telltale flute sounds that would warn them of Candy's
imminent arrival.

Frank said, "Sometimes, when he touches something recently touched, he
sees an image of you in his mind, sometimes he can see where you went
after you put the object down, and he can follow you."

"But I didn't touch anything back there at the house."

"You stood on the back lawn."

"So?"

"If he can find the place where the grass is trampled, where we stood,
he might be able to put his fingers to the ground and see us, see this
place, and come after us."

"For God's sake, Frank, you make this guy sound super natural."

"He's the next thing to it."

Bobby almost said he would take his chances with brother Candy,
regardless of his godlike powers.  Then he remembered what the Phans had
told him about the savage murders of the Farris family.  He also
remembered the Roman family, their brutalized bodies torched to cover
the ragged gashes that Candy's teeth had torn in their throats.  He
recalled what Frank had said about Candy offering him the fresh blood of
a living baby, factored in the unmitigated terror in Frank's eyes at
that very moment, and thought of the inexplicable prophetic dream he'd
had about the "bad thing."  At last he said, "All right, okay, if he
shows up, and if you're able to pop out of here before he kills us both,
then I'd be better off with you.  I'll take your hand, but only until we
walk up to that restaurant, call a cab, and are on our way to the
airport."  He gripped Frank's hand reluctantly.

"As soon as we're out of this area, I let go."

"All right.  Good enough," Frank said.

Squinting as the rain battered their faces, they headed toward the
restaurant.  The structure, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty
yards away, appeared to be made of gray, weathered wood and lots of
glass.  Bobby thought he saw dim lights in the place, but he could not
be sure; the large windows were no doubt tinted, which filtered out what
fraction of the lampglow was not already hidden by the veils of rain.

Every third or fourth incoming wave was now much larger than the others,
reached farther onto the beach, and sloshed around their legs with
enough force to unbalance them.  They moved toward the higher end of the
strand, away from the breakers, but the sand was far softer there; it
sucked at their shoes and made progress more laborious.

Bobby thought of Lisa, the blond receptionist at Palomar Labs.  He
pictured her coming along the beach right now, taking a crazy-romantic
walk in the warm rain with some guy who'd brought her to the islands,
pictured her face when she saw him strolling the black-sand beach
hand-in-hand with another man, cheating on Clint.

This time his laughter didn't have a scary edge.

Frank said, "What?"

Before Bobby could even start to explain, he saw that someone actually
was heading in their general direction through the obscuring rain.  It
was a dark figure, not Lisa, a man, and he was only about thirty yards
away.

He hadn't been there a moment ago.

"It's him," Frank said.

Even at a distance the guy looked big.  He spotted them turned directly
toward them.

Bobby said, "Get us out of here, Frank."

"I can't do it on demand.  You know that."

"Then let's run," he urged, and he tried to pull Frank down the beach,
toward the abandoned lifeguard tower and what lay beyond.

But after floundering a few steps through the sand, Frank stopped and
said, "No, I can't, I'm worn out.  I'm going to have to pray that I pop
out of here in time."  He looked worse than worn out.  He looked half
dead.

Bobby turned toward Candy again, and saw the brother slogging through
the soft, wet sand much faster than they had managed but still with some
difficulty.

"Why don't he just teleport from there to here in a flash, overwhelm
us?"

Frank's horror at the sight of his oncoming nemesis was complete in that
he didn't appear capable of speech.  Yet words came with the shallow
breaths that rasped out of his mouth.

"Short hops, under a few hundred feet, aren't possible.  Do you know
why."  Maybe if the trip was too short, the mind had a fraction of a
second less than the minimum time required to deconstruct and fully
reconstruct the body.  It didn't matter what the son was.  Even if he
couldn't teleport across the remain stretch of sand, Candy was going to
reach them in seconds.  He was only thirty feet away and closing, a
massive juggernaut of a man, with a neck thick enough to support a car
balanced on his head, and arms that would give him an advantage in a
wrestling match with a four-ton industrial robot.  His blond hair was
almost white.  His face was broad and sharp-featured and hard-and as
cruel as the face of one of those psychotic young boys who liked to set
ants on fire with matches and test the effects of their full-strength on
neighborhood

Charging through the storm, kicking up gouts of wet black sand with each
step, he looked less like a man than a demon with a fierce hunger for
human souls.

Holding fast to his client's hand, Bobby said, "Frank, for God's sake,
let's get out of here."

When Candy was close enough for Bobby to see blue eyes as wild and
vicious as those of a rattlesnake on Benzedrine, he let out a wordless
roar of triumph.  He flung himself at them.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Pale morning light filtered from a clear sky into the narrow
pass-through between two rotting, ramshackle buildings so crusted in the
filth of ages that it was impossible to determine what material had been
used to construct their walls.  Bobby and Frank were standing in
knee-deep garbage that had been tossed out of the windows of the
two-story structures and left to decompose into a reeking sludge that
steamed like a compost pile.  Their magical arrival had startled a
colony of roaches that scuttled away from them, and caused swarms of fat
black flies to leap up from their breakfast.  Several sleek rats sat up
on their haunches to see what had arrived among them, but they were too
bold to be scared off.

The tenements on both sides had some windows completely open to the
outside, some covered with what looked like oiled paper, none with
glass.  Though no people were in sight, from the rooms within the aged
walls came voices: laughter here; an angry exchange there; chanting, as
of a mantra, softly drifting down from the second floor of the building
on the right.  It was all in a foreign tongue with which Bobby was not
familiar, though he suspected they might be in India, perhaps Bombay or
Calcutta.

Because of the ineluctable stench, which by comparison made the stink of
a slaughterhouse seem like a new perfume by Calvin Klein, and because of
the insistently buzzing flies that exhibited great interest in an open
mouth and nostrils, Bobby was unable to get his breath.  He choked, put
his free hand over his mouth, still could not breathe, and knew he was
going to faint face first into the vile, steaming muck.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

In a place of stillness and silence, shafts of afternoon sunshine
pierced mimosa branches and dappled the ground with golden light.  They
stood on a red oriental footbridge over a koi pond in a Japanese garden,
where sculpted bonsai and other meticulously tended plants were
positioned among carefully raked beds of pebbles.

"Oh, yes," Frank said with a mixture of wonder and pleasure and relief.

"I lived here, too, for a while."  They were alone in the garden.  Bobby
realized that Frank always materialized in sheltered places where he was
unlikely to be seen in the act, or in circumstances-such as the middle
of a cloudburst-that almost ensured even a public place like a beach
would be conveniently deserted.  Evidently, in addition to the
unimaginably demanding task of deconstruction-rather than
reconstruction, his mind was also capable of scouting the way ahead and
choosing a discreet point of arrival.

Frank said,

"I was the longest-residing guest they'd ever had.  It's a traditional
Japanese inn on the outskirts of Kyoto."  Bobby became aware that they
were both totally dry.  their clothes were wrinkled, in need of an
ironing, but when Frank had deconstructed them in Hawaii, he had not
teleported the molecules of water that had saturated their clothes.

"They were so kind here," Frank said,

"respectful of my privacy, yet so attentive and kind."  He sounded
wistful and eternally weary, as if he would have liked to have stopped
traveling right there, even if stopping meant dying at the hand of his
brother.

Bobby was relieved to see that Frank also had not brought with them any
of the slime from the narrow alley in Calcutta or wherever.  Their shoes
and pants were clean.

Then he noticed something on the toe of his right shoe.

He bent forward to look at it.

"I wish we could stay here," Frank said.

"Forever."

One of the roaches from that filth-choked alley was now part of Bobby's
footwear.

One of the biggest advantages being self-employed was freedom from
neckties and uncomfortable shoes, so he was wearing, as usual, a pair of
soft Rock port Supersports, and the roach was not merely stuck on the
putty-colored leather but bristling from it and melded with it.

The roach was not squirming, obviously dead, but it was the or at least
part of it was, some bits of it apparently having been left behind.

"But we've got to keep moving," Frank said, oblivious to the roach.

"He's trying to follow us.  We have to lose him by Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were on a high place, a rocky trail, with an incredible panorama
below them.

"Mount Fuji," Frank said, not as if he had known where they were going
but as if pleasantly surprised to be there,

"About halfway up."  Bobby was not interested in the exotic view or
concerned about the chill in the air.  He was entirely preoccupied by
the discovery that the roach was no longer a part of the toe of his
shoe.

"The Japanese once thought Fuji was sacred.  I guess they still do, or
some of them do.  And you can see why.  It's magnificent."

"Frank, what happened to the roach?"

"What roach?"

"There was a roach welded into the leather of this shoe.  I saw it back
there in the garden.  You evidently brought it along from that
disgusting alleyway.  Where is it now?"

"I don't know."

"Did you just drop its atoms along the way?"  'I don't know."  'Or are
its atoms still with me but somewhere else?"

"Bobby, I just don't know."

In Bobby's mind was an image of his own heart, hidden within the dark
cavity of his chest, beating with the mystery of all hearts but with a

new secret all its own-the bristling legs and shiny carapace of a roach
embedded in the muscle tissue that formed the walls of the atrium or a
ventricle.

An insect might be inside of him, and even if the thing was dead, its
presence within was intolerable.  An attack of entomophobia hit him with
the equivalent force of a hammer blow to the gut, knocking the wind out
of him, sending undulate waves of nausea through him.  He struggled to
breathe, at the same time striving not to vomit on the sacred ground of
Mount Fuji.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They hit more violently this time, as if they had materialized in midair
and had fallen a few feet onto the ground.  They didn't manage to hold
on to each other, and they didn't land on their feet, either.  Separated
from Frank, Bobby rolled dow a gentle incline, over small objects that
clattered and clicked under him and poked painfully into his flesh. When
he tumble to a halt, gasping and frightened, he was face down on gray
soil almost as powdery as ashes.  Scattered around him, sparkling
brightly against that ashen backdrop, were hundreds if not thousands of
red diamonds in the rough.

Raising his head, he saw that the diamond miners were the in unnerving
numbers: a score of huge insects just like the ones they had taken to
Dyson Manfred.  Caught, as he was, in whirlpool of panic, Bobby believed
that every one of those bugs was fixated on him, all those multifaceted
eyes turned toward him, all those tarantula legs churning through the
powder gray soil in his direction.

He felt something crawling on his back, knew what it must be, and rolled
over, pinning the thing between him and the ground.  He felt it
squirming frantically beneath him.  Propel by repulsion, he was suddenly
on his feet, without quite remembering how he had gotten up.  The bug
was still clinging to the back of his shirt; he could feel its weight,
its quick-foot advance from the small of his back to his neck.  He
reached behind, tore it off himself, cried out in disgust as it kicked
against his hand, and pitched it was far away as he could.

He heard himself breathing hard and making queer little sounds of fear
and desperation.  He didn't like what he heard but he was unable to
silence himself.

A foul taste filled his mouth.  He figured he had ingested some of the
powdery soil.  He spat, but his spittle looked clear and he realized
that the air itself was what he tasted.  The warm air was thick, not
humid exactly but thick, like nothing he had experienced before.  And in
addition to the bitter taste, it had a distinctly different but equally
unpleasant smell, like some milk with a whiff of sulfur.

Turning around, surveying the terrain, he realized that he was standing
in a shallow bowl in the land, about four feet deep at its lowest point,
and about a hundred feet in diameter.  The sloped walls were marked by
evenly spaced holes, a double layer of them, and more of the
biologically engineered insects were squirming into some of those bores,
out of others, no doubt seeking-and returning with-diamonds.

Because it was only four feet deep, he could see above the rim of the
bowl.  Across the huge, barren, and slightly sloped plain in which this
depression was set, he saw what appeared to be scores of similar
features, like age-smoothed meteor craters, though they were so evenly
spaced that they had to be unnatural.  He was in the middle of a giant
mining operation.

Kicking at an insect that had crept too close to him, Bobby turned to
look at the last quarter of his surroundings.  Frank was there, at the
far side of the crater, on his hands and knees.  Bobby was relieved by
the sight of him, but he was definitely not relieved by what he saw in
the sky beyond Frank.

The moon was visible in broad daylight, but it was not like the gossamer
ghost moon that sometimes could be seen in a clear sky.  It was a
mottled gray-yellow sphere six times normal size, looming ominously over
the land, as if about to collide with the larger world around which it
should have been revolving at a respectable distance.

But that was not the worst.  A huge and strangely shaped aircraft hung
silently at perhaps an altitude of four or five hundred feet, so alien
in every aspect that it brought home to Bobby the understanding that had
thus far eluded him.  He was not on his own world any longer.

"Julie," he said, because suddenly he realized how terribly far from her
he had traveled.

At the far side of the crater, as he was getting to his feet, Frank
Pollard vanished.

AS DAY dimmed and darkness came, Thomas stood at the window or sat in
his chair or stretched out on his bed sometimes reaching toward the Bad
Thing to be sure it was coming closer.  Bobby was worried when he
visited, so was Thomas worried too.  A lump of fear kept rising in his
throat, but he kept swallowing it because he had to be brave and protect
Julie.

He didn't get as close to the Bad Thing as last night.  N close enough
to let it grab him with its mind.  Not close enough to let it follow him
when he quick-like reeled his own mind string back to The Home.  But
close.  A lot closer than Thomas liked.

Every time he pushed at the Bad Thing to make sure it was still there,
up north someplace, where it belonged, he knew the Bad Thing felt him
snooping.  That spooked Thomas.  The Bad Thing knew he was snooping
around, but didn't do anything and sometimes Thomas felt maybe the Bad
Thing was waiting like a toad.

Once, in the garden behind The Home, Thomas watched a toad sit real
still for a long time, while a bright yellow butterfly fluttered pretty
and quick, bounced from leaf to leaf, flower to flower back and forth,
round and round, close to the toad, then so close, then closer than
ever, then way out of reach, then closer again, like it was teasing the
toad, but the toad didn't move, not an inch, like maybe it was a fake
toad or just a stone that looked like a toad.  So the butterfly felt
safe, or maybe just liked the game too much, and it came even closer.
When The toad's tongue shot out like one of those roll-up tootes they'd
let the dumb people have one New Year's Eve, and caught the butterfly,
and the green toad ate the yellow butterfly, every bit, and that was the
end of the game.

If the Bad Thing was playing a toad, Thomas was going to be real careful
not to be a butterfly.

Then, just when Thomas figured he should start washing himself and
changing clothes for supper, just when he was going to pull back from
the Bad Thing, it went somewhere.  He felt it go, bang, there one second
and far away the next, slipping past where he could keep a watch on it,
out across the world, going the same place where the sun was taking the
last of the daylight.  He couldn't figure how it could go so fast,
unless maybe it was on a jet plane having good food and a fine whine,
smiling at pretty girls in uniforms who put little pillows behind the
Bad Thing's seat and gave it magazines and smiled back at it so nice and
so much you expected them to kiss it like everybody was always kissing
on daytime TV.  Okay, yeah, probably a jet plane.

Thomas tried some more to find the Bad Thing.  Then, by the time the day
was all gone and night all there, he gave up.  He got off his bed and
got ready for supper, hoping maybe the Bad Thing was gone away and never
coming back, hoping Julie was safe forever now, and hoping there was
chocolate cake for dessert.

BOBBY CHARGED across the floor of the diamond-strewn crater, kicking at
the bugs in his way.  As he ran he told himself that his eyes had
deceived him and that his mind was playing nasty tricks, that Frank had
not actually teleported out of there without him.  But when he arrived
at the spot where Frank had been, he found only a couple of footprints
in the powdery soil.

A shadow fell across him, and he looked up as the alien craft drifted in
blimplike silence over the crater, coming to a full stop directly above
him, still about five hundred feet overhead.  It was nothing like
starships in the movies, neither organic looking nor a flying
chandelier.  It was lozenge shaped, at least five hundred feet long, and
perhaps two hundred feet in diameter.  Immense.  On the ends, sides, and
top, it bristled with hundreds if not thousands of pointed black metal
spines, big as church spires, which made it look a little like a
mechanical porcupine in a permanent defensive posture.  The underside,
which Bobby could see best of all, was smooth, black, and featureless,
lacking not only the massive spines but markings, remotesors, portholes,
airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.

Bobby did not know if the ship's repositioning was coincidental or
whether he was under observation.  If he was being watched, he didn't
want to think about the nature of the creatures that might be peering
down at him, and he sure as hell didn't want to consider what their
intentions toward him might be.  For every movie that featured an
adorable alien with the power to turn kids' bicycles into airborne
vehicles, that were ten others in which the aliens were ravenous flesh
eat with dispositions so vicious as to make any New York he waiter think
twice about being rude, and Bobby was certain that this was one thing
Hollywood had gotten right.  It was hostile universe out there, and
dealing with his fellow human beings was

scary enough for him; he didn't need to make contact with a whole new
race that had devised countless new ways of its own.

Besides, his capacity for terror was already filled to the brim running
over; he could contain no more.  He was abandon on a distant world,
where the air-he began to suspect-might contain only enough oxygen and
other required gases to keep him alive only for a short while, insects
the size of kittens crawling all around him, and there was a possibility
that much smaller dead insects was actually fused with the tinicals of
one of his internal organs, and a psychotic blond giant super human
powers and a taste for blood was on his trail-and the odds were billions
to one that he would ever see Julie again or kiss her, or touch her, or
see her smile.

A series of tremendous, throbbing vibrations issued from the ship and
shook the ground around Bobby.  His teeth chattered and he nearly fell.

He looked for somewhere to hide.  There was nothing in the crater to
afford concealment, and nowhere to run on the plain beyond.

The vibrations stopped.

Even in the deep shadows thrown by the ship, Bobby noticed a horde of
identical insects begin to scuttle out of the bore holes in the crater
walls, one after the other.  They had been called forth.

Though no apparent openings appeared in the belly of the ship, a score
or more of low-energy lasers-some yellow, some white, some blue, some
red-began to play over the floor of the crater.  Each beam was the
diameter of a silver dollar, and each moved independently of the others.
Like spotlights, they repeatedly swept the crater and everything in it,
sometimes moving parallel to one another, sometimes crisscrossing one
another, in a display that further disoriented Bobby and gave him the
feeling that he was caught in the middle of a silent fireworks show.

He remembered what Manfred and Gavenall had told him about the crimson
decorations along the rim of the bug's shell, and he saw that the white
lasers were focusing only on the insects, busily scanning the markings
around each carapace.  Their owners were taking roll call.  He saw a
white beam fidget over the broken corpus of one of the bugs he had
kicked, and after a moment a red beam joined it to study the carcass.
Then the red beam jumped to Bobby, and a couple of other beams of
different hue also found him, as if he was a can of peas being
identified and added to someone's grocery bill at a supermarket
checkout.

The floor of the crater was teeming with insects now, so many that Bobby
could see neither the gray soil nor the litter of excreted diamonds over
which they clambered.  He told himself that they were not really bugs;
they were just biological machines, engineered by the same race that had
built the ship hanging over him.  But that didn't help much because they
still looked more like bugs than like machines.  They had been designed
to mine diamonds; they were not attracted to him whatsoever; but their
disinterest did not make him feel better, because his phobia guaranteed
that he was interested in them.  His shadow-chilled skin prickled with
gooseflesh.  Short circuiting nerve endings sputtered with false reports
of things crawling on him, so he felt as if bugs swarmed over him from
head to foot.  They were actually creeping over his shoes, but none of
them tried to scurry up his legs; he was grateful, because he was sure
he would go mad if they began to climb him.

He used his hand as a visor over his eyes, to avoid being dazzled by the
lasers that were playing on him.  He saw something gleaming in the
scanner beams only a few feet away: a curved section of what appeared to
be hollow steel tubing.  It was sticking out of the powdery soil, partly
buried, further concealed by the bugs that scurried and jittered around
it.  Nevertheless, at first sight Bobby knew what it was, and he was
overcome with a horrible sinking feeling.  He shuffled forward, trying
to crush any of the insects because, for all he knew, the penalty for
the additional destruction of property might be instant incineration.
When he could reach the glinting curve metal, he seized it and pulled it
loose of the soft earth.  It was the missing railing from the hospital
bed.

"HOW LONG?"  Julie demanded.

"Twenty-one minutes," Clint said.

They still stood near the chair where Frank had been sitting and beside
which Bobby had been stooping.

Lee Chen had gotten off the sofa, so Jackie Jaxx could sit down.  The
magician-hypnotist had draped a damp washcloth over his forehead.  Every
couple of minutes he protested.  He could not really make people
disappear, though no one had accused him of being responsible for what
had happened to Frank and Bobby.

Having retrieved a bottle of Scotch, glasses, and ice from the office
wet bar, Lee Chen was pouring six stiff drinks,for each person in the
room, as well as for Frank and Bobby

"If you don't need a drink to steady your nerves now," he said, "you'll
need one to celebrate when they come back safe."  He had already downed
one Scotch himself.  The drink he poured now would be his second.  This
was the first time in his life he had drunk hard liquor-or needed it.

"How long?"  Julie demanded.

"Twenty-two minutes," Clint said.

And I'm still sane, she thought wonderingly.  Bobby, you, come back to
me.  Don't you leave me alone forever.  How am I going to dance alone?
How am I going to live alone?  How am I going to live?

BOBBY DROPPED the bed railing, and the lasers winked leaving him in the
shadow of the spiny ship, which seem darker than before the beams
appeared.  As he looked up to see what would happen next, another light
issued from the underside of the craft, too pale to make him squint.
This one was precisely the diameter of the crater.  In that queer,
pearly glow, the insects began to rise off the ground, as if they were
weightless.  At first only ten or twenty floated upward, but then twenty
more and a hundred after that, rising as lazily and effortlessly as so
many bits of dandelion fluff, turning slowly, their tarantula legs
motionless, the eerie light gone out of their eyes, as if they had been
switched off.  In a minute or two, the floor of the crater was
depopulated of insects, and the horde was being drawn up effortlessly in
that sepulchral silence that accompanied all of the craft's maneuvers
except for the base vibrations that had called the insect miners from
their bores.

Then the silence was broken by a flowerlike warble.

"Frank!"  Bobby cried in relief, and turned as a gust of vile smelling
wind washed over him.

As the cold, hollow piping echoed across the crater again, there was a
subtle change in the hue of the light that issued from the ship above.
Now the thousands of red diamonds rose from the ash-gray soil in which
they lay and followed the insects upward, gleaming dully here and
brightly there, so many of them that it seemed as if Bobby was standing
in a rain of blood.

Another whirl of evil-scented wind cast up a cloud of the ashy soil,
reducing visibility, and Bobby turned in eager expectation of Frank's
arrival.  Until he remembered that it might not be Frank but the
brother.

The piping came a third time, and the subsequent puff of wind carried
the dust away from him, so he saw Frank arrive less than ten feet from
him.

"Thank God!"  As Bobby stepped forward, the pearly light underwent a
second subtle change.  Reaching for Frank's hand, he felt himself
suddenly weightless.  When he looked down he saw his feet drift off the
floor of the crater.

Frank grabbed at his outstretched hand and seized it.

Nothing had ever felt better to Bobby than Frank's firm grip, and for a
moment he felt safe.  Then he became aware that Frank had risen from the
ground too.  They were both being drawn upward in the wake of the
insects and diamonds, toward the belly of the alien vessel, toward
God-only-knew what nightmare inside.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were on Punaluu beach again, and the rain was coming down harder
than before.

"Where the hell was that last place?"  Bobby demanded holding fast to
his client.

"I don't know," Frank said.

"It scares the hell out of me.  it's so weird, but sometimes I seem to
be...  drawn there.  He hated Frank for having taken him there; he loved
him for having returned for him.  When he shouted above the roar of the
surf, neither love nor hate was in his voice, which was just borderline.

"I thought you could only travel to places you've been

"Not necessarily.  Anyway, I've been there before."

"But how did you get there the first time, it's another world.  It can't
have been familiar to you-right, Frank?"

"I don't know.  I just don't understand any of it, Bobby turned to stand
face to face with Frank, and Bobby took notice of how much the man's
appearance had deteriorated they had teleported from the Dakota & Dakota
offices in New port Beach.  Although the storm once more had soaked them
to the skin in seconds and left his clothes hanging on him shapelessly,
it wasn't just the rain that made him look disheveled, beaten, and
sickly.  His eyes were more sunken than the whites of them were yellow,
as if he had contracted a disease, and the flesh around them was so
darkly bruised they appeared to as painted fake shiners with black shoe
polish.  His skin was paler than pale, a deathly pale and his lips were
bluish, as though his circulatory system was failing.  Bobby felt guilty
about having shouted at him, put his free hand on Frank's shoulder and
told him how sorry, that it was all right, that they were still fighting
on the same side of this war, and that everything would turn out fine-as
long as Frank didn't take them back to that place again.  Frank said,
"Sometimes it's like I'm almost in touch with the minds of those people,
creatures, whatever they are in that ship."  They were leaning on each
other now, for to forehead, seeking mutual support in their exhaustion.

"Maybe I've got another gift I'm not aware of, like for all of my life I
wasn't aware of being able to teleport until Candy backed me into a
corner and tried to kill me.  Maybe I'm telepathic.  Maybe the
wavelength my telepathy functions on is the major wavelength of that
race's brain activity.  Maybe I feel them out there, even across
billions of light-years of space.  Maybe that's why I feel as if I'm
being drawn to them, called to them."

Pulling back a few inches from Frank, Bobby looked into his tortured
eyes for a long moment.  Then he smiled and pinched Frank's cheek, and
said, "You devil, you've really done a lot of thinking about this,
haven't you, really put the old noodle to work on it, huh?"  Frank
smiled.

Bobby laughed.

Then they were both laughing, holding each other up by leaning into each
other, the way teepee poles held one another up, and a part of their
laugh was healthy, a release of tension, but part of it was that mad
laughter that had troubled Bobby earlier.  Clinging to his client, he
said, "Frank, your life is chaos, you're living in chaos, and you can't
go on like this.  It's going to destroy you."

"I know."

"You've got to find a way to stop it."

"There is no way."

"You've got to try, buddy, you've got to try.  Nobody can handle this. I
couldn't live like this for one day, and you've done it for seven
years!"

"No. It wasn't this bad most of that time.  It's just lately, the last
few months, it's accelerated."

"A few months," Bobby said wonderingly.

"Hell, if we don't give your brother the slip soon and get back to the
office and step off this merry-go-round in the next few minutes, I swear
to God I'm going to crack.  Frank, I need order, order and stability,
familiarity.  I need to know that what I do today will determine where I
am and who I am and what I have to show for it tomorrow.  Nice orderly
progression, Frank, cause and effect, logic and reason."  Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

"HOW LONG?"

"Twenty-seven...  almost twenty-eight minutes."

"Where the hell are they?"

"Julie," Clint said, "I think you ought to sit down.  You're shaking
like a leaf, your color's not good."

"I'm all right."  Lee Chen handed her a glass of Scotch.  "Have a
drink."

"No."

"It might help," Clint said.

She grabbed the glass from Lee, drained it in a couple of long swallows,
and shoved it back into his hand.

"I'll get you another," he said.

"Thanks."  From the sofa, Jackie Jaxx said,

"Listen, is anyone going to sue me over this?"  Julie no longer sort of
liked the hypnotist.  She loathed as much as she had loathed him when
they had first met in Vegas and taken on his case.  She wanted to go
kick his head in.  Though she knew the urge to kick him was irrational,
he really had not been the cause of Bobby's disappearance, but she
wanted to kick him anyway.  That was the impulsive side of her, the
quick-to-anger side of which she was not proud.

she couldn't always control it, because it was part of her genetic
makeup or, as Bobby suspected, a predilection to violent response that
had begun to form in her on the day, in her childhood, when a
drug-crazed sociopath had brutally killed her mother.  Either way, she
knew Bobby was sometimes dismayed by that dark side of her, much as he
loved everything else she made a bargain with both Bobby and God:
Listen, Bobby wherever you are-and you listen, too, God-if this just...
well, if I can just have my Bobby back with me, I won't be that way any
more, I won't want to kick in Jackie's head or anyone else's head,
either, I'll turn over a new leaf I will, just let Bobby come back to me
safe and sound

THEY WERE on a beach again, but this one had white that was slightly
phosphorescent in the early darkness.

Sand disappeared into a medium-thick fog in both directions.  No rain
was falling, and the air was not as warm as it had been at Punaluu.

Bobby shivered in the chill, moist air.

"Where are we?"

"I'm not sure," Frank said,

"but I think we're probably on the Monterey Peninsula somewhere."  A car
passed on a highway a hundred yards behind them.

"That's probably Seventeen-Mile Drive.  You know it?  The road from
Carmel through Pebble Beach-"

"I know it."

"I love the peninsula, Big Sur to the south," Frank said.

"It's another one of the places I was happy...  for a while."  Their
voices were strangely muffled by the mist.  Bobby liked the solid ground
beneath his feet, and the thought that he was not only on his own planet
but in his own country and in his own state; but he would have preferred
a place with more concrete details, where fog did not obscure the
landscape.  The white blindness of fog was another form of chaos, and he
had had more than enough disorder to last him for the rest of his life.

Frank said,

"Oh, and by the way, back there in Hawaii a minute ago, you were worried
about giving Candy the slip, but you don't need to be concerned.  We
lost him several stops ago in Kyoto, or maybe on the slopes of Mount
Fuji."

"For God's sake, if we don't have to worry about leading him back to the
office, let's go home."

"Bobby, I don't have-"

"Any control.  Yeah, I know, I heard, it's no big secret.  But I'll tell
you something-you've got control on some level, way down deep in the
subconscious, more control than you think you have."

"No. I

"Yes.  Because you came back to that crater for me," Bobby said.  "You
told me you hate the place, that it's more frightening than anywhere
you've ever been, but you came back and got me.  You didn't leave me
there with the bed railing."

"Pure chance that I came back."

"I don't think so."  Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

THEY MADE the soft, pretty bing-bong signal come out of the wall,
because that was how they told all the people in Home it was just ten
minutes before supper was going to be eaten.

Derek was already out the door by the time Thomas got up from his chair.
Derek liked food.  Everyone liked food of course.  But Derek liked food
enough for three people.

Thomas got to the doorway, and Derek was already down the hall, walking
fast in that funny way he did, almost to the Dining Room.  Thomas looked
back at the window.

Night was at the window.

He didn't like seeing night at the window, which was why he usually kept
the drapes closed after the light went out in the world.  But after he
got himself ready for supper, he tried to find the Bad Thing out there,
and it helped a little to see the night when he was trying to send a
mind-string to it.

The Bad Thing was still so far away it couldn't be felt.

he wanted to try once more before going to eat food and be Sociable.  He
reached out through the window, up into the dark, spinning the
mind-string toward where the Bad Thing used to be-and it was back.  He
felt it right away, knew it was him, too, and he remembered the green
toad eating the beautiful yellow flutterby, and he pulled back into his
room faster than a toad tongue could snap out and catch him.

He didn't know if he should be happy or scared that it was back.  When
it was gone away, Thomas was happy, because maybe it was going to be
gone away a long time, but he didn't know exactly where it was.

He was also a little scared because when it was gone away, he was ok.
But it was back.

He waited in the doorway a while.

Then he went to eat food.  There was roast chicken.  There was frenched
fries.  There was carrots and peas.  There was cold slaw.  There was
Homemade bread, and people said there was going to be some chocolate
cake and ice cream for dessert though the people that said it was dumb
people, so he couldn't be sure.  It all looked good, and it smelled
good, it even tasted good.  But Thomas kept thinking about how flutterby
might've tasted to the toad, and he couldn't eat much of anything.

BOUNCING like two balls in tandem, they traveled to an empty lot in Las
Vegas, where a cool desert wind spun a tumbleweed past them and where
Frank said he had once lived in a house that was now demolished; moving
to that cabin at the top of a snowy mountain meadow, where they had
first teleported after leaving the office; to the graveyard in Santa
Barbara; to the top of an Aztec ziggurat in the lush Mexican jungles,
where the humid night air was full of buzzing mosquitoes and the cries
of unknown beasts, and where Bobby almost fell down the terraced side of
the pyramidal structure before he realized how high they were and how
precariously perched; to the offices of Dakota & Dakota They were
popping around so quickly, remaining in each place such a brief time-in
fact, briefer with each stop-that for a moment he stood in a corner of
his own office, blinking stupidly, before he realized where he was and
what he had to do.  He tore his hand away from Frank, and he said,

"Stop it now, stop here."  But Frank vanished even as Bobby spoke.

Julie was all over him an instant later, hugging him so tightly that she
hurt his ribs.  He hugged her, too, and kissed her a long time before
coming up for air.  Her hair smelled clean, and her skin smelled sweeter
than he remembered.  Her eyes were brighter than memory allowed, and
more beautiful.

Though by nature he was not much of a toucher, Clint put a hand on
Bobby's shoulder.

"God, it's good to see you, good to have you back."  There was even a
catch in his voice.

"Had us worried there for a while."  Lee Chen handed him a glass of
Scotch on the rocks.

"Don't do that again, okay?"

"Don't plan to," Bobby said.

No longer the smooth and self-assured performer, Jackie Jaxx had had
enough for one night.

"Listen, Bobby, I'm sure that whatever you have to tell us is
fascinating, and you're bound to come back with a lot of wonderful
anecdotes, wherever you went, but I for one don't want to hear about
it."

"wonderful anecdotes?"  Bobby said.

Jackie shook his head.

"Don't want to hear ''em.  Sorry.

my fault, not yours.  I like show biz 'cause it's a narrow you know?  A
thing little slice of the real world, but exciting 'cause it's all
bright colors and loud music.  You don't have to think in show biz, you
can just be.  I just want to be, you know Perform, hang out, have fun. I
got opinions, sure, colorful loud opinions about everything, showbiz
opinions, but I don't know a damn thing, and I don't want to know a damn
thing.  I sure as hell don't want to know about what happened here
tonight, 'cause it's the kind of thing that turns your upside down,
makes you curious, makes you think, and pretty soon you're no longer
happy with all the things that made you happy before."  He raised both
hands, as if to stall an argument, and said,

"I'm outta here," and a moment later he was.

At first, as he told the others what had happened to them, Bobby walked
slowly around the room, marveling at ordinary items, finding wonder in
the mundane, relishing the solace of things.  He put his hand on Julie's
desk, and it seemed to him that nothing in the world was more wondrous
than the Formica-all those molecules of man-made chemicals lined up in
perfect, stable order.  The framed prints of Disney characters, the
inexpensive furniture, the half-empty bottle of Scotch, the flourishing
pathos plant on a stand by the windows-all of those things were suddenly
precious to him He had been traveling only thirty-nine minutes.  He took
almost as long to tell them a condensed version.  He had popped out of
the office at 4:47 and returned at 5:26, but he'd had enough
traveling-via teleportation or otherwise-to last him the rest of his
life.

On the sofa, with Julie and Clint and Lee gathered around Bobby said,

"I want to stay right here in California.  I do need to see Paris. Don't
need London.  Not any more.  I want to stay where I have my favorite
chair, sleep every night in a bed that's familiar-"

"Damn right you will," Julie interjected.

-drive my little yellow Samurai, open a medicine cab where the Anacin
and toothpaste and mouthwash and sty pencil and Bactine and Band-Aids
are exactly where they ought to be.

By 6:15 Frank had not reappeared.  During Bobby's account of his
adventures, no one mentioned Frank's second disappearance or wondered
aloud when he would return.  But all of them kept glancing at the chair
from which he had vanished initially and at the corner of the room from
which he had dematerialized the second time.

"How long do we wait here for him?"  Julie finally asked.

"I don't know," Bobby said.

"But I have a feeling...  a real bad feeling...  that maybe Frank's not
going to regain control of himself this time, that he's just going to
keep popping from one place to another, faster and faster, until sooner
or later he's unable to put himself back together again."

WHEN HE came straight from Japan into the kitchen of his mother's house,
Candy was seething with anger and when he saw the cats on the table,
where he ate his meals his anger grew into a full-blown rage.  Violet
was sitting in a chair at the table; her ever-silent sister was in
another chair beside her, hanging on her.  Cats lay under their chairs
all around their feet, and five of the biggest were on the table, eating
bits of ham that Violet fed them.

"What're you doing?"  he demanded.

Without a word Violet did not acknowledge him with a glance.  Her gaze
was locked with that of a dark gray mong that was sitting as erect as a
statue of an Egyptian temple priestess patiently nibbling at a few small
bits of meat offered on a pale palm.

"I'm talking to you," he said sharply, but she did not respond.

He was sick of her silences, weary to death of her infinite strangeness.
If not for the promise that he had made to mother, he would have torn
Violet open right there and fed on her.  Too many years had passed since
he had tasted the ambrosia in his sainted mother's veins, and he had
often thought that the blood in Violet and Verbina was, in a way, the
same blood that had flowed in Roselle.  He wondered-and some times
dreamed-of how his sisters' blood might feel upon his tongue, how it
might taste.

Looming over her, staring down as she continued to commune with the gray
cat, he said,

"This is where I eat, damn you!"  Violet still said nothing, and Candy
struck her hand, knocking the remaining bits of ham helter-skelter.  He
swept the plate of ham off the table, as well, and took tremendous
satisfaction in the sound of it shattering on the floor.

The five cats on the table were not the least startled by his fury, and
the greater number on the floor remained unfazed by the ping and clatter
of china fragments.

At last Violet turned her head, tilted it back, and looked up at Candy.

Simultaneously with their mistress, the cats on the table turned their
heads to look haughtily at him, too, as if they wished him to understand
what a singular honor they were bestowing upon him simply by granting
him their attention.

That same attitude was apparent in the disdain in Violet's eyes and in
the faint smirk that curled the edges of her ripe mouth.  More than once
he had found her direct gaze withering, and he had turned away from her,
rattled and confused.  Certain that he was her superior in every way, he
was perplexed by her unfailing ability to defeat him or force him into a
hasty retreat with just a look.

But this time would be different.  He had never been as furious as he
was at that moment, not even seven years ago when he had found his
mother's bloody, sundered body and had learned the ax had been wielded
by Frank.  He was angrier now because that old rage had never subsided;
it had fed on itself all these years, and on the humiliation of
repeatedly failing to get his hands on Frank when the opportunities to
do so arose.  Now it was a midnight-black bile that coursed in his veins
and bathed the muscles of his heart and nourished the cells of his brain
where visions of vengeance were spawned in profusion.

Refusing to be cowed by her stare, he seized her thin arm and jerked her
violently to her feet.

Verbina made a soft, woeful sound upon her separation from her sister,
as if they were Siamese twins, for God's sake, as if tissue had been
torn, bones split.

Shoving his face close to Violet's, he sprayed her with spittle as he
spoke:

"Our mother had one cat, just one, she liked things clean and neat, she
wouldn't approve of this mess, this stinking brood of yours."

"Who cares," Violet said in a tone of voice that was at once
disinterested and mocking.

"She's dead."  Grabbing her by both arms, he lifted her off her feet.
The chair behind her fell over as he swung her away from it.  He slammed
her up against the pantry door so hard that the sound was like an
explosion, rattling the loose kitchen windows and some dirty silverware
on a nearby Counter.  He had the satisfaction of seeing her face contort
with pain and her eyes roll back in her head as she nearly passed out
from the blow.  If he had smashed her against the door any harder, her
spine might have cracked.  He dug his fingers cruelly into the pale
flesh of her upper arms, pulled her away from the door, and slammed her
into it again, though not as hard as before, just making the point that
it might have been as hard, that it could be as hard the next time if
she displeased him.

Her head had fallen forward, for she was teetering on the edge of
consciousness.  Effortlessly, he held her against the door, with her
feet eight inches off the floor, as if she weigh nothing at all, thereby
forcing her to consider his incredible strength.  He waited for her to
come around.

She was having difficulty getting her breath, and when at last she
stopped gasping and raised her head to face him, he expected to see a
different Violet.  He had never struck her before.  A fateful line had
been crossed, one over which he never expected to trespass.  With his
promise to his mother in which he had kept his sisters safe from the
often dangerous world out side, provided them with food, kept them warm
in cold weather and cool in the heat, dry when it rained, but year by
year he had performed his brotherly duties with growing frustration,
appalled by their increasingly shameless and mysterious behavior.  Now
he realized that disciplining them was a natural part of protecting
them; up in Heaven, his mother had probably despaired over his never
realizing the need for discipline.  Thanks to his rage, he had stumbled
upon enlightenment.

It felt good to hurt Violet a little, just enough to bring her to her
senses and to prevent her from spiraling fur-their into the dense and
animal sensuality to which she had surrendered herself.  He knew he was
right to punish her.  He waited eagerly for her to lift her head and
face him, for he knew that they had entered a new relationship and that
the awareness of the profound changes would be evident in her eyes.

At last, breathing somewhat normally, she raised her head and met
Candy's gaze.  To his surprise, none of his own enlightenment had been
visited upon his sister.  Her white-blond hair had fallen across her
face, and she stared through it, like a jungle animal peering through
its wind-tossed mane.  In her icy blue eyes, he perceived something
stranger and more primitive than anything he had seen there before.  A
gleeful wildness.  Indefinable hungers.  Need.  Though she had been hurt
when he had thrown her against the pantry door, a smile played on her
full lips again.  She opened her mouth, and he felt her hot breath
against his face as she said,

"You're strong.  Even the cats like the feel of your strong hands on me
...  and so does Verbina."  He became aware of her long bare legs.  The
flimsiness of her panties.  The way her red T-shirt had pulled up to
expose her flat belly.  The swell of her full breasts, which seemed even
fuller than they were because of the leanness of the rest of her.  The
sharp outlines of her nipples against the material of the shirt.  The
smoothness of her skin.  Her smell.

Revulsion burst through him like pus from a secret inner abscess, and he
let go of her.  Turning, he saw that the cats were looking at him.
Worse, they were still lying where they had been when he had pulled
Violet from her chair, as if they had not been frightened by his outrage
even briefly.  He knew their equanimity meant that Violet had not been
frightened, either, and that her erotic response to his fury-and her
mocking smile-was not in the least feigned.

Verbina was slumped in her chair, her head bowed, for she was no more
able to look at him directly now than she had ever been.  But she was
grinning, and her left hand was between her legs, her long fingers
tracing lazy circles on the thing material of her panties, under which
lay the dark cleft of her sex.  He needed no more proof that some of
Violet's sick desire had communicated itself to Verbina, and he turned
away from her too.

He tried to leave the room quickly, but without looking as if he was
fleeing from them.

In his scented bedroom, safely among his mother's belongings, Candy
locked the door.  He was not sure why he felt safer with the lock
engaged, though he was certain it was not because he feared his sisters.
There was nothing about them to fear.  They were to be pitied.

For a while he sat in Roselle's rocker, remembering the times, as a
child, when he'd curled in her lap and contentedly sucked blood from a
self-inflicted wound in her thumb or in the meaty part of her palm.
Once, she had made a half-inch incision in one of her breasts and took
him to her bosom while he drank her blood from the same place where
other mothers gave, and other children received, milk of maternity.

He had been five years old that night when, in this very chair, he
tasted the blood of her breast.  Frank, seven years old then, had been
asleep in the room at the end of the hall, and the twins, who'd only
recently reached their birthday, were asleep in a crib in the room
across from mother's.  Being alone with her when all the others slept
how unique and treasured that made him feel, especially since she was
sharing with him the rich liquid of her arteries veins, which she never
offered to his siblings; it was a sacred communion, dispensed and
received, that remained their secret.

He recalled being in something of a swoon that night, merely because of
the heavy taste of her rich blood and unbounded love that was
represented by the gift of it, but cause of the metronomic rocking of
the chair and the lul rhythms of her voice.  As he sucked, she smoothed
the hair away from his brow and spoke to him of God's intimacies for the
world.  She explained, as she had done many times before, that God
condoned the use of violence when it was committed in the defense of
those who were good and righteous.  She told him how God had created men
who thrived on blood so they might be used as the earthly instruments of
God's revengements on behalf of the righteous.  Theirs was a righteous
love, she said, and God had sent Candy to them to be their Protector.
None of this was new.  But though his mother had spoken of these things
many times during their secret communions, Candy never grew tired of
hearing them again.  Candy often relished in the retelling of a favorite
story.  And as.  certain particularly magical tales, this story somehow
did become more familiar with retelling but curiously more righteous and
appealing.

That night in his sixth year, however, the story took a turn.  The time
had come, his mother said, for him to accept the truly amazing talents
he had been given, and embark on the mission for which God had created
him.  He had begun to exhibit his phenomenal talents when he was three,
the age at which Frank's far more meager gifts had become evident.  His
telekinetic abilities-primarily his talent for telekinetic
transportation of his own body-particularly enchanted Roselle, and she
quickly saw the potential.  They would never want for money as long as
he could teleport at night into places where cash and valuables were
locked away: bank vaults; the jewelry-rich, walk-in safes in Beverly
Hills mansions.  And if he could materialize within the homes of the
Pollard family's enemies, while they slept, vengeance could be taken
without fear of discovery or reprisal.

"There's a man named Salfont," his mother cooed to him as he took his
nourishment from her wounded breast.

"He's a lawyer, one of those jackals who prey on upstanding folks,
nothing good about him at all, not that one.  He handled my father's
estate-that your dear grandpa, little Candy-probated the will, charged
too much, way too much, he was greedy.  They're all greedy, those
lawyers."  The quiet, gentle tone in which she spoke was at odds with
the anger she was expressing, but that contradiction added to the sweet,
hypnotic quality of her message.

"I've tried for years to get part of the fee returned to me, like I
deserve.  I've gone to other lawyers, but they all say his fee was
reasonable, they all stick up for each other, they're alike, peas in a
pod, rotten little peas in rotten little pods.  Took him to court, but
judges are nothing except lawyers in black robes, they make me sick, the
greedy lot of them.  I've worried at this for years, little Candy, can't
get it out of my mind.  That Donald Salfont, living in his big house in
Montecito, overcharging people, overcharging me, he ought to have to pay
for that.  Don't you think so, little Candy?  Don't you think he ought
to pay?"

He was five years old and not yet big for his age, as he would be from
the time he was nine or ten.  Even if he could teleport into Salfont's
bedroom, the advantage of surprise might not be sufficient to ensure
success.  If either Salfont or his wife happened to be awake when Candy
arrived, or if the first slash of the knife failed to kill the lawyer
and brought him awake in a defensive panic, Candy would not be able to
overpower him.  He wouldn't be in danger of getting caught or harmed,
for he could teleport home in a wink; but he would risk being
recognized.  Police would believe a man like Salfont, even as regarded
such a fantastic accusation as murder lodged against a five-year-old
boy.  They would visit the Pollard place, as questions, poking around,
and God knew what they might or come to suspect.

"So you can't kill him, though he deserves it," Roselle pered as she
rocked her favorite child.  She stared down intently into his eyes as he
looked up from her exposed breast.

"Instead what you have to do is take something from him as revenge for
the money he took from me, something precious to them.  There's a new
baby in the Salfont house.  I read about it in the paper a few months
ago, a little girl baby they called Reb Elizabeth.  What kind of name is
that for a girl, I ask you.  Sounds highfalutin' to me, the kind of name
a fancy lawyer and his wife would give a baby 'cause they think them and
theirs are better than other people.  Elizabeth is a queen's name, and
you just look up what Rebekah is in the Bible, see if you don't think
they think way too much of themselves and their little Rebekah...  she's
almost six months now, they've had her long enough to miss her when
she's gone, miss her bad.  I'll drive you past their house tomorrow, my
precious little Candy let you see where it is, and tomorrow night you'll
go there visit the Lord's vengeance on them, my vengeance. They'll think
a rat got into the room, or something of the sort, and they'll blame
themselves until the day they're dead too."

The throat of Rebekah Salfont had been tender, her blood salty.  Candy
enjoyed the adventure of it, the thrill of being in the house of
strangers without their permission or knowledge Killing the girl while
grownups slept in the adjoining room unaware, filled him with a sense of
power.  He was just a kid, yet he slipped past their defenses and struck
a blow for mother, which in a way made him the man of the Pollard house.
That heady feeling added an element of glory to the excitement of the
kill.

His mother's requests for vengeance were thereafter irrevocable.

For the first few years of his mission, infants and very young children
were his only prey.  Sometimes, in order not to create a pattern to the
police, he did not bite them but disposed of them in other ways, and
occasionally he took hold of them teleported out of the house with them,
so no body was found.

An so, if Roselle's enemies had all been from in and around Santa
Barbara, the pattern could not have been hidden.  But often she required
vengeance against people in far places, about whom she read in
newspapers and magazines.

He remembered, in particular, a family in New York State, who won
millions of dollars in the lottery.  His mother had felt that their good
fortune had been at the expense of the Pollard family, and that they
were too greedy to be permitted to live.  Candy had been fourteen at the
time, and he had not understood his mother's reasoning-but he had not
questioned it, either.  She was the only source of truth to him, and the
thought of disobedience had never crossed his mind.  He had killed all
five members of that family in New York, then burned their house to the
ground with their bodies in it.

His mother's thirst for vengeance followed a predictable cycle.
Immediately after Candy killed someone for her, she was happy, filled
with plans for the future; she would bake special treats for him and
sing melodically while she worked in the kitchen, and she would begin a
new quilt or an elaborate needlepoint project.  But over the next four
weeks her happiness would dim like a light bulb on a rheostat, and
almost one month to the day after the killing, having lost interest in
baking and crafts, she would begin to talk about other people who had
wronged her and, by extension, the Pollard family.  Within two to four
more weeks, she would have settled on a target, and Candy would be
dispatched to fulfill his mission.  Consequently, he killed on only six
or seven occasions each year.

That frequency satisfied Roselle, but the older Candy got, the less it
satisfied him.  He had not merely acquired a thirst for blood but a
craving that occasionally overwhelmed him.  The thrill of the hunt also
intoxicated him, and he longed for it was an alcoholic longed for the
bottle.  Not least of all, the mindless hostility of the world toward
his blessed mother motivated him to kill more often.  Sometimes it
seemed that virtually everyone was against her, scheming to harm her
physically or to take money that was rightfully hers.  She had no dearth
of enemies.  He remembered days when fear oppressed her; then at her
direction all the blinds and drapes were drawn, the doors locked and
sometimes even barricaded with chairs and other furniture, against the
onslaught of adversaries who never came but who might have.  On those
bad days she became despondent and told him that so many people were out
to hurt her that even he could not protect her forever.  When he begged
her to turn him loose, she refused and only said,

"It's useless."  Then, as now, he tried to supplement the approved
murders with his forays into the canyons in search of small animals But
those blood feasts, rich as they sometimes were, never quenched his
thirst as thoroughly as when the vessel was human.

Saddened by too many memories, Candy rose from the rocking chair and
nervously paced the room.  The blinds were drawn as he glanced with
increasing interest at the night beyond the window.

After failing to catch Frank and the stranger who had telaported into
the backyard with him, after the confrontation with Violet had taken
that unexpected turn and left him filled with undissipated rage, he was
smoldering, hot to kill, but in need of a target.  With no enemy of the
family in sight, he would have to slaughter either innocent people or
the small creature that lived in the canyons.  The problem was-he
dreaded evoking his sainted mother's disappointment, up there in heaven
yet he had no appetite for the blood of timid beasts.

His frustration and need built by the minute.  He knew he was going to
do something he would later regret, something that would make Roselle
turn her face from him for a time Then, just when he felt he might
explode, he was saved by the intrusion of a genuine enemy.

A hand touched the back of his head.

He whirled around, feeling the hand withdraw as he turned.  It had been
a phantom hand.  No one was there.

But he knew it was the same presence that he had sensed in the canyon
last night.  Someone out there, not of the Pollard family, had psychic
ability of his own, and the very fact that Roselle was not his mother
made him an enemy to be found and eliminated.  The same person had
visited Candy several times earlier in the afternoon, reaching out
tentatively, probing at him but not making full contact.

Candy returned to the rocking chair.  If a real enemy is going to put in
an appearance, it would be worth waiting for him.

A few minutes later, he felt the touch again.  Light, hesitant, quickly
withdrawn.

He smiled.  He started rocking.  He even hummed softly- one of his
mother's favorite songs.

Banking the coals of rage eventually made them burn brighter.  By the
time the shy visitor grew bolder, the fire would be white hot, and the
flames would consume him.

AT TEN minutes to seven, the doorbell rang.  Felina Karaghiosis did not
hear it, of course.  But each room of the house had a small red signal
lamp in one corner or another, and she could not miss the flashing light
that was activated by the bell.

She went into the foyer and looked through the sidelight next to the
front door.  When she saw Alice Kasper, a neighbor from three doors down
the street, she switched off the dead bolt, removed the security chain
from its slot, and let her in.

"Hi, kid.  How ya doing'?"

I like your hair, Felina signed.

"Do ya really?  Just got it cut, and the girl said that I was the same
old same old, or did I want to catch up with the time and I thought what
the hell.  I'm not too old to be sexy, ya think?"

Alice was only thirty-three, five years older than Felina.  She had
exchanged her trademark blond curls for a more mode cut that would
require a new source of income just to pay for all the makeup she was
going to use, but she looked great.

Come in.  Want a drink?

"I'd love a drink, kid, and right now I could use six of ''em but I
gotta say no.  My in-laws came over, and we're about thinking about
either playing cards with ''em or shooting ''em.  It depends on their
attitude." Of all the people Felina knew in her day-to-day life, Alice
was the only one, other than Clint, who understood sign language.  Given
the fact that most people harbored a prejudice against the deaf, to
which they could not admit but on what they acted, Alice was her only
girlfriend. But Felina was happy and would have given up their
friendship if Mark Kasper-Alicson, for whom she had learned sign
language-had not been born deaf

"Why I came over, we got a call from Clint, asking me to tell ya he's
not on his way home yet, but he expects to get here soon."

"So late?"

"maybe by eight.  "Since when does he work so late?"

"They've got a big case.  That always means some overtime.

"ya it's

"He's going to take ya out to dinner, and says it's been an incredible
day.  I guess that's about the case, huh?  Must be fascinating, married
to a detective.  And he's sweet, too.  You're lucky, kid."

"Yes.  But so is he.

Alice laughed.

"Right on!  And if he comes home this late another night, don't settle
for dinner.  Make him buy ya diamonds."

Felina thought of the red gem he had brought home yesterday, and she
wished she could tell Alice about it.  But Dakota & Dakota business,
especially concerning an ongoing case in which the client was in
jeopardy, was as sacred in their house as the privacies of the marriage
bed.

"Saturday, our place, six-thirty?  Jack'll cook up a mess of his chili,
and we'll play pinochle and eat chili and drink beer and fart till we
pass out.  Okay?"

"Yes."

"And tell Clint, it's okay-we won't expect him to talk."

Felina laughed, then signed: He's getting better.

"That's 'cause you're civilizing him, kid."

They hugged again, and Alice left.

Felina closed the door, looked at her wristwatch, and saw that it was
seven o'clock.  She had only an hour to get ready for dinner, and she
wanted to look especially good for Clint, not because this was a special
occasion, but because she always wanted to look good for him.  She
headed for the bedroom, then realized that only the automatic lock was
engaged on the front door.  She returned to the foyer, twisted the thumb
screw that slid the dead bolt home, and slipped the security chain in
place.

Clint worried about her too much.  If he came home and found that she
hadn't remembered the dead bolt, he'd age a year in a minute, right
before her eyes.

so AFTER BEING off duty all day, Hal Yamataka responded to a call from
Clint and came to the offices at 6: Tuesday night, to stand a watch in
case Frank returned after the rest of them had left.  Clint met him in
the reception lounge and briefed him there over a cup of coffee.  He had
to be brought up to date on what had happened during his absence and
after he heard what had gone down, he again wistfully considered a
career in gardening.

Nearly everyone in his family either had a gardening business or owned a
little nursery, and all of them did well, most of them better than what
Hal made working for Dakota & Dakota, some of them a great deal better.
His folks, his three brothers, and various well-meaning uncles tried
repeatedly to persuade him that he should work for them or come into
business with them, but he resisted.  It was not that he had anything
against running a nursery, selling gardening supplies, land scape
planning, tree pruning, or even gardening itself But southern California
was not the place.

the term "Japanese gardener" was a cliche not a career, and he couldn't
abide the thought of being a kind of stereotype.

He had been a heavy reader of adventure and suspense novels all his
life, and he yearned to be a character like one of those he read about,
especially a character worthy of being a lead in a John D. MacDonald
novel, because John D's lead characters were as rich in insight as they
were in courage, even as sensitive as they were tough.  In his heart Hal
knew that work at Dakota & Dakota was usually as mundane as the day
grind of a gardener, and that the opportunities for heroism in the
security industry were far fewer than they appeared to to outsiders. But
selling a bag of mulch or a can of Specticide or a flat of marigolds,
you couldn't kid yourself that you were a romantic figure or had any
chance of being one.  And, after all, self-image was often the better
part of reality.

"If Frank shows up here," Hal said,

"what do I do with him?"

"Pack him in a car and take him to Bobby and Julie."

"You mean their house?"

"No. Santa Barbara.  They're driving up there tonight, staying at the
Red Lion Inn, so tomorrow they can start digging into the Pollard
family's background."

Frowning, Hal leaned forward on the reception-lounge sofa.

"Thought you said they don't figure ever to see Frank again."

"Bobby says he thinks Frank is coming apart, won't last through this
latest series of travels.  That's just his feeling."

"So then who's their client?"

"Until he fires them, Frank is."

"Sounds iffy to me.  Be straight with me, Clint.  What's really got them
so committed to this one, especially considering how crazy-dangerous it
seems to get, hour by hour?"

"They like Frank.  I like Frank."

"I said be straight."  Clint sighed.

"Damned if I know.  Bobby came back here spooked out of his mind.  But
he won't let go of it.  You'd think they'd pull in their homes, at least
until Frank shows up again if he does.  This brother of his, this Candy,
he sounds like the devil himself, too much for anyone to handle. Bobby
and Julie are stubborn sometimes, but they're not stupid, and I'd expect
them to let go of this, now that they've seen it's a job big enough for
God, not a private detective.  But here we are."

BOBBY AND JULIE huddled with Lee Chen at the desk, while he shared with
them the information he had thus far obtained.

"The money might be stolen, but it's spendable," Lee said.

"I can't find those serial numbers on any currency hot sheets federal,
state, or local."

Bobby had already thought of several sources from which Frank might have
obtained the six hundred thousand now in the office safe.

"Find a business with a high cash flow, where they don't always get to a
bank with the receipts at the end of the day, and you've got a potential
target.  Say it's a super market, stays open till midnight, and it's not
a good idea for a manager to tote a lot of cash to a bank for automatic
deposit.  so there's a safe in the market.  After the place closes, you
trans port inside, if you're Frank, and use whatever other power you
have to open that safe, put the day's receipts in a grocery bag, and
vanish.  You're not going to find big chunks of cash, a couple hundred
thousand at a time, but you hit three or for markets in an hour, and
you've got your haul."

Evidently Julie had been pondering the same question, she said,
"Casinos.  They all have accounting rooms you!"  find on the blueprints,
the ones the IRS gets into with a little effort.  But they've got hidden
rooms, too, where the skim goes Like big walk-in safes.  Fort Knox would
envy them.  You use whatever minor psychic abilities you have to figure
the location of one of those hidden rooms, teleport in when it's
deserted and just take what you want."

"Frank lived in Vegas for a while,"

Bobby said.  "Remember I told you about the vacant lot he took me to,
where he'd had  a house."

"He wouldn't be limited to Vegas," Julie said.

"Reno, Tahoe, Atlantic City, the Caribbean, Macao, France, England,
Monte Carlo-anywhere there's big-time gambling."  This talk of easy
access to unlimited amounts of cash excited Bobby, though he was not
sure why.  After all, it was Frank who could teleport, not him, and he
was ninety-five-percent sure they were never going to see Frank again.

Spreading a sheaf of printouts across the desktop, Lee Chen said,

"The money's the least interesting thing.  You remember you wanted me to
find out if the cops are on to Mr. Blue

"Candy," Bobby said.

"We have a name for him now."  Lee scowled.

"I liked Mr. Blue better.  It had more style."

Entering the room, Hal Yamataka said, "I don't think you can trust the
style judgment of a guy who wears red sneakers and yellow socks."

Lee shook his head.  "We Chinese spend thousands of years working up an
intimidating image for all Asians, so we can keep these hapless
Westerners off balance, and you people in Japan blow it all by making
those Godzilla movies.  You can't be inscrutable and make Godzilla
movies."

"Yeah?  You show me anybody who understands a Godzilla movie after the
first one."

They made an interesting pair, these two: one slender, modish, with
delicate features, an enthusiastic child of the silicon age; the other
squat, broad, with a face as blunt as a hammer, a guy who was about as
high-tech as a rock.

But to Bobby the most interesting thing was that, until this moment, he
had never thought about the fact that a disproportionately large
percentage of Dakota & Dakota's small staff was Asian-American.  There
were two more-Nguyen Tuan Phu and Jamie Quang, both Vietnamese.  Four
out of eleven people.  Though he and Hal once in a while made East-West
jokes, Bobby never thought of Lee and Hal and Nguyen and Jamie as
composing any subset of employees; they were just themselves, as
different from one another as apples are different from pears and
oranges and peaches.  But Bobby realized that this predilection for
Asian-American co-workers revealed something about himself, something
more than just an obvious and admirable racial blindness, but he could
not figure out what it was.

Hal said,

"And nothing gets more inscrutable than the whole concept of Mother.  By
the way, Bobby, Clint's gone home to comfort Felina.  We should all be
so lucky."

"Lee was telling us about Mr. Blue," Julie said.

"Candy,"

Bobby said.

Indicating the data he had extracted from various police records
nationwide, Lee said,

"Most police agencies began to be computerized and interlinked only
about nine years ago-in any sophisticated way, that is.  So that's all
the further back a lot of electronically accessible files go.  But
during that time, there have been seventy-eight brutal murders, in nine
states, that have enough similarities to raise the possibility of a
single perp- Just the possibility, mind you.  But FBI got interested
enough last year to put a three-man team on it, one in the office and
two in the field, to coordinate local and stat& investigations."

"Three men?"  Hal said.

"Doesn't sound like high priority."

"The Bureau's always been overextended," Julie said.

"And over the last thirty years, since it's been unfashionable for
judges to hand out long criminal sentences, the bad guys outnumber them
worse than ever.  Three men, full time-that's a serious commitment at
this stage."  Extracting a printout from the pile on the desk, Lee
summarized the essential data on it.

"All of the killings have the points in common.  First-the victims were
all bitten, most the throat, but virtually no part of the body is sacred
to the guy.  Second-many of them were beaten, suffered head injuries.
But loss of blood, from the bites-usually the jugular vein and carotid
artery in the throat-was a substantial contributing factor to the death
in virtually every instance, regardless of other injuries."

"On top of everything else, the guy's a vampire?"  Hal asked Taking the
question seriously-as, indeed, they had to consider every possibility in
this bizarre case, regardless of how outlandish it seemed-Julie 'said,

"Not a vampire in the supernatural sense.  From what we've learned, the
Pollard family for some reason generously gifted.  You know that
magician on TV, The Amazing Randier, who offers to pay a hundred
thousand bucks to anyone who proves they have psychic power.  This
Pollard clan would bankrupt his ass.  But that doesn't mean there's
anything SUPERNATURAL about them.  They're demons, or possessed, or the
children of the devil-nothing like that."

"It's just some extra bit of genetic material," Bobby said

"Exactly.  If Candy acts like a vampire, biting people in the throat,
that's just a manifestation of psychological illness, Julie said.

"It doesn't mean he's one of the living dead."  Bobby vividly remembered
the blond giant charging him and Frank on the rain swept black beach at
Punaluu.  The ground was as formidable as a locomotive.  If Bobby had a
choice going up against either Candy Pollard or Dracula, he'd choose the
undead Count.  Nothing as simple as a clove of garlic, a crucifix, or a
well-placed wooden stake would effectively deter Frank's brother.

Lee said,

"Another similarity.  In those instances where victims didn't leave
doors or windows unlocked, there was no indication of how the killer
gained entrance.  And in man instances police found doors dead-bolted
from the inside, windows locked from the inside, as if the murderer had
gone down the chimney when he was done," Seventy-eight," Julie said, and
shivered.

Lee dropped the paper onto the desk.

"They figure there're more, maybe a lot more, because sometimes this guy
has a tempted to cover his trail-the bite marks-by further mutilating or
even burning the bodies.  Though the cops weren't fooled in these cases,
you can figure they were fooled in others.  So the count's higher than
seventy-eight, and that's just the last nine years."  e," Julie said,
and Bobby seconded that.

"Good job, Lee "I'm not done yet," Lee said.

"I'm going to order in a pizza, do some more digging."

"You've been here more than ten hours today," Bobby said.

"That's already above and beyond the call.  Got to have down time, Lee."

"If you believe, as I do, that time is subjective, then you've got an
infinite supply.  Later, at home, I'll stretch a few hours into a couple
of weeks and return tomorrow quite rested."  Hal Yamataka shook his head
and sighed.

"Hate to admit it, Lee, but you're damned good at this mysterious
oriental crap."  Lee smiled enigmatically.

"Thank you."

After BOBBY and Julie went home to pack an OVERNIGHT bag for the trip to
Santa Barbara, and after Lee returned to the computer room, Hal settled
on the sofa in the bosses' office, slipped off his shoes, and put his
feet up on the coffee table.  He still had the paperback of The Last One
Left, which he'd read twice before, and which he had started to reread
last night in the hospital.  If Bobby was right when he said they might
never see Frank again, Hal was in for an uneventful evening and would
probably get half the book read.

Maybe his happiness at Dakota & Dakota had nothing to do with the
prospect of excitement, avoiding a stereotypical job as a gardener, and
having the admittedly slim chance to be a hero.  Maybe the thing that
most affected his career decision was the realization that he simply
could not ow a lawn or trim a hedge or plant fifty flats of flowers and
read a book at the same time.

DEREK SAT in his chair.  Pointed the raygun at the TV and made it be on.
He said,

"You don't want to watch news?"

"No," Thomas said.  He was on his bed, propped up with pillows, looking
at the night being dark outside the window

"Good.  Me neither."  Derek pushed buttons on the raygun A new picture
came on the screen.

"You don't want to wat a game show?"

"No."  All Thomas wanted to do WaS snoop on the Bad Thing.

"Good."  Derek pushed buttons, and the invisible rays from the screen
show a new picture.

"You don't want to watch Three Stooges pretending to be funny?"

"No."

"What you want to watch?"

"Don't matter.  Whatever you want to watch."

"Really?"

"Whatever you want to watch," Thomas repeated.

"Gee, that's nice."  He made lots of pictures on the screen until he
found a space movie where spacemen in space suits were poking around in
some spooky place.  Derek made happy sigh and said,

"This is good.  I like their hats."

"Helmets," Thomas said.

"Space helmets."

"I wish I had a hat like that."  When he reached out into the big dark
again, Thomas decided not to picture a mind-string unraveling toward the
Bad Thing.  Instead he Pictured a raygun, shooting some invisible rays.
Boy, did that work better!  Wham, he was right there wit the Bad Thing
in a flash, and he felt it stronger, too, so strong he got scared and
clicked off the raygun and got all of himself back into his room with
the rest of himself right away.

"They got telephones in their hats," Derek said.

"See they're talking through their hats."  On the TV, the spacemen were
in an even spookier place poking around, which was one of the things
spacemen did most, even though something ugly-nasty was usually in those
spooky places just waiting for them.  Spacemen never learned.  Thomas
looked away from the screen.

At the window.

The dark.

Bobby was scared for Julie.  Bobby knew stuff Thomas didn't know.  If
Bobby was scared for Julie, Thomas had to be brave and do What Was
Right.

The raygun idea worked such a lot better it scared him, but he figured
it was really good because he could easier snoop on the Bad Thing.  He
could get to the Bad Thing faster and get away from it faster, too, so
he could snoop on it more often and not be scared about it maybe
grabbing the mind-string and coming back to The Home with him.  Grabbing
an invisible raygun ray was harder, even for a thing as fast and smart
and mean as the Bad Thing.

So he pictured pushing buttons on a raygun again, and a part of him went
through the dark-wham!-and to the Bad Thing right away.  He felt how mad
the Bad Thing was, madder than ever, and thinking lots of thoughts about
blood that made Thomas half sick.  Thomas wanted to come right back to
The Home.  The Bad Thing felt him, you could tell.  He didn't like the
Bad Thing feeling him, knowing he was there with it, but he stayed just
a couple clock ticks longer, trying to see any thoughts about Julie in
all those thoughts about blood.  If the Bad Thing had thoughts about
Julie, Thomas would TV a warning right away to Bobby.  He was happy he
couldn't find Julie in the Bad Thing's mind, and he quick raygunned back
to The Home.

"Where you think I could get a hat like that?"  Derek asked.

"Helmet."

"Even has a light on it, see?"  Rising up a little from his pillows,
Thomas said,

"You know what kind of a story this is?"  Derek shook his head.

"What kind of story?"

"It's the kind where any second something ugly-nasty jumps up and sucks
off a spaceman's face or maybe crawls in his mouth and down his belly
and makes a nest in there."  Derek made a disgusted face.

"Yuck.  I don't like that kind of stories."

"I know," Thomas said.

"That's why I warned you."  While Derek made a lot of different pictures
come on the screen, one quick after the other, to get far away from the
spaceman who was going to get his face sucked off, Thomas tried to think
how long he should wait before he snooped on the Bad Thing again.  Bobby
was real worried, you could tell, even if he tried to hide it, and Bobby
was not a Dumb Person, so it was a good idea to check on the Bad Thing
pretty regular, in case maybe it all of a sudden thought about Julie and
got up and went after her.

"You want to watch this?"  Derek asked.

On the screen was a picture of this guy in a hockey uniform with a big
knife in his hand, going quiet-like across a room where a girl was
asleep in a bed.

"Better raygun up another picture," Thomas said.

BECAUSE THE rush hour was past, because Julie knew all the best
shortcuts, but mainly because she was not in a moo be cautious or
respect the traffic laws, they made great time from the office to their
home on the east end of Orange.

On the way Bobby told her about the Calcutta roach that had been part of
his shoe when he and Frank had arrived that red bridge in the garden in
Kyoto.

"But when we pop to Mount Fuji, my shoe was okay, the roach was gone."
She slowed at an intersection, but she was the only traffic in sight, so
she didn't obey the four-way stop.

"Why didn't tell me about this at the office?"

"Wasn't time for every detail."

"What do you think happened to the roach?"

"I don't know.  That's what bothers me."  They were on Newport Avenue,
just past Crawford Cany Sodium-vapor street lamps cast a queer light on
the road Atop the steep hills to the left, several huge English and
French houses, blazing like giant luxury liners, looked wildly out of
place, partly because the insanely high value such upscale real estate
ensured the construction of immense houses out of proportion to the tiny
lots they stood on, partly because Tudor and French architectural styles
clashed with the semitropical landscape.  It was all part of the Cali
nia circus, some of which he hated, most of which he loved.  Those
houses never bothered him before, and given the serious problems he and
Julie faced, he couldn't figure why they bothered him now.  Maybe he was
so jumpy that even these misharmonies reminded him of the chaos that had
almost engulfed him during his travels with Frank.

He said,

"Do you have to drive so fast)"

"Yes," she said curtly.

"I want to get home, get packed, to Santa Barbara, learn what we can
about the Pollard family, get finished with this whole damn creepy
case."

"If you feel that way, why don't we just drop it here?  Frank comes
back, we give him his money, his jar of red diamonds, tell him we're
sorry, we think he's a prince of a guy, but we're out of it."

"We can't," she said.

He chewed on his lower lip, then said,

"I know.  But I can't figure why we're compelled to hang in there with
this one."  They crested the hill and speeded north, past the entrance
to Rocking Horse Ridge.  Their own development was only a couple of
streets ahead, on the left.  As she finally began to brake for the turn,
she glanced at him and said,

"You really don't know why we can't bug out of it?"

"No. You saying you do?"

"I know."

"Tell me."

"You'll figure it out eventually."

"Don't be mysterious.  That's not like you."  She swung the company
Toyota into their development, then onto their street.

"I tell you what I think, it'll upset you.  You'll deny it, we'll argue,
and I don't want to argue with you."

"Why will we argue?"  She pulled into their driveway, put the car in
park, switched off the lights and engine, and turned to him.  Her eyes
shone in the dark.

"When you understand why we can't let go, you won't like what it says
about us, and you'll argue that I'm wrong, that we're just a couple of
sweet kids, really.  You like to see us as a couple of sweet kids, savvy
but basically innocent at the same time, like a young Jimmy Stewart and
Donna Reed.  I really love you for that, for being such a dreamer about
the world and us, and it'll hurt me when you want to argue."  He almost
started to argue with her about whether he would argue with her.  Then
he stared at her for a moment and finally said,

"I've had this feeling that I'm not facing up to something, that when
this is all over and I realize why I was so determined to see this
through to the end, my motivations won't be as noble as I think they are
now.  It's a weird damn feeling.  As if I don't really know myself."

"Maybe we spend all our lives learning to know ourselves.

And maybe we never really will completely."  She kissed him lightly,
quickly, and got out of the car.

As he followed her up the sidewalk to the front door, glanced at the
sky.  The clarity of the day had been short-lived A pall of clouds
concealed the moon and stars.  The sky very dark, and he was gripped by
the curious certainty great and terrible weight was falling toward them,
bright against the black heavens and therefore invisible, but falling
fast, faster....

CANDY KEPT a choke hold on his fury, which reacted its leash.  strained
like an attack dog trying to!"  He rocked and rocked, and gradually the
shy visitor grew bolder.  Repeatedly he felt the invisible hand on his
head.  Initially it lay upon him as lightly as an empty silk glove, and
it stayed only briefly before flitting away.  But as he pretended to be
disinterested in both the hand and the person to whom it belonged, the
visitor grew more daring, the hand heavier and less nervous.

Though Candy made no effort to probe at the mind of the intruder, for
fear of scaring him away, some of the stranger's thoughts came to him
nonetheless.  He did not think the visitor was aware that images and
words from his own mind were slipping into Candy's; they were just
leaking out of him as if they were trickles of water seeping from
pin-size holes in a rusty bucket.

The name

"Julie" came several times.  And once an image floated along with the
name-an attractive woman with brown hair and dark eyes.  Candy wasn't
sure if it was the visitor's face or the face of someone the visitor
knew even if it was the face of anyone who really existed.  There were
aspects that made it seem unreal: a pale light radiated from it, and the
features were so kind and serene that it looked like the holy
countenance of a saint in an illustrated Bible.

The word

"flutterby" leaked out of the visitor's mind more than once, sometimes
with other words, like

"remember the flutterby" or "don't be a flutterby."  And each time that
word flitted through his mind, the visitor quickly withdrew.

But he kept coming back.  Because Candy did nothing to make him feel
unwelcome.

Candy rocked and rocked.  The chair made a soft sound creak...  creak...
creak...  creak.

He waited.

He kept an open mind.

...  creak...  creak...  creak...

Twice the name

"Bobby" seeped from the visitor's mind and the second time a fuzzy image
of a face was linked to another very kind face.  It was idealized, like
Julie's face.  Recognition stirred in Candy, but Bobby's visage was not
as clear or detailed as Julie's, and Candy did not want to concentrate
on it because the visitor might notice his interest and be frightened
off.

During his long and patient courtship of the shy introvert many other
words and images came to Candy, but he didn't know what to make of them:
-men in spacesuits

"Bad Thing"-a guy in a hockey mask-"The Home"-"Dumb People"-a bathrobe,
a half-eaten Hershey's bar, and a sudden frantic thought: Draw Bugs, no
good, Draw Bugs, got to Be Not More than ten minutes passed without
contact, and Can started to worry that the intruder had gone away for
good.  But suddenly he was back.  This time the contact was strong, more
intimate than ever.

When Candy sensed that the visitor was more confident, knew the time had
come to act.  He pictured his mind as a steel trap, the visitor as an
inquisitive mouse, and he pictured a trap springing, the bar pinning the
visitor to the kill plate.

Shocked, the visitor tried to pull away.  Candy held him a pushed across
the telepathic bridge between them, trying storm his adversary's mind to
find out who he was, where was, and what he wanted.

Candy had no telepathic power of his own, nothing to equal; even the
weak telepathic gifts of the intruder; he had never re anyone's mind
before, and he did not know how to go about it.  As it turned out, he
did not need to do anything except stop himself and receive what the
visitor gave him.  Thomas was name, and he was terrified of Candy, of
having Done Some thing Really Dumb, and of putting Julie in danger; that
kind of terrors shattered his mental defenses and caused him to disgorge
a flood of information.

in fact, there was too much information for Candy to make sense of it, a
babble of words and images.  He tried desperately to sort through it for
clues to Thomas's identity and location.

Dumb People, Cielo Vista, The Home, everybody here has bad eye cues,
Care Home, good food, TV The Best Place For Us, Cielo Vista, the aides
are nice, we watch the humming birds, the world is bad out there, too
bad for us out there, Cielo Vista Care Home...

With some astonishment, Candy realized that the visitor was someone with
a subnormal intellect-he even picked up the term

"Down's syndrome"-and he was afraid that he was not going to be able to
sort enough meaningful thoughts from the babble to get a fix on Thomas's
location.  Depending on the size of his IQ, Thomas might not know where
Cielo Vista Care Home was, even though he apparently lived there.

Then a series of images spun out of Thomas's mind, a well linked chain
of serial memories that still caused him some emotional pain: the trip
to Cielo Vista in a car with Julie and Bobby, on the day they first
checked him into the place.  This was different from most of Thomas's
other thoughts and memories, in that it was richly detailed and so
clearly retained that it unreeled like a length of motion-picture film,
giving Candy all he needed to know.  He saw the highways over which they
had driven that day, saw the route markers flashing past the car window,
saw every landmark at every turn, all of which Thomas had struggled
mightily to memorize because all through the trip he kept thinking, if I
don't like it there, if people are mean there, if it's too scary there,
if it's too much being alone there, I got to know how I find the way
back to Bobby and Julie anytime I want, remember this, remember all of
this, turn there at the I, right there at the 7-11, don't forget that
7-11, and now go past those three palm trees.  What if they don't come
visit me?  No, that's a bad thing to think, they love me, they said they
would come.  But what if they don't?  Look there, remember that house,
you go past that house, remember that house with the blue roof Candy got
it all, as precisely a fix as he could have obtained from a geographer
who would have spoken precisely in degrees and minutes of longitude and
latitude.  It was more than he needed to know to make use of his gift.
He opened the trap and let Thomas go.

He got up from the rocker.

He pictured Cielo Vista Care Home as it appeared so exquisitely detailed
in Thomas's memory.

He pictured Thomas's room on the first floor of the no wing, at the
northwest corner.

Darkness, billions of hot sparks spinning in the void, velocity.

BECAUSE JULIE was in a let's-move-and-get-it-done mood they had stopped
at the house only fifteen minutes, long enough to throw toiletries and a
change of clothes in an over night bag.  At McDonald's, on Chapman
Avenue in Orange she swung by the drive-through window and got dinner to
on the way: Big Macs, fries, diet colas.  Before they reach the Costa
Mesa Freeway, while Bobby was still divvying the extra packets of
mustard and opening the containers that held the Big Macs, Julie had
clipped the radar detector to the rear view mirror, plugged it in the
Toyota's cigarette lighter and switched it on.  Bobby had never before
eaten fast food high speed, but he figured they averaged eighty-five
miles hour north on the Costa Mesa to the Riverside Freeway to the
Orange Freeway north, and he was still finishing french fries when they
were only a couple of exits away from the Foothill Freeway east of Los
Angeles.  Though the rush hour was well past and the traffic unusually
light, maintaining that pace required a lot of lane changing and nerve.

He said,

"We keep this up, I'll never have a chance to from the cholesterol in
this Big Mac."

"Lee says cholesterol doesn't kill us."

"Is that what he says?"

"He says we live forever, and all cholesterol can do is move us out of
this life a little sooner.  Same thing must be true I slip up and roll
this sucker a few times."

"I don't think that'll happen," he said.

"You're the best driver I've ever seen."

"Thank You, Bobby.  You're the best passenger."

"The only thing I wonder.

"Yeah?"

"If we don't really die, just move on, and I don't have to worry about
anything-why the hell did I bother to get diet colas?"  THOMAS ROLLED
off the bed, onto his feet.

"Derek, go, get out, he's coming!"  Derek was watching a horse talking
on TV, and he didn't hear Thomas.

The TV was in the room's middle, between the beds, and by the time
Thomas got there and grabbed Derek to make him listen, a funny sound was
all around them, not funny ha-ha but funny weird, like somebody
whistling but not whistling.  There was wind, too, a couple of puffs,
not warm or cold either, but it made Thomas shiver when it blew on him.

Pulling Derek off his chair, Thomas said,

"Bad Thing's coming, you get out, you go, like I said before, now!"

Derek just made a dumb face at him, then smiled, like- he figured Thomas
was pretending to be funny the way the Three Stooges pretended.  He'd
forgot all about the promise he made Thomas.  He'd thought the Bad Thing
was going to be poached eggs for breakfast, and when poached eggs never
showed up on his plate, he figured he was safe, but now he wasn't safe
and didn't know it.

More funny-weird whistling.  More wind.

Giving Derek a shove, making him get started for the door, Thomas
shouted,

"Run!"  The whistling stopped, the wind stopped, and all of a sudden
from nowhere the Bad Thing was there.  Between them and the open door.

It was a man, like Thomas already knew it was, but it was more than just
a man.  It was darkness poured in the shape of a man, like a piece of
the night itself that came in through the window, and not just because
it wore a black T-shirt and black pants but because it was all deep dark
inside, you could tell.

Right away Derek was afraid.  Nobody needed to tell him this was a Bad
Thing, not now when he could see it with his own eyes.  But he didn't
see it was too late to run, and he went straight at the Bad Thing, like
maybe he could push past it, which must have been what he was figuring
because Derek wasn't dumb enough to figure he could knock it do it was
so big.

The Bad Thing grabbed him and lifted him before he any chance to get
around it, lifted him right up off the floor like he didn't weigh any
more than a pillow.  Derek scream and the Bad Thing slammed him against
the wall so hard scream stopped, and pictures of Derek's mom and dad a
brother fell off the wall, not the one where Derek got slam but another
wall all the way around the room from him a over his bed.

The Bad Thing was so fast.  That was the worst thing about it, how awful
fast it was.  It slammed Derek against the wall.  Derek's mouth fell
open but no more sound came from him the Bad Thing slammed him again,
right away, harder, thou the first time was hard enough for anybody, and
Derek's e went funny.  The Bad Thing took him away from the wall a
slammed him down on the worktable.  The table kind of shuttered like it
would fall apart, but it didn't.  Derek's head over the table edge,
hanging down, so Thomas was looking his face, upside-down eyes blinking
fast, upside-down more open real wide but no sound coming out.  He
looked up from Derek's face, looked right across Derek's body at the Bad
Thing, which was looking at him and grinning, like all this was a joke,
funny ha-ha, which it wasn't, no way.  Then it picked up the scissors on
the edge of the worktable, the ones Thomas used to make his picture
poems, the ones that almost fell on the floor when it slammed Derek on
the table.  It made the scissors go into Derek and bring the blood out
of him, into Derek who wouldn't hurt no one himself, except
himself,wouldn't know how to hurt anyone.  And the Bad Thing get the
scissors go in again and bring more blood out of another place in Derek,
and in again, and again.  Then blood was coming Out of just four places
on Derek's chest and belly who the scissors had been made to go in, but
out of his mouth a nose too.  The Bad Thing lifted Derek off the table,
the scissors still sticking out of his front, and threw him like he was
just a Pillow.  No, like he was a garbage bag, threw him like the
Sanitation Men threw the garbage bags onto their Sanitation Truck. Derek
landed on his bed, on his back on bed, with the scissors still in him,
and didn't move and

gone to the Bad Place, you could tell.  And the worst thing was it all
happened so fast, faster than Thomas could think what to do to stop it.

Footsteps in the hall, people running.

Thomas yelled for help.  the doorway.  Pete saw Pete, one of the aides,
showed up in Derek on the bed, scissors in him, blood coming out
everywhere, and he got afraid, you could see him get it.  He turned to
the Bad Thing and said,

"Who-" The Bad Thing grabbed him by the neck, and Pete made a sound like
something was stuck in his throat.  He put both his hands on the Bad
Thing's arm, which seemed bigger than Pete's two arms together, but he
couldn't make the Bad Thing let go.  The Bad Thing lifted him by his
neck, making his chin turn up and his head bend back, and then took hold
of him by the belt, too, and pitched him back out the door, into the
hall.  Pete hit a nurse who came running up just then, and they both
went down on the floor out there in the hall, all tangled up, her
screaming.

All of this in a few clock ticks.  So fast.

The Bad Thing made the door shut with a bang, saw you couldn't lock it,
then did the funniest thing of all, funny-weird, funny-scary.  He held
both his hands out at the door, and this blue light came from his hands
the way not-blue came from a flashlight.  Sparks flew from hinges and
around the knob and all around the door edges.  Everything metal smoked
and turned all soft, like butter when you put it on mashed potatoes.  It
was a Fire Door.  They said you had to keep your door closed if you ever
saw fire in the hall, not try to run in the hall, but keep your door
closed and stay put.  They called it a Fire Door because fire couldn't
get through it, they said, and Thomas always wondered why they didn't
call it a Fire Can't Get Through It Door, but he never asked.  The thing
was, a Fire Door was all metal, so it couldn't burn, but no* it melted
around the edges, and so did the metal frame, they melted together, it
didn't look like you could ever get through that door again.

People started pounding on the door from out there in the hall, tried to
make it open, couldn't, and shouted for Thomas and Derek.  Thomas knew
some voices and who they belonged to, and he wanted to yell for them to
help quick because he was in trouble, but he couldn't make a sound any
better.  Poor Derek.

The Bad Thing made the blue light stop.  Then it turned looked at
Thomas.  It smiled at him.  It didn't have a nice smile it said,
"Thomas?"

Thomas was surprised he could stand up, he was so scared He was against
the wall by the window, and he thought maybe making the lock open on the
window and push it and get out, which he knew how to do because of
Emerge Drills.  But he knew he wasn't fast enough, no way, because the
Bad Thing was the fastest he ever saw.

it took a step toward him, and another step.

"Are Thomas?"  For a while he still couldn't find the way to make sound
He could just move his mouth and sort of pretend to make sounds.  Then
while he was doing that, he figured maybe if told a lie and said he
wasn't Thomas, the Bad Thing won't believe him and just go away.  So
when all of a sudden he could make sounds, and then words, he said,

"No. I...  no...

Thomas.  He's gone out in the world now, he's got a big cue, he's a
high-end moron, so they moved him out in world."  The Bad Thing laughed.
It was a laugh that had no future in it, the worst Thomas ever heard.
The Bad Thing said,

" the hell are you, Thomas?  Where do you come from?  H come a dummy
like you can do something I can't?"  Thomas didn't answer.  He didn't
know what to say.

wished the people in the hall would stop pounding on the door and find
some other way to get in, because pounding was working.  Maybe they
could call the cops and tell them to bring the Jaws of Life, yeah, the
Jaws of Life, like you saw them on the TV news when a person was in a
wrecked car couldn't get out.  They could use the Jaws of Life to pull
the door the way they pulled at smashed-up cars to get people out of
them.  He hoped the cops wouldn't say, we're sorry we can only open car
doors with the Jaws of Life, we can open Care Home doors, because then
he was finished for"You going to answer me, Thomas?"  the Bad Thing ask
Derek's TV chair got turned around in the fight, and it was between
Thomas and the Bad Thing.  The Bad Thing held one hand out at the chair,
just one, and the blue light whoosh!  and the chair blew up in
splinters, like all the toothpicks in the world.  Thomas threw his hands
over his face just fast enough so no splinters went in his eyes.  Some
went in the backs of his hands and even in his cheeks and chin, and he
could feet some of them in his shirt, poking his belly, but he didn't
feel any hurt because he was so busy feeling scared.

He took his hands from his eyes right away, because he had to see where
the Bad Thing was.  Where it was was right on top of him, with soft bits
of the chair insides floating in the air in front of its face.

"Thomas?"  it said, and it put one of its big hands on the front of
Thomas's neck the way it did Pete a while ago.

Thomas heard words coming from himself, and he couldn't believe he was
making them, but he was.  Then when he forgot what he said to the Bad
Thing, he couldn't believe he said it, but he did:

"You're not Being Sociable."  The Bad Thing grabbed him by the belt and
kept hold of him by the neck and lifted him off the floor and pulled him
away from the wall, then slammed him into the wall, the same way it did
Derek, and, oh, it hurt worse than Thomas ever before hurt in his life.

THE INTERIOR garage door had a dead bolt but no security chain.
Pocketing his keys, Clint entered the kitchen at ten minutes past eight
and saw Felina sitting at the table, reading a magazine while she waited
for him.

She looked up and smiled, and his heart thumped faster about her, just
like in every sappy love story ever written.

the sigh He wondered how this could have happened to him.  He had been
so self-contained before Felina.  He had been proud of the fact that he
needed no one for intellectual stimulation or emotional support, and
that he was therefore not vulnerable to the pains and disappointments of
human relationships.  Then he had met her.  When he caught his breath,
he had been as vulnerable as anyone-and glad of it.

She looked terrific in a simple blue dress with a red belt and matching
red shoes.  She was so strong yet so gentle, so tough yet so fragile.

He went to her, and for a while they stood by the refrigerator 7tor,
next to the sink, holding each other and kissing, neither of them
speaking in either of the ways they could.  Clint thought they would
have been happy, just then, even if!"  of them had been deaf and mute,
capable of neither lip reading nor sign language, because at that moment
what made them happy was the very fact of being together, which no would
could adequately express anyway.

Finally he said,

"What a day!  Can't wait to tell you all about it.  Let me clean up real
quick, change clothes.  We'll be of here by eight-thirty, go over to
Caprabello's, get a corner booth, some wine, some pasta, some garlic
bread-" Some heartburn.

He laughed because it was true.  They both loved Caprablo's, but the
food was spicy.  They always suffered for the indulgence.

He kissed her again, and she sat down with her magazine and he went
through the dining room and down the hall the bathroom.  While he let
the water run in the sink to it hot, he plugged in his electric razor
and began to shave, grinning at himself in the mirror because he was
such a damn lucky guy.

THE BAD THING, was right in his face, snarling at him, I of questions,
too many for Thomas to think about and answer even if he was sitting in
a chair quiet and happy, instead lifted ofF the floor and held against
the wall with his whole body hurting so bad he had to cry.  He kept
saying,

"I'm full up, I, full up."  Always when he said that, people stopped
asking him things or telling him things, they let him take time to make
his head clear.  But the Bad Thing was not like other people.  It didn't
care if his head was clear, it just wanted answers.  W was Thomas?  Who
was his mother?  Who was his father Where did he come from?  Who was
Julie?  Who was Bobby Where was Julie?  Where was Bobby?

Then the Bad Thing said,

"Hell, you're just a dummy.  Y don't know the answers, do You?  You're
just as stupid as are stupid-looking."  It Pulled Thomas away from the
wall, held him off the floor with one hand on his neck, so Thomas
couldn't breathe good Thomas in the face, hard, and Thomas didn't want
It slapped to keep crying, but he couldn't stop, he hurt and was scared.

"Why do they let people like you live?"  the Bad Thing asked.

It let go of Thomas, and Thomas dropped on the floor.  The Bad Thing
looked down at him in a mean way that made Thomas angry almost as much
as it made him scared.  Which was funny-weird, because he almost never
was angry.  And this was the first time he was ever angry and scared
both at the same time.  But the Bad Thing was looking at him like he was
just a bug or some dirt on the floor that had to be made clean.

"Why don't they kill you people at birth?  What're you good for?  Why
don't they kill you at birth and chop you up and make dog food out of
you?"  Thomas had memories of how people, out there in the world, looked
at him that way or said mean things, and how Julie always Told Them OfF.
She said Thomas didn't have to be nice to people like that, said he
could tell them they were Being Rude.  Now Thomas was angry like he had
Every Right To Be, and even if Julie never told him he could be angry
about these things, he probably would be angry anyway, because some
things you just knew were right or wrong.

The Bad Thing kicked him in the leg, and was going to kick him again,
you could tell, but a noise was made at the window.  Some of the aides
were at the window.  They broke a little square of glass and reached
through, wanting to find the lock.

When the glass made a breaking sound, the Bad Thing turned from Thomas
and held its hands up at the window, like it was asking the aides to
stop wanting in.  But Thomas knew what it was going to do was make the
blue light.

Thomas wanted to warn the aides, but be figured nobody would hear him or
listen to him until it was too late.  So while the Bad Thing's back was
turned, he crawled across the floor, away from the Bad Thing, even if
crawling hurt, even if he had to go through spots of Derek's blood, all
wet, and it made him sick on top of being angry and scared.

Blue light.  Very bright.

Something exploded.

He beard glass falling and worse, like maybe not just the whole window
blew out on the aides but part of the wall too.

People screamed.  Most of the screams cut off quick-like, but one of
them went on, it was real bad, like somebody out in dark past the
blown-up window was made to hurt even worst than Thomas.

Thomas didn't look back because he was all the way around the side of
Derek's bed now, where he couldn't see the wind anyway from where he was
on the floor.  And, besides, he knew what he wanted now, where he wanted
to go, and he had get there before the Bad Thing got interested in him
again Quick-like, he crawled to the top end of the bed and look up and
saw Derek's arm hanging over the side, blood running down under his
shirtsleeve and across his hand and drip-d dripping off his fingers.  He
didn't want to touch a dead person not even a dead person he liked.  But
this was what he had do, and he was used to having to do all sorts of
things wished he didn't-that was what life was like.  So he grabbed the
edge of the bed and pulled himself up as fast as he could trying not to
feel the bad hurt in his back and in his kicking leg, because feeling it
would make him stiff and slow.  Deryk was right there, eyes open, mouth
open, blood-wet, so sad, scary, on top of the pictures of his folks that
fell off the table still dead, off for always and ever to the Bad Place.
Thomas grabbed the scissors sticking out of Derek, pulled them loo
telling himself it was okay because Derek couldn't feel an thing now, or
ever.

"You!"  the Bad Thing said, Thomas turned to see where the Bad Thing
was, and when it was was right behind him, all the way around the bed,
coming at him.  So he shoved the scissors at it, hard as he could and
the Bad Thing's face made a surprised look.  The scissors went in the
front of the Bad Thing's shoulder.  The Bad Thing looked even more
surprised.  The blood came.

Letting go of the scissors, Thomas said,

"For Derek," Thomas said, "for me.', He wasn't sure what would happen,
but he figured that making the blood come would hurt the Bad Thing and
maybe it dead, like it made Derek dead.  Across the room where the
window wasn't any more and where part of there wasn't any more, some
smoke coming from the broken end of things.  He figured he was going to
run over there and through the hole, even if the night was out there on
the other side.

But he never figured on what did happen, because the Bad Thing acted
like the scissors weren't even in it, like blood wasn't being let loose
from it, and it grabbed him and lifted him up again.  It slammed him
into Derek's dresser, which was a lot more hurt than the wall because
the dresser was made with knobs and edges the wall didn't have.

He heard something crack in him, heard something tear.  But the funny
thing was, he wasn't crying any more and didn't want to cry any more,
like he'd used up all the tears in himself The Bad Thing put its face
close to Thomas's face, so their eyes were only a couple inches apart.
He didn't like looking in the Bad Thing's eyes.  They were scary.  They
were blue, but it was like they were really dark, like under the blue
was a lot of stuff as black as the night out past the gone window.

But the other funny thing was, he wasn't as scared as he was a while
ago, like he'd used up all his being scared just like he'd used up his
tears.  He looked in the Bad Thing's eyes, and he saw all that big dark,
darkness.  The dark that came over the world each day when the sun went
away, and he knew it was wanting to make him dead, going to make him
dead, and that was okay.  He was not so afraid of being made dead as he
always thought he would be.  It was still a Bad Place, death, and he
wished he didn't have to go there, but he had a funny-nice feeling about
the Bad Place all of a sudden, a feeling that maybe it wouldn't be so
lonely over there as he always figured it was, not even as lonely as it
was on this side.  He felt maybe someone was over there who loved him,
someone who loved him more than even Julie loved him, even more than
their dad used to love him, someone who was all bright, no dark at all,
so bright you could only look at Him sideways.

The Bad Thing held Thomas against the dresser with one hand, and with
its other hand it pulled the scissors out of itself.

Then it put the scissors in Thomas.

This light started to fill up Thomas, this light that loved him, and he
knew he was going away.  He hoped when he was all gone, Julie would know
how brave he was right at the end, how he stopped crying and stopped
being scared and fought back.  And then all of a sudden he remembered he
hadn't sent a warning to Bobby that the Bad Thing might be coming for
them, too, and he started to do that.

-the scissors went in again Then he all of a sudden knew something even
more important he had to do.  He had to let Julie know that the Bad
Place was not so bad, after all, there was a light over there that love
you, you could tell.  She needed to know about it because deep down she
really didn't believe it.  She figured it was all dark and lonely the
way Thomas once figured it was, so she counted each clock tick and
worried about all she had to do before he time ran out, all she had to
learn and see and feel and get, a she had to do for Thomas and for Bobby
so they'd be ok if Something Happened To Her.

-and the scissors went in again And she was happy with Bobby, but she
was never going to be real happy until she knew she didn't have to be so
angry about everything ending in a big dark.  She was so nice it was
hard to figure she was angry inside, but she was.  Thomas only figured
it out now, as the light was filling him up, figured out how terrible
angry Julie was.  She was angry that all the hard work and all the hope
and all the dreams and all the trying and doing and loving didn't matter
in the end because you were sooner or later made dead forever.

-the scissors If she knew about the light, she could stop being angry
deep down.  So Thomas sent that, too, along with a warning, an with
three last words to her and to Bobby, words of his own all three things
at once, hoping they wouldn't get mixed up: The Bad Thing's coming, look
out, the Bad Thing, there  light that loves you, the Bad Thing, I love
you too, and there  light, there's a light, THE BAD THING'S COMING AT
8:15 they were on the Foothill Freeway, rocketing toward the junction
with the Ventura Freeway, which they would follow across the San
Fernando Valley almost to the ocean before turning north toward Oxnard,
Ventura, and eventually Santa Barbara.  Julie knew she should slow down,
but she couldn't.  Speed relieved her tension a little; if she stayed
even close to the fiftY-five-mile-an-hour limit, she was pretty sure
that she would start to scream before they were past Burbank.

A Benny Goodman tape was on the stereo.  The exuberant melodies and
syncopated rhythms seemed in time and sympathy with the headlong rush of
the car; and if they had been in a movie, Goodman's sounds would have
been perfect background music to the tenebrous panorama of
light-speckled night hills through which they passed from city to city,
suburb to suburb.

She knew why she was so tense.  In a way she could never have
anticipated, The Dream was within their grasp they could lose everything
as they reached for it.  Everything.  Hope.

Each other.  Their lives.

Sitting in the seat beside her, Bobby trusted her so implicitly that he
could doze at more than eighty miles an hour, even though he knew that
she, too, had slept only three hours last night.  From time to time she
glanced at him, just because it felt good to have him there.

He did not yet understand why they were going north to check out the
Pollard family, stretching their obligation to the client beyond reason,
but his bafflement sprang from the fact that he was nearly as good a man
as he appeared to be.  He sometimes bent the rules and broke the laws on
behalf of their clients, but he was more scrupulous in his personal life
than anyone Julie had ever known.  She had been with him once when a
newspaper-vending machine gave him a copy of the Sunday Los Angeles
Times, then malfunctioned and returned three of his four quarters to
him, whereupon he had repaid all three into the coin slot, even though
that same machine had malfunctioned to his disadvantage on other
occasions over the years and was into him for a couple of bucks.

"Yeah, well," he'd said, blushing when she had laughed at his
goody-goody deed,

"maybe the machine can be crooked and still live with itself, but I
can't."  Julie could have told him that they were hanging with the
Pollard case because they saw a once-in-a-lifetime shot at really big
bucks, the Main Chance for which every hustler in the world was looking
and which most of them would never find.

Frank had shown them all that cash the From the moment of flight bag and
told them about the second cache back at the motel, they were locked in
like rats in a maze, drawn forward by the smell of cheese, even though
each of them had taken a turn at protesting any interest in the game.
When Frank came back to that hospital room from God-knew_where, with
another three hundred thousand, neither she nor Bobby even 7 I raised
the issue of illegality, though it was by that time longer possible to
pretend that Frank was entirely an innocent By then the smell of cheese
was too strong to be resisted a all.  They were plunging ahead because
they saw the chance to use Frank to cash out of the rat race and buy
into The Dream sooner than they had expected.  They were willing to use
dirty money and questionable means to get to their desire end, more
willing than they could admit to each other, though Julie supposed it
could be said in their favor that they were not yet so greedy that they
could simply steal the money an the diamonds from Frank and abandon him
to the mercy of his psychotic brother; or maybe even their sense of duty
t their client was a lie now, a virtue they could point to late when
they tried to justify, to themselves, their other less-than noble acts
and impulses.

She could have told him all that, but she didn't, because she did not
want to argue with him.  She had to let him figure i out at his own
pace, accept it in his own way.  If she tried to tell him before he was
able to understand it, he'd deny what she said.  Even if he admitted to
a fraction of the truth, he' trot out an argument about the rightness of
The Dream, the basic morality of it, and use that to justify the means
to the end.  But she didn't think a noble end could remain purely noble
if arrived at by immoral means.  And though she could not turn away from
this Main Chance, she worried that when they achieved The Dream it would
be sullied, not what it might have been.

Yet she drove on.  Fast.  Because speed relieved some of he fear and
tension.  It numbed caution too.  And without caution she was less
likely to retreat from the dangerous confrontation with the Pollard
family that seemed inevitable if they were to seize the opportunity to
obtain immense and liberating wealth They were in a clearing in traffic,
with nothing close behind them and trailing the nearest forward car by
about a quarter of a mile, when Bobby cried out and sat up in his seat
as i warning her of an imminent collision.  He jerked forward, pulling
the shoulder harness taut, and put his hands on his head as though
stricken by a sudden migraine.

Frightened, she let up on the accelerator, lightly tapped the brake
pedal, and said,

"Bobby, what is it?"  In a voice coarsened by fear and sharpened by
urgency speaking above the music of Benny Goodman, he said,

"Bathing, the Bad Thing, look out, there's a light, there's a light that
loves you-" CANDY LOOKED down at the bloody body at his feet and knew
that he should not have killed Thomas.  Instead, he should have taken
him away to a private place and tortured the answers out of him even if
it took hours for the dummy to remember everything Candy needed to know.
It could even have been fun.

But he was in a rage greater than any he had ever known, and he was less
in control of himself than at any time in his life since the day he had
found his mother's dead body.  He wanted vengeance not only for his
mother but for himself and for everyone in the world who ever deserved
revenge and never got it.  God had made him an instrument of revenge,
and now Candy longed desperately to fulfill his purpose as he had never
fulfilled it before.  He yearned not merely to tear open the throat and
drink the blood of one sinner, but of a great multitude of sinners.  If
ever his rage was to be dissipated, he needed not only to drink blood
but to become drunk on it, bathe in it, wade through rivers of it, stand
on land saturated with it.  He wanted his mother to free him from all
the rules that had restricted his rage before, wanted God to turn him
loose.

He heard sirens in the distance, and knew that he must go soon.

Hot pain throbbed in his shoulder, where the scissors had parted muscle
and scraped bone, but he would deal with that when he traveled.  In
reconstituting himself, he could easily remake his flesh whole and
healthy.

Stalking through the debris that littered the floor, he looked for
something that might give him a clue to the whereabouts of either the
Julie or the Bobby of whom Thomas had spoken.  They might know who
Thomas had been and why he had possessed a gift that not even Candy's
blessed mother had been able to impart.

He touched various objects and pieces of furniture, but all he could
extract from them were images of Thomas and Derek and some of the aides
and nurses who took care of them.  Then he saw a scrapbook lying open on
the floor, beside the table on which he had butchered Derek.  The open
pages were of all kinds of pictures that had been pasted in lines and
peculiar patterns.  He picked the book up and leafed through wondering
what it was, and when he tried to see the face the last person who had
handled it, he was rewarded with someone other than a dummy or a nurse.

A hard-looking man.  Not as tall as Candy but almost solid.

The sirens were less than a mile away now, louder by second.

Candy let his right hand glide over the cover of the scrapebook, seeking
...  seeking...

Sometimes he could sense only a little, sometimes a lot.  T time he had
to be successful, or this room was going to be dead end in his search
for the meaning of the dummy's pow Seeking...

He received a name.  Clint.

Clint had sat in Derek's chair sometime during the afternoon, paging
through this odd collection Of pictures.

When he tried to see where Clint had gone, after leaving the room, he
saw a Chevy that Clint was driving on the freeway then a place called
Dakota & Dakota.  Then the Chevy again on a freeway at night, and then a
small house in a place call Placentia.

The approaching sirens were very close now, probably coming up the
driveway into the Cielo Vista parking lot.

Candy threw the book down.  He was ready to go.

He had only one more thing to do before he teleported When he had
discovered that Thomas was a dummy, and who he had realized that Cielo
Vista was a place full of them, had been angered and offended by the
home's existence.

He held his hands two feet apart, palm facing palm.  Sky-blue light
glowed between them.

He remembered how neighbors and other people had talked about his
sisters-and also about him when, as a boy, he had been kept out of
school because of his problems.  Violet an Verbina looked and acted
mentally deficient, and they probably did not care if people called them
retards.  Ignorant people labeled him retarded, too, because they
thought he was excused from school for being as learning disabled and
strange as his sisters.  (Only Frank attended classes like a normal
child.) The light began to coalesce into a ball.  As more power poured
out of his hands and into the ball, it acquired a deeper shade of blue
and seemed to take on substance, as if it were a solid object floating
in the air.

Candy had been bright, with no learning disabilities at all.  His mother
taught him to read, write, and do math; so he got angry when he
overheard people say he was a deadhead.  He had been excused from school
for other reasons, of course, mainly because of the sex thing.  When he
got older and bigger, nobody called him retarded or made jokes about
him, at least not within his hearing.

The sapphire-blue sphere looked almost as solid as a genuine sapphire,
but as big as a basketball.  It was nearly ready.

Having been unjustly tagged with the retarded label, Candy had not grown
up with sympathy for the genuinely disabled, but with an intense
loathing for them that he hoped would make it clear to even ignorant
people that he definitely was not-and never had been-one of them.  To
think such a thing of him-or of his sisters, for that matter-was an
insult to his sainted mother, who was incapable of bringing a moron into
the world.

He cut off the flow of power and took his hands away from the sphere.
For a moment he stared at it, smiling, thinking about what it would do
to this offensive place.

Through the missing window and the partially shattered walls, the wail
of the sirens became deafening, then suddenly subsided from a
high-pitched shriek to a low growl that spiraled toward silence.

"Help's here, Thomas," he said, and laughed.

He put one hand against the sap hire sphere and gave it a shove.  It
shot across the room as if it were a ballistic missile fired from its
silo.  It smashed through the wall behind Derek's bed, leaving a ragged
hole as big as anything a cannonball could have made, through the wall
beyond that, and through every additional wall that stood before it,
spewing flames as it went, setting fire to everything along its path.

Candy heard people screaming and a hard explosion, as he did a fadeout
on his way to the house in Placentia.

BOBBY STOOD at the side of the freeway, holding on to the open car door,
gasping for breath.  He had been sure he was going to throw up, but the
urge had passed.

"Are you all right?"  Julie asked anxiously.

"I...  think so.  Traffic shot past.  Each vehicle was trailed by a wake
of wind and a roar that gave Bobby the peculiar feeling that he a Julie
and the Toyota were still moving, doing eighty-five with him holding on
to the open door and her with a hand on his shoulder, magically keeping
their balance and avoiding road burn as they dragged their feet along
the pavement, with body driving.

The dream had seriously unsettled and disoriented him.

"Not a dream, really," he told her.  He continued to keep his head down,
peering at loose gravel on the shoulder of the highway, half expecting a
return of the cramping nausea.

"Not like the dream I had before, about us a the jukebox and the ocean
of acid."

"But about 'the bad thing' again."

"Yeah.  You couldn't call it a dream, though, because it just this..  -
this burst of words, inside my head."

"From where?"

"I don't know."  He dared to lift his head, and though a whirl of
dizziness swept through him, the nausea did not return.

He said,

"'Bad thing...  look out...  there's a light that loves You.  - -." I
can't remember it all.  It was so strong, so hard like somebody shouting
at me through a bullhorn that pressed against my ear.  Except that's not
right, either, because I didn't really hear the words, they were just
there, in my head But they felt loud, if that makes any sense.  And
there were images, like in a dream.  Instead there were these feelings,
as strong as they were confused.  Fear and joy, anger and forgiveness...
and right at the end of it, this strange sense of peace that I...  can't
describe."  A Peterbilt thundered toward them, towing the biggest
trailer the law allowed.  Sweeping out of the night behind its blazing
headlights, it looked like a leviathan swimming up from a deep marine
trench, all raw power and cold rage, with a hunger that could never be
satisfied.  For some reason, as it boomed past them, Bobby thought of
the man he had seen on the beach at Punaluu, and he shuddered.

Julie said,

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"  He nodded.

"A little dizzy.  That's all."

"What now?"  He looked at her.

"What else?  We go on to Santa Barbara.

El Encanto Heights, bring this thing to an end...  somehow."  CANDY
ARRIVED in the archway between a living room and dining room.  No one
was in either place.

He heard a buzzing sound farther back in the house, and after a moment
he identified it was an electric razor.  It stopped.  Then he heard
water running in a sink, and the drone of a bath room exhaust fan.

He intended to head straight for the hall and the bath, take the man by
surprise.  But he heard a rustle of paper from the opposite direction.

He crossed the dining room and stepped into the kitchen doorway.  It was
smaller than the kitchen in his mother's house, but it was as spotlessly
clean and orderly as his mother's kitchen had not been since her death.

A woman in a blue dress was sitting at the table, her back to him.  She
was leaning over a magazine, turning the pages one after the other, as
if looking for something of interest to read.

Candy possessed a far greater control of his telekinetic talents than
Frank enjoyed, and in particular could teleport more efficiently and
swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and less noise from
molecular resistance.  Nevertheless he was surprised that she had not
gotten up to investigate, the sounds he had made during arrival had been
only one room away from her and, surely, odd enough to prick her!"
curiosity.

She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to where He could not
see much of her from behind.  Her hair thick, lustrous, and so black it
seemed to have been spun from the same loom as the night.  Her shoulders
and back were muscular.  Her legs, which were both to one side of the
chair crossed at the ankles, were shapely.  If he had been a man with
any interest in sex, he Supposed he would have been excited by the curve
of her calves.

Wondering what she looked like-and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to
know how her blood would taste stepped out of the open doorway and took
three steps to her.  He made no effort to be silent, but she did not
look up.

The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her
hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of the chair.

He turned her around and was instantly excited by her.

He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, trimness
of her waist, the fullness of her breasts.  Though beautiful, it was not
even her face that electrified him.  Something else.  A quality in her
gray eyes.  Call it vitality.  She was more alive than most people,
vibrant.

She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or an then struck him
furiously with both fists.  She pounded his chest, battered his face.

Vitality!  Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, her
vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of sexual charms.

He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-h of the
bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her
without drawing the attention of the man long as he could prevent her
from screaming.  He struck her on the side of the head with his fist,
hammered her before she could scream.  She slumped against him, not
unconscious dazed.

Shaking with the anticipation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back,
on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge He spread her legs
and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting
as that.  As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him
in confusion, still rattlebrained from the blows she had taken.  Then
her eyes began to clear.  He saw horrified comprehension return to her,
and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which
was clean and sweet, intoxicating.

She thrashed beneath him.

She was so alive.  So wonderfully alive.  For a while.

WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and
Julie's office and offered some to Hal.

Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee
table, Hal said,

"You know what that stuff does to your arteries?"  :'Why's everyone so
concerned about my arteries today?"

'You're such a nice young man.  We'd hate to see you dead before you're
thirty.  Besides, we'd always wonder what clothes you might've worn
next, if you'd lived."

"Not anything like what you're wearing, I assure you."  Hal leaned over
and looked in the box that Lee held down to him.

"Looks pretty good.  Rule of thumb-any pizza they'll bring to you,
they're selling service instead of good food.  But this doesn't look bad
at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard
begins."  Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and
put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate.

"There."

"You're not going to give me half',."

"What about the cholesterol?"

"Hell, cholesterol's just a little animal fat, it isn't arsenic."  WHEN
THE woman's strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her.
Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch
another drop of it.  The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him.
He remembered his sisters' cats, eating their own each time one of the
pack died, and he grimaced.

Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard the door open
farther back in the house.  Footsteps approached.  Candy quickly circled
the table, putting it and the woman between himself and the doorway to
the dining room From the vision induced by the dummy's scrapbook of
pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to kill as most
people were.  He preferred to put a little distance between them, give
himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by
surprise.

Clint appeared in the doorway.  Except for his outfit slacks, navy-blue
blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt looked the same as the psychic
impression he had left on the book.  He had pumped a lot of iron in his
time.  His hair thick, black, and combed straight back from his
forehead.

He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes Excited
by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy
watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next.  There
were all sorts of ways it could and not one of them would be dull.

Clint did not react as Candy expected.  He did not show surprise when he
saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table he did not seem horrified,
shattered by the loss of her, or raged.  Something major changed in his
stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting
under the earth's crust.

Finally he met Candy's gaze, and said,

"You."  The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling For a
moment.  Candy could think of no way this man could know him-then he
remembered Thomas.

The possibility that Thomas had told this man-and perhaps others-about
Candy was most frightening to Candy since his mother's death.  His
service in God's army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret
should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family.

mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud doing God's
work, but that his pride would lead him to a if he boasted of his divine
favor to others.

"Satan," she told him, "constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in
Garrny-which is what you are-and when he finds them, destroys them with
worms that eat them alive from wit worms fat as snakes, and he rains
fire on them too.  If you can't keep the secret, you'll die and go to
Hell for your big mouth."

"Candy," Clint said.

The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had
been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble,
though he had not broken the code of silence himself.

He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had
tilted his head and said,

"Who?  Who did you say?  What was his name?  Candy?  Candy who?"  As
furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table,
wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas.  He was determined
to break the man, make him talk before killing him.

In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman's
murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired
two shots.

He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy
heard.  The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest,
pitching him backward.  Fortunately he sustained no damage to his head
or heart.  If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the
mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his
mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate
the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport,
leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace.  And if his heart had been
stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could
dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he'd stood.  Those
were the only wounds that might finish him.  He was many things, but he
was not immortal; so he was grateful to God for letting him get out of
that kitchen and back to his mother's house alive.

THE VENTURA FREEWAY.  Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had
earlier.  On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw's "Night mare."  Bobby brooded,
staring through the side window at the nightscape.  He could not stop
thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a
bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire.  He had come to terms
with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad
dreams.  Though exceptionally vivid, almost more real than real life,
there had been nothing uncanny about it-or so he had convinced himself.
But this was different.  He could believe that these urgent, lava-hot
words had erupted from some subconscious.  A dream, with complex
Freudian message couched in elaborate scenes and symbols-yes, that was
understandable; after all, the subconscious dealt in euphemisms a
metaphors.  But this wordburst had been blunt, direct, like telegraph
delivered on a wire plugged directly into his cerebral cortex.

When he wasn't brooding, Bobby was fidgeting.  Because Thomas.  For some
reason, the longer he dwelt on the blaze of words the more Thomas
slipped into his thoughts.  He could see connection between the two, so
he tried to put Thomas out of his mind and concentrate on turning up an
explanation for thee experience.  But Thomas gently, insistently
returned, again and again.  After a while Bobby got the uneasy feeling
there was a link between the wordburst and Thomas, though he had no
ghost of an idea what it might be.

Worse, as the miles rolled up on the odometer and they reached the
western end of the valley, Bobby began to understand that Thomas was in
danger.  And because of me and Julie Bobby thought.

Danger from whom, from what?

The biggest danger that Bobby and Julie faced, right now was Candy
Pollard.  But even that jeopardy lay in the future for Candy didn't know
about them yet; he was not aware that they were working on Frank's
behalf, and he might never become aware of it, depending on how things
went in Santa Barbara and El Encanto Heights.  Yes, he had seen Bobby on
the beach at Punaluu, with Frank, but he had no way of knowing who Bobby
was.  Ultimately, even if Candy became aware Dakota & Dakota's
association with Frank, there was no way that Thomas could be drawn into
the affair; Thomas was other, separate part of their lives.  Right?

"Something wrong?"  Julie said as she pulled the Toyota to the left, to
pass a big rig hauling Coors.

He could see nothing to be gained by telling her that Thomas might be in
danger.  She would be upset, worried.  And for what?  He was just
letting his vivid imagination run away with him.  Thomas was perfectly
safe down there in Cielo Vista.

"Bobby, what's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Why're you fidgeting?"

"Prostate trouble."

CHANNEL No. 5, a softly glowing lamp, cozy rose-patterned fabrics and
wallpaper...

He laughed with relief when he materialized in the bedroom, the bullets
left behind in that kitchen in Placentia, over a hundred miles away. His
wounds had knitted up as if they had never existed.  He had lost perhaps
an ounce of blood and a few flecks of tissue, because one of the bullets
had passed through him and out his back, carrying that material with it
before he'd transported himself beyond the revolver's range. Everything
else was as it should be, however, and his flesh did not harbor even the
memory of pain.

He stood in front of the dresser for half a minute, breathing deeply of
the perfume that wafted up from the saturated handkerchief.  The scent
gave him courage and reminded him of the abiding need to make them pay
for his mother's murder, all of them, not just Frank but the whole
world, which had conspired against her.

He looked at his face in the mirror.  The gray-eyed woman's blood was no
longer on his chin and lips; he had left it behind him, as he might
leave water behind when teleporting out of a rainstorm.  But the taste
of it was still in his mouth.  And his reflection was without a doubt
that of vengeance personified.

Depending on the element of surprise and his ability to target his point
of arrival precisely now that he was familiar with the kitchen, he
returned to Clint's house.  He intended to enter at the dining-room
doorway, immediately behind the man, directly opposite the point from
which he had dematerialized.

Either the experience of being shot had shaken him more than he
realized, or the rage jittering through him had passed the critical
point at which it interfered with his concentration.  Whatever the
reason, he did not arrive where he intended, but by the door to the
garage, one-quarter instead of halfway around the room from his last
position, to the right of Clint and not near enough to rush him and
seize the gun before it could be fired.

Except Clint was not present.  And the woman's body had been removed
from the table.  Only the blood remained as proof that she perished
there.

Candy could not have been gone more than a minute-time he had spent in
his mother's room, plus a couple of seconds in transit each way.  He
expected to return to find Clint bent over the corpse, either grieving
or checking desperately for a pulse.  But as soon as he realized Candy
was gone, the man must have taken the body in his arms and...  And who
He must have fled the house, of course, hoping against hope that a faint
thread of life remained unbroken in the worn getting her out of the way
in case Candy returned.

Cursing softly-then immediately begging his mother's and God's
forgiveness for his foul language-Candy tried the door into the garage.
It was locked.  If he had left by that exit, Clint wouldn't have paused
to lock up behind himself.

He hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room,ward the foyer of
the living room, to check out the front lawn and the street.  But he
heard a noise from deeper in the house and halted before he reached the
front door.  He changed direction, cautiously following the hallway back
to the bedroom A light was on in one of those rooms.  He eased to the
door and risked a glance inside.

Clint had just put the woman on the queen-size bed.  Candy watched, the
man pulled her skirt down over her legs.  He still had the revolver in
one hand.

For the Second time in less than an hour, Candy heard faint away sirens
swelling in the night.  The neighbors probably had heard the gunfire and
called the police.

Clint saw him in the doorway but did not bring up the question.  He did
not say anything, either, and the expression on his stone face remained
unchanged.  He seemed like a deaf-mute.  the strangeness of the man's
demeanor made Candy nervous and uncertain.

He thought there was a pretty good chance that Clint had emptied the gun
at him in the kitchen, even though he had telaPorted out of there with
the impact of the second slug.  Most likely, he had fired every round
reflexively, his trigger finger ruled by rage or fear or whatever he was
feeling.  He could not have carried the woman into the bedroom and
reloaded the gun, too, in the minute or so that Candy had been gone,
which meant Candy might be in no danger if he just walked up to the guy
and took the weapon away from him.

But he stayed in the doorway.  Either of those two shots could have been
dead-center in his heart.  The power within him was great, but he could
not exercise it quickly enough to vaporize an oncoming bullet.

instead of dealing with Candy in any fashion, the man turned away from
him, walked around the foot of the bed to the other side, and stretched
out beside the woman.

"What the hell?"  Candy said aloud.

Clint took hold of her dead hand.  His other hand held the.38 revolver.
He turned his head on the pillow to look toward her, and his eyes
glistened with what might have been unshed tears.  He put the muzzle of
the gun under his chin, and annihilated himself.

Candy was so stunned that he was unable to move for a moment or think
what to do next.  He was jolted out of his paralysis by the ululant
sirens, and realized that the trail from Thomas to Bobby and Julie,
whoever they were, might end here if he did not discover what link the
dead man on the bed shared with them.  If he ever hoped to learn who
Thomas had been, how Clint had known his name, or how many others knew
of him, if he wanted to learn how much danger he was in and how he might
slide out of it, he couldn't waste this opportunity.

He hurried to the bed, rolled the dead man onto his side, and withdrew
the wallet from his pants pocket.  He flipped it open and saw the
private investigator's license.  Opposite it, in another plastic window,
was a business card for Dakota & Dakota.

Candy remembered a vague image of the Dakota & Dakota offices, which had
come to him in Thomas's room when he had obtained a vision of Clint from
the scrapbook.  There was an address on the card.  And below the name
Clint Karaghiosis, in smaller type, were the names Robert and Julia
Dakota.

Outside, the sirens had died.  Someone was pounding on the front door.
Two voices shouted,

"Police!"  Candy threw the wallet aside and took the gun out of the dead
man's hand.  He broke open the cylinder.  It was a five shot weapon, and
all of the chambers were filled with expended cartridges.  Clint had
fired four rounds in the kitchen, but even in his moment of vengeful
fury, he had possessed enough control to save the last bullet for
himself.

"Just because of a woman?"  Candy said uncomprehendingly, as if the dead
man might answer him.

"Because he couldn't get sex from her any more now?  Why does sex matter
so much?  Couldn't you get sex from another woman?  Why was sex with
this one so important, you didn't want to live without it?"  They were
still pounding on the door.  Someone spoke through a bullhorn, but Candy
didn't pay attention to what was being said.

He dropped the gun and wiped his hand on his pants, cause he suddenly
felt unclean.  The dead man had handled it, and the dead man seemed to
have been obsessed with one question, the world was a cesspool of lust
and bauchery, and Candy was glad that God and his mother had spared him
from the sick desires that seemed to infect nearly everyone else.

He left that house of sinners.

SLUMPED ON the sofa, Hal Yamataka had a slice of pizza in one hand and
the MacDonald novel in the other, when he heard the hollow flowerlike
warble.  He dropped both to his feet.

the book and the food, and shot

"Frank?"  The half-open door swung slowly inward, not because it was
being pushed open by anyone but because a sudden draft, sweeping in from
the reception lounge, was strong enough to move it.

"Frank?"  Hal repeated.

As he crossed the room, the sound faded and the draft died.  But by the
time he reached the doorway, the unmelodiclar could teleport more
efficiently and swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and
less noise from molecular resistance.  Nevertheless he was surprised
that she had not gotten up to investigate, the sounds he had made during
arrival had been only one room away from her and, surely, odd enough to
prick her!" curiosity.

She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to where He could not
see much of her from behind.  Her hair thick, lustrous, and so black it
seemed to have been spun from the same loom as the night.  Her shoulders
and back were muscular.  Her legs, which were both to one side of the
chair crossed at the ankles, were shapely.  If he had been a man with
any interest in sex, he Supposed he would have been excited by the curve
of her calves.

Wondering what she looked like-and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to
know how her blood would taste stepped out of the open doorway and took
three steps to her.  He made no effort to be silent, but she did not
look up.

The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her
hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of the chair.

He turned her around and was instantly excited by her.

He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, trimness
of her waist, the fullness of her breasts.  Though beautiful, it was not
even her face that electrified him.  Something else.  A quality in her
gray eyes.  Call it vitality.  She was more alive than most people,
vibrant.

She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or an then struck him
furiously with both fists.  She pounded his chest, battered his face.

Vitality!  Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, her
vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of sexual charms.

He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-h of the
bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her
without drawing the attention of the man long as he could prevent her
from screaming.  He struck her on the side of the head with his fist,
hammered her before she could scream.  She slumped against him, not
unconscious dazed.

Shaking with the anticipation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back,
on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge He spread her legs
and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting
as that.  As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him
in confusion, still rattlebrained from the blows she had taken.  Then
her eyes began to clear.  He saw horrified comprehension return to her,
and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which
was clean and sweet, intoxicating.

She thrashed beneath him.

She was so alive.  So wonderfully alive.  For a while.

WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and
Julie's office and offered some to Hal.

Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee
table, Hal said,

"You know what that stuff does to your arteries?"  :'Why's everyone so
concerned about my arteries today?"

'You're such a nice young man.  We'd hate to see you dead before you're
thirty.  Besides, we'd always wonder what clothes you might've worn
next, if you'd lived."

"Not anything like what you're wearing, I assure you."  Hal leaned over
and looked in the box that Lee held down to him.

"Looks pretty good.  Rule of thumb-any pizza they'll bring to you,
they're selling service instead of good food.  But this doesn't look bad
at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard
begins."  Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and
put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate.

"There."

"You're not going to give me half',."

"What about the cholesterol?"

"Hell, cholesterol's just a little animal fat, it isn't arsenic."  WHEN
THE woman's strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her.
Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch
another drop of it.  The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him.
He remembered his sisters' cats, eating their own each time one of the
pack died, and he grimaced.

Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard the door open
farther back in the house.  Footsteps approached.  Candy quickly circled
the table, putting it and the woman between himself and the doorway to
the dining room From the vision induced by the dummy's scrapbook of
pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to kill as most
people were.  He preferred to put a little distance between them, give
himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by
surprise.

Clint appeared in the doorway.  Except for his outfit slacks, navy-blue
blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt looked the same as the psychic
impression he had left on the book.  He had pumped a lot of iron in his
time.  His hair thick, black, and combed straight back from his
forehead.

He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes Excited
by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy
watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next.  There
were all sorts of ways it could and not one of them would be dull.

Clint did not react as Candy expected.  He did not show surprise when he
saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table he did not seem horrified,
shattered by the loss of her, or raged.  Something major changed in his
stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting
under the earth's crust.

Finally he met Candy's gaze, and said,

"You."  The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling For a
moment.  Candy could think of no way this man could know him-then he
remembered Thomas.

The possibility that Thomas had told this man-and perhaps others-about
Candy was most frightening to Candy since his mother's death.  His
service in God's army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret
should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family.

mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud doing God's
work, but that his pride would lead him to a if he boasted of his divine
favor to others.

"Satan," she told him, "constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in
Garrny-which is what you are-and when he finds them, destroys them with
worms that eat them alive from wit worms fat as snakes, and he rains
fire on them too.  If you can't keep the secret, you'll die and go to
Hell for your big mouth."

"Candy," Clint said.

The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had
been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble,
though he had not broken the code of silence himself.

He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had
tilted his head and said,

"Who?  Who did you say?  What was his name?  Candy?  Candy who?"  As
furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table,
wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas.  He was determined
to break the man, make him talk before killing him.

In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman's
murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired
two shots.

He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy
heard.  The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest,
pitching him backward.  Fortunately he sustained no damage to his head
or heart.  If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the
mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his
mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate
the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport,
leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace.  And if his heart had been
stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could
dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he'd stood.  Those
were the only wounds that might finish him.  He was many things, but he
was not immortal; so he was grateful to God for letting him get out of
that kitchen and back to his mother's house alive.

THE VENTURA FREEWAY.  Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had
earlier.  On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw's "Night mare."  Bobby brooded,
staring through the side window at the nightscape.  He could not stop
thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a
bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire.  He had come to terms
with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad
dreams.  Thouflown from him, but it had been too short to attract
notice.  The explosion of the glass and the tinny clanging of the blinds
had been loud enough, but the action had been over before anyone could
have located the source of the sound.

A four-lane street encircled the Fashion Island shopping center and also
served the office towers that, like this one, stood on the outer rim.
Apparently, however, no cars had been on it when the man had fallen.

Now two appeared to the left, one behind the other.  Both passed without
slowing.  A row of shrubberies, between the sidewalk and the street,
prevented motorists from seeing the corpse where it lay.  The
office-tower ring of the sprawling complex was clearly not an area that
attracted pedestrians at night, so the dead man might remain
undiscovered until morning.

He looked across the street, at the restaurants and stores that were on
this flank of the mall, five or six hundred yards away.  A few people on
foot, shrunken by distance, moved between the parked cars and the
entrances to the businesses.  No one appeared to have seen anything-and
in fact it would not have been that easy to spot a darkly dressed man
plunging past a mostly dark building, aloft and visible for only seconds
before gravity finished him.

Candy cleared his throat, wincing in pain, and spat toward the dead man
below.

He tasted blood.  This time it was his own.

Turning away from the window, he surveyed the office, wondering where he
would find the answers he sought.  If he could locate Bobby and Julie
Dakota, they might be able to explain Thomas's telepathy and more
important, they might be able to deliver Frank into his hands.

AFTER TWICE responding to an alarm from the radar did and avoiding two
speed traps in the west valley, Julie cranked the Toyota back up to
eighty-five, and they dusted L.A.

off their heels.

A few raindrops spattered the windshield, but the spring rain did not
last.  She switched the wipers off moments after turning them on.

"Santa Barbara in maybe an hour," she said,

"as long cop with a sense of duty doesn't come along."  The back of her
neck ached, and she was deeply weary, she didn't want to trade places
with Bobby; she didn't have the patience to be a passenger tonight.  Her
eyes were sore not heavy; she could not possibly have slept.  The events
of the day had murdered sleep, and alertness was assured by thinking
about what might lie ahead, not just on the highway behind them but in
El Encanto Heights.

Ever since he'd been awakened by what he called the "wordburst," Bobby
had been moody.  She could tell he was worried about something, but he
didn't seem to want to talk about it yet.

After a while, in an obvious attempt to take his mind off wordburst and
whatever gloomy ruminations it had inspired he tried to strike up a
conversation about something different.  He lowered the volume on the
stereo, thereby trating the intended effect of Glenn Miller's "American
trol," and said, "You ever stop to think, four out of our eleven
employees are Asian-Americans?"  She didn't glance away from the road.

"So?"

"So why is that, do you think?"

"Because we hire only first-rate people, and it so happens that four of
the first-rate people who wanted to work for us were Chinese, Japanese,
and Vietnamese."

"That's part of it."

"Just part?"  she said.  "So what's the other part?  You think maybe the
wicked FuManchu turned a mind-control ray us from his secret fortress in
the Tibetan mountains and made us hire ''em?"

"That's part of it too," he said.  "But another part of it is I'm
attracted to the Asian personality.  Or to what people think of when
they think of the Asian personality: intelligence, a high degree of
self-discipline, neatness, a strong sense of tradition and order."

"Those are pretty much traits of everyone who works for us, not just
Jamie, Nguyen, Hal, and Lee.

"I know.  But what makes me so comfortable with Asian Americans is that
I buy into the stereotype of them, I feel everything will go along in an
orderly, stable fashion when I'm working with them, and I need to buy
into the stereotype because...  well, I'm not the kind of guy I've
always thought I was.  You ready to hear something shocking?"

"Always," Julie said.

OFTEN, WHEN Lee Chen was laboring in the computer room, he popped a CD
in his Sony Discman and listened to music through earphones.  He always
kept the door closed to avoid distraction, and no doubt some of his
fellow employees thought he was somewhat antisocial; however, when he
was engaged in the penetration of a complex and well-protected data
network, like the array of police systems he was still plundering, he
needed to concentrate.  Occasionally music distracted him as much as
anything, depending on his mood, but most of the time it was conducive
to his work.  The minimalist New Age piano solos of George Winston were
sometimes just the thing, but more often he needed rock-'n'-roll.
Tonight it was Huey Lewis and The News: "Hip to Be Square" and "The
Power of Love,"

"The Heart of Rock & Roll" and "You Crack Me Up."  Focused intently on
the terminal screen (his window on the mesmerizing world of cyberspace),
with

"Bad Is Bad" pouring into his ears through the headset, he might not
have heard a thing if, in the world outside, God had peeled back the sky
and announced the imminent destruction of the human race.

A COOL DRAFT circulated through the room from the broken window, but
growing frustration generated a compensate heat in Candy.  He moved
slowly around the spacious handling various objects, touching the
furniture, trying to get a vision that would reveal the whereabouts of
Frank.  Thus far he'd had no luck.

He could have pored through the contents of the desk drawers and filing
cabinets, but that would have taken hours,he didn't know where they
might have filed the information he was seeking.  He also realized he
might not recognize right stuff when he found it, for it might be in a
folder ore lope bearing a case name or code that was meaningless to And
though his mother had taught him to read and write, though he had been a
voracious reader just like her-until lost interest in books upon her
death-teaching himself subjects as well as any university could have
done, he never less trusted what his special gifts could reveal to him
more than anything he might find on paper, Besides, he had already
stepped into the lounge, obtain the Dakotas' home address and phone
number, and called to see if they were there.  An answering machine had
picked on the third ring, and he had left no message.  He didn't want to
know where the Dakotas lived, where they might up in time; he needed to
know where they were now, this minute, because he was in a fever to get
at them and wring ans from them.

He picked up a third Scotch-and-soda glass.  They were over the room.
The psychic residue on the tumbler gave an instant, vivid image of a man
named Jackie Jaxx, and pitched it waside in anger.  It bounced off the
sofa, onto the carpet, without shattering.

This Jaxx person left a colorful and noisy psychic impress everywhere in
his wake, the way a dog with poor bladder control would mark each step
on his route with a dribble of stiing urine.  Candy sensed that Jaxx was
currently with a large number of people, at a party in Newport Beach,
and he sensed that trying to find Frank or the Dakotas through i would
be wasted effort.  Even so, if Jaxx had been alone easily taken, Candy
would have gone straight to him slaughtered him, just because the guy's
lingering aura was brassy and annoying.

Either he had not yet found an object that one of the Dakotas had
touched long enough to leave an imprint, or neither of them was the type
who left a rich, lingering psychic residue in his wake.  For reasons
Candy could not fathom, some people were harder to trace than others.

He had always found tracing Frank to be of medium difficulty, but
tonight catching that scent was harder than usual.  Repeatedly he sensed
that Frank had been in the room, but at first he could locate nothing in
which the aura of his brother was coagulated.

Next he turned to the four chairs, beginning with the largest.  When he
skimmed his sensitive fingertips lightly over the upholstery, he
quivered with excitement, for he knew at once that Frank had sat there
recently.  A small tear marred the vinyl on one arm, and when Candy put
his thumb upon the rent, particularly vivid visions of Frank assaulted
him.

Too many visions.  He was rewarded with a whole series of place images,
where Frank had traveled after rising from the chair: the High Sierras;
the apartment in San Diego in which he had lived briefly four years ago;
the rusted front gate of their mother's house on Pacific Hill Road; a
graveyard; a book-lined study in which he'd stayed such a short time
that Candy could get only the vaguest impression of it; Punaluu Beach,
where Candy had nearly caught him....  There were so many images, from
so many travels, layered one atop another, that he could not clearly see
the later stops.

Disgusted, he pushed the chair out of his way and turned to the coffee
table, where two more tumblers stood.  Both contained melted ice and
Scotch.  He picked one up and, had a vision of Julie Dakota.

WHILE JULIE drove toward Santa Barbara as if they were competing in time
trials for the Indianapolis 500, Bobby told her the shocking thing: that
he was not, at heart, the laid-back guy he appeared to be on the
surface; that during his hectic travels with Frank-especially during the
moments when he had been reduced to a disembodied mind and a frantic
whirl of disconnected atoms-he'd discovered within himself a rich vein
of love for stability and order that ran deeper than he could ever have
imagined, a motherlode of stick-in-the-mudness; than delight in swing
music arose more from an appreciation the meticulosity of its structures
than from the dizzyingcal freedom embodied in jazz; that he was not half
the spirited man he'd thought he was...  and far more of a conservative
embracer of tradition that he would have hoped.

"In short," he said,

"all this time when you thought were married to an easy-going
young-James-Gamer you've actually been wed to an any-age-Charles-Bronson
type.

"

"I can live with you anyway, Charlie."

"This is serious.  Sort of I've tipped into my late thirties, no child.
I should've known this about myself a long time a

"You!"  I id."

"Huh?'

"You love order, reason, logic-that's why you got in line.of work where
you could right wrongs, help the innoc punish the bad.  That's why you
share The Dream withso we can get our little family in order, step out
of the!"  of the world as it is these days and buy into some peace
quiet.  That's why you won't let me have the Wurlitzer 95 those bubble
tubes and leaping gazelles are just a little too otic for you."  He was
silent a moment, surprised by her answer.

The lightless vastness of the sea lay to the west.

He said,

"Maybe you're right.  Maybe I've always knew what I am, deep down.  But
then isn't it unnerving that fooled myself with my own act for so long?"

"You haven't.  You're easy-going and a bit of Charles Bronson, which is
a good thing.  Otherwise we probably could communicate at all, since
I've got more Bronson in meanyone but Bronson."

"God, that's true!"

he said, and they both laughed.

The Toyota's speed had declined to under seventy.  She it UP to eighty
and said,

"BObby...  what's really onmind?"

"Thomas."  She glanced at him.

"What about Thomas?"

"Since that wordburst, I can't shake the feeling he's in danger."

"What did that have to do with him?"

"I don't know.  But I'd feel better if we could find a phone and put in
a call to Cielo Vista.  Just to be...  sure."  She let their speed fall
dramatically.  Within three miles they exited the freeway and pulled
into a service station.  There was a full-service lane.  While the
attendant washed their windows, checked the oil, and filled the tank
with premium unleaded, they went inside and used the pay phone.

It was a modern electronic version allowing everything from coin to
credit calls, on the wall next to a rack of snack crackers, candy bars,
and packages of beer nuts.  A condom machine was there, too, right out
in the open, thanks to the social chaos wrought by AIDS.  Using their
AT&T credit card, Bobby called Cielo Vista Care Home in Newport.

It didn't ring or give a busy signal.  He heard an odd series of
electronic sounds, then a recording informed him that the number he had
dialed was temporarily out of service as a result of unspecified line
problems.  The droning voice suggested that he try later.

He dialed the operator, who tried the same number, with the same
results.  She said,

"I'm sorry, sir.  Please call your party later."

"What line problems could they be having?"

"I wouldn't know, sir, but I'm sure service'll be restored soon."  He
had tilted the phone away from his ear, so Julie could lean in and hear
both sides of the exchange.  When he hung UP, he looked at her.  "Let's
go back.  I got this hunch Thomas needs us."

"Go back?  We're little more than half an hour from Santa Barbara now.
Much further to go home."

"He may need us.  It's not a strong hunch, I admit, but it's persistent
and...  weird."

"If he needs help urgently," she said,

"then we'd never get to him in time, anyway.  And if it's not so urgent,
it'll be okay if we go on to Santa Barbara, call again from the motel.
If he's sick or been hurt or something, the extra driving from here to
Santa Barbara and back will only add about an hour."

"Well...

"He's my brother, Bobby.  I care about him as much as you do, and I say
it'll be all right.  I love you, but you've never shown enough talent as
a psychic to make me hysterical a this."  He nodded.

"You're right.  I'm just...  jumpy.  My knees haven't settled down since
all that traveling with Frank."  Back on the highway, a few thing
tendrils of fog were creep in from the sea.  Sprinkles of rain fell
again, then stopped a less than a minute.  The heaviness of the air, and
an indefina but undeniable quality of oppressiveness in the utterly blue
night sky, portended a major storm.

When they had gone a couple of miles, Bobby said, should've called Hal
at the office.  While he's sitting around there waiting for Frank, he
could use some of our contactsthe phone company, the cops, make sure
everything's jake Cielo Vista."

"If the lines are still out when you make the call from motel," Julie
said,

"then you can bother Hal about it."  FROM THE weak psychic residue on
the drinking glass, Can received an image of Julie Dakota that was
recognizablysame face that had seeped from Thomas's mind earlier
inevening-except that it was not as idealized as it had been Thomas's
memory.  With his sixth sense he saw that she had gone home from the
office, to the address he had obtained earlier from the secret's
Rolodex. She hadthere a she ry bee time, then had gone somewhere in a
car with another pers most likely the man named Bobby.  He could see no
more, a he wished that the traces she left behind had been as stro as
those of Jaxx.

He put down the tumbler and decided to go to her hou Though she and
Bobby were not there now, he might be a to find an object that would,
like the liquor glass, lead him a other step or two along their trail.
If he found nothing, could return here and continue his search, assuming
the police had not arrived in response to the discovery of the dead m
outside.

mw LEE SWITCHED off the computer, then cut off the CD player too-Huey
Lewis and The News were in the middle of

"Walking On a Thin Line"-and removed the earphones.

Happy after a long and productive session in the land of silicon and
gallium arsenide, he stood, stretched, yawned, and checked his watch.  A
little after nine.  He'd been at work for twelve hours.

He should have wanted nothing more than to flop in bed and sleep half a
day.  But he figured he'd zip back to his condo, which was ten minutes
from the office, freshen up, and catch some nightlife.  Last week he'd
found a new club, Nuclear Grin, where the music was loud and hard-edgd,
the drinks unwatered, the crowd's politics unconsciously libertarian,
and the women hot.  He wanted to dance a little, drink a little, and
find someone who wanted to screw her brains out.

In this age of new diseases, sex was risky; it sometimes seemed that
drinking from the same glass as someone else was suicidal.  But after a
day in the painstakingly logical microchip universe, you had to get a
little wild, take some risks, dance on the edge of chaos, to get some
balance in your life.

Then he remembered how Frank and Bobby had vanished in front of his
eyes.  He wondered if maybe he hadn't already had enough wildness for
one day.

He picked up the latest printouts.  It was more stuff that he had
gleaned from police records, regarding the decidedly weird behavior of
Mr Blue, who would never need to get a little wild for balance, since he
was already chaos walking around in shoes.  Lee opened the door,
switcfied off the lights, went down the hall and through another door
into the lounge, intending to leave the printouts on Julie's desk and
say goodnight to Hal before splitting.

When he walked into Bobby and Julie's office, it looked like the
National Wrestling Federation had sanctioned a match there between tag
teams of three-hundred-pound hulks.  Furniture was overturned, and
Scotch glasses, some of them broken, were scattered over the floor.
Julie's desk was aslant and askew: tilting on one shattered leg; the top
no longer was properly aligned with the base, as if someone had gone at
it with prybars and hammers.

"Hal?"  No answer.

He gingerly pushed open the door to the adjoining bat

"Hal?"  The bathroom was deserted.

He went to the broken window.  A few small shards of gi still clung to
the frame.  Caught the light.  Jagged.

With one hand against the wall, Lee Chen carefully lea out.  He looked
down.  In a much different tone of voice, he"Hal?" CANDY MATERIALIZED in
the foyer of the Dakotas' house which was dark and silent.  He stood
quietly for a mom head cocked, until he was confident that he was alone.

His throat was healed.  He was whole again, and excited the prospects of
the night.

He began the search from there, putting his hand on doorknob in hope of
finding some of the residue that,lacking physical substance,
nevertheless provided the nourishment for his visions.  He felt nothing,
no doubt partly because the Dakotas had touched it only briefly upon
entering and parting the house.

Of course, a person could handle a hundred items, leaving psychic images
of himself on only one of them, then touch same hundred an hour later
and contaminate every onehis aura.  The reason for that was as
mysterious, to Candy, was so many people's interest in sex.  He remained
as grate to his mother for this talent as he was for all the others,
tracking his prey with psychometry was not always an or infallible
process.

The Dakotas, living room and dining room were unfurnished, which gave
him little to work with, although for so reason the emptiness made him
feel comfortable and at home That response puzzled him.  The rooms in
his mother's house were all furnished-as much with mold and fungus and!"
these days as with chairs, sofas, tables, and lamps; but hedenly
realized that, like the Dakotas, he lived in such a small Percentage of
the house that most of its chambers might as well have been bare,
carpetless, and sealed off.

The Dakotas' kitchen and family room were furnished a obviously lived
in.  Though it was unlikely that they had us the family room during
their brief stop between the office and wherever they had gone from
here, he hoped they might have lingered in the kitchen for a bite of
food or a drink.  But the handles of the cabinets, microwave, oven, and
refrigerator provided him with no images whatsoever.

On his way to the second floor, Candy climbed the steps slowly, letting
his left hand slide searchingly along the oak balustrade.  At several
points along the way, he was rewarded by psychic images that, while
brief and not clear, encouraged him, and led him to believe that he
would find what he needed in their bedroom or bath.

INSTEAD OF immediately dialing 911 to reportmurder of Hal Yamataka, Lee
ran first to the reception and, as he had been trained, removed a small
brown notebo from the back of the bottom drawer on the right side.  For
benefit of employees, like Lee, who did not often get into field and
seldom interfaced directly with the county's many lice agencies but
might one day need to deal with them in emergency, Bobby had composed a
list of some of the office detectives, and administrators who were most
profession reasonable, and reliable in every majorjurisdiction.  The bro
notebook contained a second list of cops to avoid: thosehad an
instinctive dislike for anyone in the private investigation and security
business; those who were just pains in ass in general; and those who
were always on the lookout a little green grease to lubricate the wheels
of justice.  It a testament to the high quality of the county's law
enforcem that the first list was much longer than the second.

According to Bobby and Julie, it was preferable to try manage the
introduction of the police into a situation that quired them, even going
so far as to try to select one of detectives who would show up at the
scene-if it was a scene that needed detectives.  Relying on the luck of
the draw dispatcher's whim was considered unwise.

Lee wondered if he should even call the cops.  He had doubt who had
killed Hal.  Mr. Blue.  Candy.  But also he knew that Bobby would not
want to reveal more about Frank a the case than was truly necessary; the
agency-client privile was not as legally airtight as that of
lawyer-client or doct patient, but it was important too.  Since Julie
and Bobby on the road and temporarily unreachable, Lee could get
guidance on what and how much to say to the police.

But he couldn't let a dead body lie in front of the building, hoping
nobody would notice!  Especially not when the victim was a man he had
known and liked.

Call the cops, then.  But play dumb.

Consulting the notebook, Lee dialed the Newport Beach Police and asked
for Detective Harry Ladshroke, but Ladshroke was off duty.  So was
Detective Janet Heisinger.  Detective Kyle Ostov was available, however,
and when he came on the line he sounded reassuringly big and competent;
his voice was a mellow baritone, and he spoke crisply.

Lee identified himself, aware that his own voice was higher than usual,
almost squeaky, and that he was speaking too fast.

"There's been a...  well, a murder."  Before hee could go on, Ostov
said,

"Jesus, you mean Bobby and Julie know already?  I just found out myself.
It was pushed on to me to tell them, and I was just sitting here, trying
to figure how best to break the news.  I had my hand on the phone, going
to call them, when you rang through.  How're they taking it?"  Confused,
Lee said,

"I don't think they know.  I mean, it must have happened just a few
minutes ago."

"A little longer than that," Ostov said.

"When did you guys find out?  I just looked, and there weren't any
patrol cars, nothing."  Finally the shakes hit him.

"God, I was talking to him not that long ago, took him some pizza, and
now he's splattered all over the concrete six floors down."  Ostov was
silent.  Then:

"What murder you talking about, ?"

"Hal Yamataka.  There must've been a fight here, and then-" He stopped,
blinked, and said,.'What murder are you talking about?"

"Thomas," Ostov said.

Heed felt sick.  He had only met Thomas once, but he knew that Julie and
Bobby were devoted to him.

Ostov said,

"Thomas and his roommate.  And maybe more in the fire if they didn't get
them all out of the building in time."  The computer that Lee had been
born with was not functioning as smoothly as the ones made by IBM in his
office, and he needed a moment to grasp the implications of the
information that he and Ostov had exchanged.  "They've got to be
conected, don't they?",Ild bet on it.  You know of anybody who has a gru
against Julie and Bobby?"  Lee looked around the reception lounge,
thought about other deserted rooms at Dakota & Dakota, the lonely offing
on the rest of the sixth floor, and the unpeopled levels bel the sixth.
He thought of Candy, too, all those people bitten torn, the giant Bobby
had seen on Punaluu Beach, the way guy could zap himself from place to
place.  He began to very much alone.

"Detective Ostov, could you get some peo here really fast?"

"I've entered the call on the computer while I've been ting to you,"
Ostov said.

"A couple of units are on the now."  WITH HIS fingertips, Candy traced
lazy circles on the su of the dresser, then explored the contours of
each brass hang on the drawers.  He touched the light switch on the wall
the switches on both bedside lamps.  He let his hands glidedoorframes on
the off-chance that one of his intended p might have paused and leaned
there while in conversation, amined the handles on the mirrored closet
doors, and cares each number and switchpad on the remote-control device
the TV, hoping that they had clicked on the set even dur the short time
they had been home.

Nothing.

Because he needed to be calm and methodical in his sea if he were to
succeed, Candy had to repress his rage and frustration.  But his anger
grew even as he struggled to contain and in him the thirst of anger was
always a thirst for blo that wine of vengeance.  Only blood would slake
his thi quench his fury, and allow him an interlude of relative peace By
the time he moved from the Dakotas' bedroom into adjoining bath, Candy
was possessed of a need for blood alm as undeniable and critical as his
need for air.  Looking at mirror, he did not see himself for a moment,
as if he cast reflection; he saw only red blood, as if the mirror were a
p hole on one of the lower decks of a ship in Hell, on a cr through a
sea of gore.  When that illusion faded and he saw his own face, he
quickly looked away.

He clenched his jaws, struggled even harder to control himself, and
touched the hot-water faucet, searching, seeking....

THE MOTEL Room in Santa Barbara was spacious, quiet, clean, and
furnished without the jarring clash of colors and patterns that seemed
de rigueur in most American motels-but it was not a place in which Julie
would have chosen to receive the terrible news that came to her there.
The blow seemed greater, the ache in the heart more piercing, for having
to be home in a strange and impersonal place.

She really had thought that Bobby was letting his imagination run away
with him again, that Thomas was perfectly fine.  Because the phone was
on the nightstand, he sat on the, edge of the bed to make the call, and
Julie watched him and listened from a chair only a few feet away.  When
he got that recording again, explaining that the Cielo Vista number was
temporarily out of service due to line problems, she was vaguely uneasy
but still sure that all was well with her brother.

However, when he called the office in Newport to talk with Hal, got Lee
Chen instead, and spent the first minute or so listening in shocked
silence, responding with a cryptic word or two, she knew this was to be
a night that cleaved her life, and that the years to come inevitably
would be darker than the years she had lived on the other side of that
cleft.  As he began to ask questions of Lee, Bobby avoided looking at
Julie, which confirmed her intuition and made her heart pound faster.
When at last he glanced at her, she had to look away from the sadness in
his eyes.  His questions to Lee were clipped, and she couldn't ascertain
much from them.  Maybe she didn't want to.

Finally the call seemed to be drawing to an end.

"No, you've done well, Lee.  Keep handling it just the way you have
been.  What?  Thank you, Lee.  No, we'll be all right.  We'll be okay,
Lee.  One way or another, we'll be okay."  When Bobby hung up, he sat
for a moment, staring at his hands, which he clasped between his knees.

Julie did not ask him what had happened, as if what Lee had told him was
not yet fact, as if her question was a dar magic and as if the
unrevealed tragedy would not become re until she asked about it.

Bobby got off the bed and knelt on the floor in front of her chair.  He
took both of her hands in his and gently kissed the She knew then that
the news was as bad as it could get.

Softly he said,

"Thomas is dead."  She had steeled herself for that news, but the words
cut deep

"I'm sorry, Julie.  God, I'm so sorry.  And it doesn't end there."  He
told her about Hal.

"And just a couple minutes before he talked to me, Lee received a call
about Clint and Felina Both dead."  The horror was too much to
assimilate.  Julie had liked an respected Hal, Clint, and Felina
enormously, and her admiration for the deaf woman's courage and
self-sufficiency washounded.  It was unfair that she could not mourn
each of the individually; they deserved that much.  She also felt that
she was somehow betraying them because her sorrow at their deaths was
only a pale reflection of the grief she felt at the lose of Thomas,
though that was, of course, the only way it could be.

Her breath caught in her throat, and when it flew free, i was not just
an exhalation but a sob.  That was no good.  Sh could not allow herself
to break down.  At no point in her life had she needed to be as strong
as she needed to be now; the murders committed in Orange County tonight
were the fir in a domino-fall of death that would take down her and
Bobby too, if misery dulled their edge.

While Bobby continued to kneel before her and reveal moor details-Derek
was dead, too, and perhaps others at Ciel Vista-she gripped his hands
tightly, inexpressibly gratefulhave him for an anchor in this
turbulence.  Her vision was blurry, but she held back the tears with a
sheer effort of will though she dared not make eye contact with Bobby
just seeing that would be the end of her self-control.

When he finished, she said,

"It was Frank's brother,course,"

and was dismayed by the way her voice quavered.

"Almost certainly," Bobby said.

"But how did he find out Frank was our client?"

"I don't know.  He saw me on the beach at Punaluu-"

"Yeah, but didn't follow you.  He has no way of knowin who you were. And
for God's sake, how did he find out about Thomas?"

"There's some crucial bit of information missing, so we can't understand
the pattern."

"What's the bastard after?"  she said.  Now her voice was marked by
nearly as much anger as grief, and that was good.

"He's hunting Frank," Bobby said.

"For seven years Frank was a loner, and that made him harder to find.
Now Frank has friends, and that gives Candy more ways to search for
him."

"I as good as killed Thomas when I took the case," she said.

"You didn't want to take it.  I had to talk you into it."

"I talked you into it, you wanted to back out."

"If there's guilt, we share it, but there isn't any.  We took on a new
client, that's all, and everything...  just happened."  Julie nodded and
finally met his eyes.  Although his voice had remained steady, tears
slid down his cheeks.  Preoccupied with her own grief, she had forgotten
that the friends lost were his as well as hers, and that he had come to
love Thomas nearly as much as she did.  She had to look away from him
again.

"Are you okay?"  he asked.

"For now, I have to be.  Later, I want to talk about Thomas, how brave
he was about being different, how he never complained, how sweet he was.
I want to talk about all of it, you and me, and I don't want us to
forget.  Nobody's ever going to build a monument to Thomas, he wasn't
famous, he was, just a little guy who never did anything great except be
the best person he knew how, and the only monument he's ever going to
have is our memories.  So we'll keep him alive,-won't we?"

"Yes."

"We'll keep him alive...  until we're gone.  But that's for later, when
there's time.  Now we have to keep ourselves alive, because that son of
a bitch will be coming for us, won't he?"

"I think he will," Bobby said.

He rose from his knees and pulled her up from the chair.

He was wearing his dark brown Ultraseude jacket with the shoulder
holster under it.  She'd taken off her corduroy blazer and her holster;
she put both of them on again.  The weight of the revolver, against her
left side, felt good.  She hoped she'd have a chance to use it.

Her vision had cleared; her eyes were dry.  She said,

"One' thing for sure-no more dreams for me.  What good is it, haing
dreams, when they never come true?"

"Sometimes they do."

"No. They never came true for my mom or dad.  Never cam true for Thomas,
did they?  Ask Clint and Felina if their dream came true, see what they
say.  You ask George Farris's family if they think being slaughtered by
a maniac was the fulfillme of their dreams."

"Ask the Phans," Bobby said quietly.

"They were boat people on the South China Sea, with hardly any food and
little money, and now they own dry-cleaning shops and remod
two-hundred-thousand-dollar houses for resale, and they have those
terrific kids."

"Sooner or later, they'll get it in the neck too," she said, unsettled
by the bitterness in her voice and the black despair that churned like a
whirlpool within her, threatening to swallo her up.  But she could not
stop the churning.

"Ask Park Ham stead, down there in El Toro, whether he and his wife were
thrilled when she developed terminal cancer, and ask him how his dream
about him and Maralee Roman worked after he finally got over the death
of his wife.  Nasty bugger name Candy got in the way of that one.  Ask
all the poor suckers lyin in the hospital with cerebral hemorrhages,
cancer.  Ask those who get Alzheimer's in their fifties, just when their
goide years are supposed to start.  Ask the little kids in wheelchair
from muscular dystrophy, and ask all the parents of those other kids
down there in Cielo Vista how Down's syndrom fits in with their dreams.
Ask-" She cut herself off.  She was losing control, and she could not
afford to do so tonight.

She said,

"Come on, let's go."

"Where?"

"First, we find the house where that bitch raised him.  Cruis by, get
the lay of it.  Maybe just seeing it will give us ideas.'

"I've seen it."

"I haven't."

"All right."  From a nightstand drawer he removed a tele phone directory
for Santa Barbara, Montecito, Goleta, Hop Ranch, El Encanto Heights, and
other surrounding communi ties.  He brought it with him to the door.

She said,

"What do you want th he asked.

"For now, I have to be.  Later, I want to talk about Thomas, how brave
he was about being different, how he never complained, how sweet he was.
I want to talk about all of it, you and me, and I don't want us to
forget.  Nobody's ever going to build a monument to Thomas, he wasn't
famous, he was, just a little guy who never did anything great except be
the best person he knew how, and the only monument he's ever going to
have is our memories.  So we'll keep him alive,-won't we?"

"Yes."

"We'll keep him alive...  until we're gone.  But that's for later, when
there's time.  Now we have to keep ourselves alive, because that son of
a bitch will be coming for us, won't he?"

"I think he will," Bobby said.

He rose from his knees and pulled her up from the chair.

He was wearing his dark brown Ultraseude jacket with the shoulder
holster under it.  She'd taken off her corduroy blazer and her holster;
she put both of them on again.  The weight of the revolver, against her
left side, felt good.  She hoped she'd have a chance to use it.

Her vision had cleared; her eyes were dry.  She said,

"One' thing for sure-no more dreams for me.  What good is it, haing
dreams, when they never come true?"

"Sometimes they do."

"No. They never came true for my mom or dad.  Never cam true for Thomas,
did they?  Ask Clint and Felina if their dream came true, see what they
say.  You ask George Farris's family if they think being slaughtered by
a maniac was the fulfillme of their dreams."

"Ask the Phans," Bobby said quietly.

"They were boat people on the South China Sea, with hardly any food and
little money, and now they own dry-cleaning shops and remod
two-hundred-thousand-dollar houses for resale, and they have those
terrific kids."

"Sooner or later, they'll get it in the neck too," she said, unsettled
by the bitterness in her voice and the black despair that churned like a
whirlpool within her, threatening to swallo her up.  But she could not
stop the churning.

"Ask Park Ham stead, down there in El Toro, whether he and his wife were
thrilled when she developed terminal cancer, and ask him how his dream
about him and Maralee Roman worked after he finally got over the death
of his wife.  Nasty bugger name Candy got in the way of that one.  Ask
all the poor suckers lyin in the hospital with cerebral hemorrhages,
cancer.  Ask those who get Alzheimer's in their fifties, just when their
goide years are supposed to start.  Ask the little kids in wheelchair
from muscular dystrophy, and ask all the parents of those other kids
down there in Cielo Vista how Down's syndrom fits in with their dreams.
Ask-" She cut herself off.  She was losing control, and she could not
afford to do so tonight.

She said,

"Come on, let's go."

"Where?"

"First, we find the house where that bitch raised him.  Cruis by, get
the lay of it.  Maybe just seeing it will give us ideas.'

"I've seen it."

"I haven't."

"All right."  From a nightstand drawer he removed a tele phone directory
for Santa Barbara, Montecito, Goleta, Hop Ranch, El Encanto Heights, and
other surrounding communi ties.  He brought it with him to the door.

She said,

"What do you want that for?"

"We'll need it later.  I'll explain in the car."  Sprinkles of rain were
falling again.  The Toyota's engine was still so hot from the drive
north that in spite of the cool night air, steam rose from its hood as
the beads of rainwater evaporated.  Far away a brief, low peal of
thunder rolled across the sky.  Thomas was dead.

HE RECEIVED images as faint and distorted as reflections on the
wind-rippled surface of a pond.  They came repeatedly as he touched the
faucets, the rim of the sink, the mirror, the medicine cabinet and its
contents, the light switch, the controls for the shower.  But none of
his visions was detailed, and none provided a clue as to where the
Dakotas had gone.

Twice he was jolted by vivid images, but they were related to disgusting
sexual episodes between the Dakotas.  A tube of vaginal lubricant and a
box of Kleenex were contaminated with older psychic residue that had
inexplicably lingered beyond its time, making him privy to sinful
practices that he had no desire to witness.  He quickly snatched his
hands away from those surfaces and waited for his nausea to pass.  He
was incensed that the need to track Frank through these decadent people
had forced him into a situation where his senses had been so brutally
affronted.

Infuriated by his lack of success and by the unclean contact with images
of their sin (which he seemed unable to expel from his mind), he decided
that he must burn the evil out of this house in the name of God.  Burn
it out.  Incinerate'it.  So that maybe his mind would be cleansed again
as well.

He stepped out of the bathroom, raised his hands, and sent an immensely
destructive wave of power across the bedroom.  The wooden headboard of
the big bed disintegrated, flames leaped from the quilted spread and
blankets, the nightstands flew apart, and every drawer in the dresser
shot out and dumped its contents on the floor, where they instantly
caught fire.  The drapes were consumed as if made from magicians'
flashpaper, and the two windows in the far wall burst, letting in a
draft that fanned the blaze.

Candy often wished the mysterious light that came from him could affect
people and animals, rather than just inanim things, plants, and a few
insects.  There were times when would have gone into a city and melted
the flesh from the bow of ten thousand sinners in a single night, a
hundred thousand it didn't matter which city, they were all festering
sewers iniquity, populated by depraved masses who worshipede and
practice( every repu sive degeneracy.  He had never seen anyone in any
of them, not a single person, who seemed to have to live in God's grace.
He would have made them run screaing in terror, would have tracked them
down in their sec places, would have splintered their bones with his
power, had mered their flesh to pulp, made their heads explode, and to
off the offensive sex things that preoccupied them.  If he had been that
gifted, he would not have shown them any ofmercy with which their
Creator always treated them, so they would have realized, then, how
grateful and obedient they should have been to their God, who always so
patiently tolerated even their worst transgressions.

Only God and Candy's mother had such unlimited compunsion.  He did not
share it.

The smoke alarm went off in the hall.  He walked out the pointed a
finger at it, and blew it to bits.

This part of his gift seemed more powerful tonight than ever.  He was a
great engine of destruction.

The Lord must be rewarding his purity by increasing power.

He thanked God that his own saintly mother had never scended into the
pits of depravity in which so much of hum ity swam.  No man had ever
touched her that way, so children were born without the stain of
original sin.  He knew this to be true, for she had told him-and had
shown himit was.

He descended to the first floor and set the living-room carpet on fire
with a bolt from his left hand.

Frank and the twins had never appreciated the immacul aspect of their
conceptions, and in fact had thrown away incomparable state of grace to
embrace sin and do the devi work.  Candy would never make that mistake.

Overhead he heard the roar of flames, the crash of a partition.  In the
morning, when the sun revealed a smolderingof blackened rubble, the
remains of this nest of corruption would be a testament to the ultimate
perdition of all sinners.

Candy felt cleansed.  The psychic images of the Dakotas' fevered
degeneracy had been expunged from his mind.

He returned to the offices of Dakota & Dakota to continue his search for
them.

BOBBY DROVE, for he didn't think Julie ought to be behind the wheel any
more tonight.  She had been awake for more than nineteen hours, not a
marathon all-nighter yet, but she was exhausted; and her bottled-up
grief over Thomas's death could not help but cloud her judgment and dull
her reflexes.  At least he had napped a couple of times since Hal's call
from the hospital had awakened them last night.

He crossed most of Santa Barbara and entered Goleta before bothering to
look for a service station where they could ask for directions to
Pacific Hill Road.

At his request, Julie opened the telephone directory on her lap, and
with the assistance of a small flashlight taken from the glove
compartment, she looked under the Fs for Fogarty.  He didn't know the
first name, but he was only interested in a male Fogarty who carried the
title of doctor.

"He might not live in this area," Bobby said,

"but I have a hunch he does."

"Who is he?"

"When Frank and I were traveling, we stopped in this guy's study,
twice."  He told her about both brief visits.

"How come you didn't mention him before?"

"At the office, when I told you what happened to me, where Frank and I
had gone, I had to condense some of it, and this Fogarty seemed
comparatively uninteresting, so I left him out.  But the longer I've had
time to think about it, the more it seems to me that he might be a key
player in this.  See, Frank popped us out of there so fast because he
seemed especially reluctant to endanger Fogarty by leading Candy to him.
If Frank's especially concerned about the man, then we ought to have a
talk with him."  She hunched over the directory, studying it closely.

"Fogarty, James.  Fogarty, Jennifer.  Fogarty, Kevin..

What if he's not a medical doctor and doesn't use the title MD or if
'Doc' is a nickname, we're in trouble.  Even if he is a medical doctor,
don't bother looking in the Yellow Pages under 'physicians,' because
this guy is up in years, got to be retire

"Here!"  she said.

"Fogarty, Dr. Lawrence J."

"There's an address?",Yes."  She tore the page out of the book.

"Great.  As soon as you've seen the infamous Pollard pla we'll pay
Fogarty a visit."  Though Bobby had visited the house three times, he
traveled there with Frank, and he had not known the pre location of 1458
Pacific Hill Road any more than he known exactly what flank of Mount
Fuji that trail had ascended.  They found it easily, however, by
following the directions they received from a long-haired guy with a
handle mustache at a Union 76 station.

Though the houses along Pacific Hill Road enjoyed an Encanto Heights
address, they were actually neither insuburb nor in Goleta-which
separated El Encanto from Santa Barbara-but in a narrow band of county
land that lay tween the two and that led east into a wilderness preserve
mesquite, chapparal, desert brush, and pockets of Califor live oaks and
other hardy trees.

The Pollard house was near the end of Pacific Hill, on edge of developed
land, with few neighbors.  Orientedsouthwest, it overlooked the charmed
Pacific-facing commu ties so beautifully sited on the terraced hills
below.  At ni the view was spectacular-a sea of lights leading to a real
cloaked in darkness-and no doubt the immediate neighb hood remained
rural and free of expensive new houseshecause of development
restrictions related to the proxim of the preserve.

Bobby recognized the Pollard place at once.  The headlig revealed little
more than the Eugenia hedge and the rusted ir gate between two tall
stone pilasters.  He slowed as theyby it.  The ground floor was dark. In
one upstairs room a light was on; a pale glow leaked around the edges of
a drawn bli Leaning over to look past Bobby, Julie said,

"Can't much."

"There isn't much to see.  It's a crumbling pile."  They drove over a
quarter of a mile to the end of the road turned, and went back.  Coming
downhill, the house was on Julie's side, and she insisted he slow to a
crawl, to allow her more time to study it.

As they eased past the gate, Bobby saw a light on at the back of the
house, too, on the first floor.  He couldn't actually see a lighted
window, just the glow that fell through it and painted a pale, frosty
rectangle on the side yard.

"It's all hidden in shadows,"

Julie said at last, turning to look back at the property as it fell
behind them.

"But I can see enough to know that it's a bad place."

"Very," Bobby said.

VIOLET LAY on her back on the bed in her dark robe with her sister,
warmed by the cats, which were draped over them and huddled around them.
Verbina lay on her right side, cuddled against Violet, one hand on
Violet's breasts, her lips against Violet's bare shoulder, her warm
breath spilling across Violet's smooth skin.

They were not settling down to sleep.  Neither of them cared to sleep at
night, for that was the wild time, when a greater number and variety of
nature's hunters were on the prowl and life was more exciting.  At that
moment they were not merely in each other and in all of the cats that
shared the bed with them, but in a hungry owl that soared the night,
scanning the earth for mice that weren't wise enough to fear the gloom
and remain in burrows.  No creature had night vision as sharp as the
owl, and its claws and beak were even sharper.

Violet shivered in anticipation of the moment when a mouse or other
small creature would be seen below, slipping through tall grass that it
believed offered concealment.  From past experience she knew the terror
and pain of the prey, the savage glee of the hunter, and she yearned now
to experience both again, simultaneously.

At her side Verbina murmured dreamily.

Swooping high, gliding, spiraling down, swooping up again, the owl had
not yet seen its dinner when the car came up the hill and slowed almost
to a stop in front of the Pollard house.  It drew Violet's attention, of
course, and through her the attention of the owl, but she lost interest
when the car speeded again and drove on.  Seconds later, however, her
interest renewed when it returned and coasted almost to a stop,more, at
the front gate.

She directed the owl to circle the vehicle at a height of a sixty feet.
Then she sent it out ahead of the car and brought it even lower, to
about twenty feet, before guiding it around again to approach the
curious motorist head-on.

From an altitude of only twenty feet, the vision of the hawk was more
than acute enough to see the driver and the passenger in the front seat.
There was a woman Violet had never seen before-but the driver was
familiar.  A moment later she realized that he was the man who had
appeared with Frank in the back yard, at twilight that very same day!

Frank had killed their precious Samantha, for which Frank must die, and
now here was a man who knew Frank,might lead them to Frank, and on the
bed around Violet,other cats stirred and made low growling sounds as her
passion for vengeance was transmitted to them.  A tailless Manx a a
black mongrel leaped from the bed, raced through the open bedroom door,
down the steps, into the kitchen, out the door, around the house, and
into the street.  The car was moving away, gaining speed, heading
downhill, and Violet wanted to pursue it not only by air but on foot, to
ensure that she would not lose track of it.

CANDY ARRIVED in the reception lounge at Dakota & Dakota Cool
cross-drafts circulated from the broken window in the next room and two
open doors in this one, setting up oppose currents.  The faint sounds
announcing his arrival had evidently been masked by the bursts of static
and harsh voices coming from the portable police radios that the cops
had clipped to their belts.  One policeman stood in the entrance Julie
and Bobby's private office, and the other was at the door to the
sixth-floor corridor.  Each of them was talking someone out of sight,
and both had their backs turned Candy, which Candy knew was a sign that
God was still looking out for him.

Though he was angered by this obstacle to his search the Dakotas, he got
out of there at once, materializing in bedroom, nearly a hundred and
fifty miles to the north.  He needed time to think if there was some way
that he could pick up their trail again, a place where they had been
tonight-besides their office and their house-at which he could seek more
visions of them.

WHEN they backtracked to the Union 76 station, the longhaired,
mustachioed man who had given them directions to Pacific Hill Road was
able to tell them how to find the street on which Fogarty lived.  He
even knew the man.

"Nice old guy.  Stops by here for gas now and then."  :,Is he a medical
doctor?"

Bobby asked.

'Used to be.  Been retired quite a while."  Shortly after ten o'clock,
Bobby parked at the curb in front of Lawrence Fogarty's house.  It was a
quaint Spanish two story with the style of French windows that had been
featured in the study to which Bobby and Frank had twice traveled, and
lights were on throughout the first floor.  The glass in the many panes
was beveled, at least on the front of the house, and the lamplight
inside was warmly refracted by those cut edges.  When Bobby and Julie
got out of the car, he smelled woodsmoke, and saw a homey white curl
rising from a chimney into the still, cool, humid pre-storm air.  In the
odd and vaguely purple, crepuscular glow of a nearby street lamp, a few
pink flowers were visible on the azaleas, but the bushes were not as
laden with early blooms as those farther south in Orange County.  An
ancient tree with a multiple trunk and enormous branches loomed over
more than half the house, so it seemed like a wonderfully cozy and
sheltered haven in some Spanish version of a Hobbity fantasy world.

As they followed the front walkway, something dashed between two low
Malibu lights, crossed their path, and startled Julie.  It stopped on
the lawn after passing them, and studied them with radiant green eyes.

"Just a cat," Bobby said.

Usually he liked cats, but when he saw this one, he shivered.

It moved again, vanishing into shadows and shrubs at the side of the
house.

What spooked him was not this particular creature, but the memory of the
feline horde at the Pollard house, which raced to attack him and Frank,
in eerie silence initially then with the shrill single-voiced squeal of
a banshee regime and with a most uncatlike unanimity of purpose.  On the
prowl alone, swift and curious, this cat was quite ordinary, posses only
of the mystery and haughtiness common to every remember of his species.

At the end of the walk, three front steps led up to an archway, through
which they entered a small veranda.

Julie rang the bell, which was soft and musical, and no one answered
after half a minute, she rang it again.

As the second set of chimes faded, the stillness was disturb by the
rustle of feathered wings, as some night bird settled on the veranda
roof above them.

When Julie was about to reach for the bell push again, porch light came
on, and Bobby sensed they were being scrutinized through the security
lens.  After a moment the door opened, and Dr. Fogarty stood before them
in an outfall light from the hall behind him.

He looked the same as Bobby remembered him, and he recognized Bobby as
well.

"Come in," he said, stepping aside to admit them.

"I half expected you.  Come in-not that an you is welcome."

"IN THE library," Fogarty said, leading them back through the hall to a
room on the left.

The library, where Frank had taken him during their travels, was the
place Bobby had referred to as the study when he had described it to
Julie.  As the exterior of the house had a Hobbity-fantasy coziness in
spite of its Spanish style, so this room seemed exactly the sort of
place where one imagined that Tolkien, on many a long Oxford evening,
had taken pen to paper to create the adventures of Frodo.  That warm and
welcoming space was gently illuminated by a brass floor lamp and a
stained-glass table lamp that was either a genuine Tiffany or an
excellent imitation.  Books lined the walls under a deeply coffered
ceiling, and a thick Chinese carpet dark green and beige around the
border, mostly pale green in the middlegraced a dark tongue-and-groove
oak floor.  The water-clear finish on the large mahogany desk had a deep
luster; oil the green felt blotter, the elements of a gold-plated,
bone-handled desk set-including a letter opener, magnifying glass, and
scissors-were lined up neatly behind a gold fountain pen in a square
marble holder.  The Queen Anne sofa was upholstered in a tapestry that
perfectly complemented the carpet, and when Bobby turned to look at the
wing-backed chair where he'd first seen Fogarty earlier in the day-he
twitched with astonishment at the sight of Frank.

"Something's happened to him," Fogarty said, pointing to Frank.  He was
unaware of Bobby's and Julie's surprise, apparently operating under the
assumption that they had come to his house specifically because they had
known they would find Frank there.

Frank's physical appearance had deteriorated since Bobby had last seen
him at 5:26 that afternoon, in the office in Newport Beach.  If his eyes
had been sunken then, they were as dark as pits now; the dark rings
around them had widened, too, some of the blackness seemed to have
leeched out of the bruises to impart a deathly gray tint to the rest of
his face.

previous pallor had looked healthy by comparison.

The worst thing about him, however, was the blank expression with which
he regarded them.  No recognition lit his eyes he seemed to be staring
through them.  His facial muscles were slack.  His mouth hung open about
an inch, as if he had star to speak a long time ago but had not yet
managed to remember the first word of what he had wanted to say.  At
Cielo Vista Care Home, Bobby had seen only a few patients with face
empty as this, but they had been among the most severely retarded,
several steps-down the ladder from Thomas.

"How long has he been here?"  Bobby asked, moving tow Frank.

Julie seized his arm and held him back.

"Don't!"

"He arrived shortly before seven o'clock," Fogarty said So Frank had
traveled for nearly another hour and a after he had returned Bobby to
the office.

Fogarty said,

"He's been here over three hours, and I do know what the blazing hell
I'm supposed to do with him.  N and then he comes around a little bit,
looks at you when talk to him, even responds more or less to what you
say.  Though sometimes he's positively garrulous, runs on and on, won't
swear your questions but sure wants to talk at a person, couldn't shut
him up with a two-by-four.  He's told me a lot about you, for instance,
more than I care to know."  frowned and shook his head.

"You two may be crazy enough to get involved in this nightmare, but I'm
not, and I resent being dragged into it."  At first glance, the
impression that Dr. Lawrence, Foga made was that of a kindly grandfather
who, in his day, been the type of devoted and selfless physician who
became revered by his community, known and beloved by one and He was
still wearing the slippers, gray slacks, white shirt, a blue cardigan in
which Bobby had first seen him earlier, a the image was completed by a
pair of half-lens reading glasses over which he regarded them.  With his
thick white hair, eyes, and gentle rounded features, he would have made
an effective Santa Claus if he had been fifty or sixty pounds heavier
But on a second and closer look, his blue eyes were steely, not warm.
His rounded features were too soft, and revealed not gentility so much
as lack of character, as though they had been acquired through a
lifetime of self-indulgence.  His wide mouth would have given kindly old
Doc Fogarty a winning smile, but its generous dimension served equally
well to lend the look of a predator to the real Doc Fogarty.

"So Frank's told you about us," Bobby said.

"But we don't know anything about you, and I think we need to."  Fogarty
scowled.

"Better that you don't know about me.

Better by far for me.  Just get him out of here, take him away."

"You want us to take Frank off your hands," Julie said coldly,

"then you've got to tell us who you are, how you fit into this, what you
know about it."  Meeting Julie's gaze, then Bobby's, the old man said,

"He's not been here in five years.  Today, when he came with you,
Dakota, I was shocked, I'd thRoselle's father.  Supposedly her father
was so itinerant who knocked up her mother, but I always knew it was a
lie.  Her father was Yarnell Pollard, her mother's brother Roselle was a
child of rape and incest."  A look of distress must have crossed Bobby's
face or Julie for Fogarty let out another bark of cold laughter, clearly
amused by their sympathetic response.

The old physician said,

"Oh, that's nothing.  That's the least of it."

THE TALLLESS MANX- Zitha by name-took up sentry duty in the concealment
of an azalea shrub near the front door.

The old Spanish house had exterior window ledges, and the second cat-as
black as midnight, and named Darkless-sprang to another one in search of
the room to which the old man had taken the younger man and woman.
Darkle put his nose to the glass.  A set of interior shutters inhibited
snooping, but the wide louvres were only half closed, and Darkle was
able to see several cross-sections of the room by raising or lowering
his head.

Hearing Frank's name spoken, the cat stiffened, because Violet had
stiffened in her bed high on Pacific Hill.

The old man was there, among the books, and the couple as well.  When
everyone sat down, Darkle had to lower his head to peer between another
pair of tilted louvres.  Then he saw that Frank was not only one of the
subjects of their conversation but actually present in a high-backed
chair that stood at just enough of an angle to the window to reveal part
of his face, and one hand lying limply on the wide, maroon-leather arm.

LEANING OVER his desk and smiling humorlessly as he talked, Doc Fogarty
resembled a troll that had crawled out from its lair beneath a bridge,
not content to wait for unsuspecting children to pass by, prepared to
forage for his grisly dinner.

Bobby reminded himself not to let his imagination run away with him.  He
needed to keep an unbiased perspective on Fogarty, in order to determine
the truthfulness and value of what the old man had to tell them.  Their
lives might depend on it.

"The house was built in the thirties by Deeter and Elizabeth Pollard.
He'd made some money in Hollywood, producing a bunch of cheap Westerns,
other junk.  Not a fortune, but enough that he was fairly sure he could
give up films and Los Angeles, which he hated, move up here, get into
some small businesses, and do all right for the rest of his life.  They
had two children.  Yarnell was fifteen when they came here in 1938, and
Cynthia was only six years old.  In forty-five, when Deeter and
Elizabeth were killed in a car crash-hit head-on by drunk driving a
truck full of cabbages down from the Saint Ynez valley, if you can
believe it-Yarnell became the head of the house at the age of
twenty-two, and the legal guard of his thirteen-year-old sister."  Julie
said,

"And...  forced himself on her, you said?"  Fogarty nodded.

"I'm sure of it.  Because over the next year Cynthia became withdrawn,
weepy.  People attributed it to death of her folks, but it was Yarnell
using her, I think.

just because he wanted the sex-though she was a pretty little thing, and
you could hardly fault his taste-but because being man of the house
appealed to him, he liked authority.  And was the type who wasn't happy
until his authority was absolute, his dominance complete."  Bobby was
horrified by the words

"You could hardly fault his taste" and what they implied about the depth
of the abyss in which Fogarty lived.

Oblivious of the disgust with which his visitors were regarding him,
Fogarty continued:

"Yarnell was strong-willed, re less, caused his folks a lot of heartache
before they died, kinds of heartache but mostly related to drugs.  He
was an acid head before they had a name for it, before they even had LSD
Peyote, mescaline...  all of the natural hallucinogens you can distill
from certain cactuses, mushrooms and other fun Wasn't the drug culture
back then that we have now, but!"  was around.  He got into
hallucinogens through a relations he had with a character actor who
appeared in a lot of his father's movies, got started when he was
fifteen, and I tellall this because my theory is it's the key to
everything youneed to know."

"The fact that Yarnell was an acidhead," Julie said.

"That the key?"

"That and the fact he impregnated his own sister.  The cheicals probably
did genetic damage, and a lot of it, by the time he was twenty-two. They
usually do.  in his case somestrange genetic damage. Then, when you add
in the factthe gene pool was very limited, being as Cynthia was his
sister You might expect there's a high chance the offspring will be a
freak of some kind."  Frank made a low sound, then sighed.  They all
looked at him, but he was still detached.  Thou his eyes blinked rapidly
for a moment, they did not come back into focus. Saliva still drooled
from the right corner of his mouth; a string of it hung from his chin.

Though Bobby felt that he should get some Kleenex and blot Frank's face,
he restrained himself, largely because he was afraid of Julie's
reaction.

"So about a year after their parents died, Yarnell and Cynthia came to
me, and she was pregnant," Fogarty said.

"They had this story about some itinerant farmworker raping her, but it
didn't ring true, and I pretty much figured out the real story just
watching how they were with each other.  She'd tried to conceal the
pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and by staying in the house entirely
during her last few months, and I never could understand that behavior;
it was as if they thought the problem would just go away one day.  By
the time they came to me, abortion was out of the question.  Hell, she
was in the early stages of labor."  The longer he listened to Fogarty,
the more it seemed to Bobby that the air in the library was foul and
growing fouler, thick with a humidity as sour as sweat.

"Claiming that he wanted to protect Cynthia as much as possible from
public scorn, Yarnell offered me a pretty fat fee if I'd keep her out of
the hospital and deliver the baby right in my office, which was a little
risky, in case there were complications.  But I needed the money, and if
anything went really wrong, there were ways to cover it.  I had this
nurse at the time who could assist me-Norma, she was pretty flexible
about things."  great, Bobby thought.  The sociopathic physician had
Just found himself a sociopathic nurse, a couple who would be right in
the social swing of things among the medical staff at Dachau or
Auschwitz.

Julie put a hand on Bobby's knee and squeezed, as if the contact
reassured her that she was not listening to a mad doctor in a dream.
"What came out of that girl'

"You should have seen it, Fogarty said.

"A freak it was, just as you'd expect."

"Wait a minute," Julie said.

"I thought you said the baby was Roselle.  Frank's mother."

"It was," Fogarty said.

"And she was such a spectacular little freak that she'd have been worth
a fortune to any carnival or sideshow willing to risk the anger of the
law to exhibit he He paused, enjoying their anticipation.

"She was an hermap rodite.

For a moment the word meant nothing to Bobby, and then he said,

"You don't mean-she had both sexes, male and male?"

"Oh, but that's exactly what I mean."  Fogarty bounced frorp his chair
and began to pace, suddenly energized by conversation.

"Hermaphroditism is an extremely rare birth defect in humans, it's an
amazing thing to have the opportunity to deliver one.  You have traverse
hermaphroditism, wherehave the external organs of one sex and the
internal ofother, lateral hermaphroditism...  several other types.  But
one thing is...  Roselle was the rarest of all, she possessed the
complete internal and external organs of both sexes."  He pluck a thick
medical reference book from one of the shelves a handed it to Julie.

"Check page one forty-six for photos ofkind of thing I'm talking about."
Julie handed the volume to Bobby so fast it seemed as ifthought it was a
snake.

Bobby, in turn, put it beside himself on the sofa, unopen The last thing
he needed, with his imagination, was the ass tance of clinical
photographs.

His hands and feet had gone cold, as though the blood had rushed from
his extremities to his head, to nourish his bra which was spinning
furiously.  He wished that he couldthinking about what Fogarty was
telling them.  It was gro But the worst thing about it was, judging by
the physicia strange smile, Bobby sensed that what they had heard thus
was all just the bread on this horror sandwich; the meatyet to come.

Pacing again, Fogarty said,

"Her vagina was about who you'd expect, the male equipment somewhat
displaced.  Urination was through the male part, but the female appeared
rep ductively complete."

"I think we get the picture," Julie said.

"We don't need the technical details."  Fogarty came to them, stood
looking down at them, and eyes were as bright and lively as if he were
recounting a chaing medical anecdote that had bewitched legions of
delight companions at dinner parties over the years.

"No, no,z x must understand what she was, if you're going to understand
all that happened next."  THOUGH HER OWN Mlnd was split into many
parts-sharing the bodies of Verbina, all the cats, and the owl on
Fogarty's porch roof-Violet was most acutely aware of what she was
receiving through the senses of Darkle, as he perched upon the
windowsill outside the study.  With the cat's sharp hearing, Violet
missed not a word of the conversation, in spite of the intervening pane
of glass.  She was enthralled.

She seldom paused to think about her mother, although Roselle was still
in this old house in so many ways.  She seldom thought about any human
being, for that matter, except herself and her twin sister-less often
Candy and Frank-because she had so little in common with other people.
Her life was with the wild things.  In them emotions were so much more
pnmitive and intense, pleasure so much more easily found and enjoyed
without guilt.  She hadn't really known her mother or been close to her;
and Violet would not have been close, even if her mother had been
willing to share affection with anyone but Candy.

But now Violet was riveted by what Fogarty was telling them, not because
it was news to her (which it was), but because anything that had
affected Roselle's life this completely also had profound effects on
Violet's life.  And of the countless attitudes and perceptions that
Violet had absorbed from the myriad wild creatures whose minds and
bodies she shared, a fascination with self was perhaps paramount.  She
had an animal's narcissistic preoccupatior.  with grooming, with her own
wants and needs.  From her prnt of view, nothing in the world was of
interest unless it served her, satisfied her, or affected the
possibility of her future happiness.

Dimly she realized that she should find her brother and tell him that
Frank was less than two miles away from them.  Not long ago she had
heard the wind-music of Candy's return.

FOGARTY TURNED away from Bobby and Julie and circled behind his desk
again, where he walked along the bookshelf snapping his finger against
the spines of the volumes to punctuate his story.

As the physician spoke of this family that had seened genetic
catastrophe, Julie could not help but think how Thomas's affliction had
been visited upon him though his parents had lived healthy and normal
lives.

played as cruelly with the innocent as with the guilty.

I think Ya 'When he saw the baby's abnormability he would have killed it
and thrown it out with the garbage at least put it in the hands of an
institution.  But she wouldn't part with it, she said it was her child,
deformed or not, and she named it Roselle, after her dead grandmother. I
suspect she wanted to keep it largely because she saw how it repulsed
him, and she wanted to have Roselle around as a reminder to him of the
consequences of what he forced her to do."

"Couldn't surgery have been used to make her unable to have another?"
Bobby asked.

"Easier today.  Harder then."  Fogarty had stopped at the desk, where he
had removed a bottle of Wild Turkey and a glass from one of the side
drawers.  He poured a few ounces of bourbon for himself and recap the
bottle without offering them a drink.  That was fine with Julie.  Though
Fogarty's house was spotless, she wouldn't have felt clean after
drinking or eating anything in it.

After taking a swallow of the warm bourbon, neat, Fogarty said,

"Besides, wouldn't want to remove one set of organs to discover that, as
the child grew older, it proved to look and act more like the sex you
denied it than like the one it was born with.  Secondary sex
characteristics are visible in infants of course, but not as easily
read-certainly not in 1946.  Anyway Cynthia wouldn't have authorized
surgery.  Remember I said-she probably welcomed the child's deformity
weapon against her brother."

"You could have stepped between them and the bar BObby said.

"You could've brought the child's plight to attention of the public
health authorities."

"Why on earth would I want to do that?  For the psychological well-being
of the child, you mean?  Don't be naive."  He drank some more bourbon.

"I was paid well to make the delivery and keep my mouth shut about it,
and that was fine by me.  They took her home, stuck to their story about
the itinerant rapist.

Julie said, "The baby...  Roselle...  she had no serious medical
problems?"

"None," Fogarty said.

"Other than this abnormality, she was as healthy as a horse.  Her mental
skills and her body developed right on schedule, like any child, and
before long it became obvious that, to all outward appearances, she was
going to look like a woman.  As she grew even older, you could see she'd
never be an attractive filly, mind you, more on the sturdy side than a
fashion model, thick legs and all that, but quite feminine enough."

Frank remained vacant-eyed and detached, but a muscle in his left cheek
twitched twice.

The bourbon apparently relaxed the physician, for he sat behind his desk
again, leaned forward, and clasped his hands around the glass.

"In 1959, when Roselle was thirteen, Cynthia died.  Killed herself,
actually.  Blew her brains out.  The following year, about seven months
after his sister's suicide, Yarnell came to the office with his
daughter-that is, with Roselle.  He never called her his daughter,
maintaining the fiction that she was only his bastard niece.  Anyway,
Roselle was pregnant at fourteen, same age at which Cynthia had given
birth to her."

"Good God!"  Bobby said.

The shocks kept piling one atop another with such speed that Julie was
almost ready to grab the whiskey bottle off the desk, drink straight
from it, and never mind that it was Fogarty's booze.

Enjoying their reactions, Fogarty sipped the bourbon and gave them time
to absorb the shock.

Julie said,

"Yarnell raped the daughter he had fathered by his own sister?"

Fogarty waited a little longer, savoring the moment.  Then: "No, no.  He
found the girl repellent, and I'm confident he wouldn't have touched
her.  I'm sure what Roselle told me was the truth."  He sipped more
bourbon.

"Cynthia had developed quite a religious streak between the time she
gave birth to Roselle and the day she killed herself, and she had passed
on that passion for God to Roselle.  The girl knew the Bible backward
and forward.  So Roselle came in here, pregnant.  Said she'd decided she
should have a child.  Said God had made her cial-that's what she called
hermaphroditism, specie bmause she was to be a pure vessel by which
blessed child could be brought into the world.  Therefore she had colled
the semen from her male half and mechanically inserted it in her female
half."  Bobby shot up from the sofa as if one of its springs had stuck
him, and he grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey from the desk.

"You have another glass?"

Fogarty pointed to a bar cabinet in the corner, which Julie had not
noticed before.  Bobby opened the double doors, revealing not only more
glasses but additional fifths of Wild Turkey Evidently the physician
kept a bottle in his desk drawerso he would not have to walk across the
room for it.  Bobby poured two glasses full, with no ice, and brought
one back to Julie.

To Fogarty, she said,

"Of course, I never thought Ros was barren.  She did bear children, we
know that.  But I sumed you meant the male part of her was sterile."

"Fertile as a male and as a female.  She couldn't actually join herself
to herself, so to speak.  So she resorted to,artificial semination, as I
said."

Late that afternoon, in the office in Newport, when he had tried to
explain how traveling with Frank was like a sled ride off the edge of
the world, Julie had not really understood why he was so unnerved by the
experience.  Now she thought she had an inkling of what he had meant,
for the of the Pollard family's relationships and sexual identities. Her
skin crawled and filled her with a dark suspicion that nat was even
stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than had feared.

"Yarnell wanted me to abort the fetus, and abortion was fairly lucrative
sideline in those days, though illegal and kept hushed.  But the girl
had hidden her pregnancy from him for seven months, as he and Cynthia
had tried to hide a pregnancy fourteen years earlier.  It was much too
late for an abortion then.  The girl would've died, from hemorrhaging.
Besides, I would no more have aborted that fetus than I'd have shot
myself in the foot.  Imagine the degree of inbreeding involved here:
hermaphroditic child of brother-sister incest impregnates herself.  Her
child's mother is also its father.  Its grandmother is also its
great-aunt, and its grandfather is its great-uncle!  One tight genetic
line-and genes damaged by Yarnell's use of hallucinogenics, remember.
Virtually a guarantee of a freak of one kind or another, and I wouldn't
have missed it for the world."  Julie took a long swallow of the
bourbon.  It tasted sour and stung her throat.  She didn't care.  She
needed it.

"I'd become a doctor because the pay was good," Fogarty said.

"Later, when I gravitated toward illegal abortions, the pay was better,
and it became my main business.  Not much danger, either, because I knew
what I was doing, and I could buy off an authority now and then if I had
to.  When you're getting those fat fees, you don't have to schedule many
office visits, you can have a lot of free time, money and leisure, the
best of both worlds.  But having settled for a career like that, what I
never figured was that I'd encounter anything as medically interesting,
as fascinating, as entertaining as this Pollard mess."  The only
consideration that caused Julie to refrain from going across the room
and kicking the crap out of the old man was not his age but the fact
that he would leave the story unfinished and some vital piece of
information unrevealed.

"But the birth of Roselle's first child wasn't the event I'd thought it
would be," Fogarty said.

"In spite of the odds, the baby she produced was healthy and, from all
indications, perfectly normal.  That was 1960, and the baby was Frank."

In the wingback chair, Frank whimpered softly but remained in his
semicomatose condition.

STILL LISTENING to Doc Fogarty through Darkle, Violet sat up and swung
her bare legs over the edge of the bed, dispossessing some of the cats
from their resting places, and eliciting a murmur of protest from
Verbina, who was seldom content to share just a mental link with her
sister and needed the reassurance of physical contact.  With cats
swarming at her feet, seeing through their eyes as well as her own and
therefore not blinded by the darkness, Violet started toward the open
door to the lightless upstairs hall.

Then she remembered that she was nude, and she went back for panties and
a T-shirt.

She wasn't afraid of Candy's disapproval or of Candy himself.  In fact,
she would welcome his violent attentions, for it would be the ultimate
game of hunter and prey, hawk mouse, brother and sister.  Candy was the
only wild creature into whose mind she couldn't intrude; though wild, he
was human and beyond the reach of her powers.  If he tore out Verbina's
throat, then her blood would get into him, and into her throat, and she
would become a part of him in the only manner she ever could.  Likewise,
that was the only way he could get into her: by biting his way in, by
chewing into her, the only way.

On any other night, she would have called to him and let him see her
nude, with the hope that her shamelessness would at last provoke him to
violence.  But she could not pursue her fondest desire right now, not
when Frank was nearby and unpunished for what he had done to their poor
puss, mantha When she had dressed, she returned to the hall, moved all
through it in the gloom-still in complete touch with Darkle and Zi and
the wild world-and stopped before the door to mother's room, into which
Candy had moved upon her death.  A thing line of light showed along the
sill.

"Candy," she said.

"Candy, are you there?"

LIKE A MEMORY from wars past or a presentiment of a war to come, a
searing flash of lightning and a shattering crash of thunder shook the
night.  The window in the study vibrated.  It was the first thunder
Bobby had heard since the faint and distant peal when they had come out
of the motel, nearly an hour and a half ago.  In spite of the thunder in
the sky, rain was not yet falling.  But though the storm was
slow-moving, it was almost upon them.  The pyrotech of a storm was an
ideal backdrop to Fogarty's tale.

"I was disappointed in Frank," Fogarty said, taking an old bottle of
bourbon from his capacious desk drawer and filling his glass.

"No fun at all.  So normal.  But two years later she was pregnant again!
This time the delivery was every as entertaining as I'd expected Frank's
to be.  A baby boy again and she called him James.  Her second virgin
birth, she said, and she didn't mind at all that he was as much of a
mess as she was.  She said that was just proof that he, too, was favored
by God and brought into the world without a need to wallow in the
depravity of sex.  I knew then that she was as mad as a hatter."  Bobby
knew he had to remain sober, and he was aware of the danger of too much
bourbon after a night of too little sleep.  But he had a hunch that he
was burning it off as fast as he drank it, at least for now.  He took
another sip before he said,

"You're not telling us that beefy hulk is hermaphroditic too?"

"Oh, no," Fogarty said.

"Worse than that."  CANDY OPENED the door.

"What do you want?"

"He's here, in town, right now," she said.

His eyes widened.

"You mean Frank?"

"Yes."

"WORSE," Bobby said numbly.

He got up from the sofa long enough to put his glass on the desk.  It
was still three-quarters full, but he suddenly decided that even bourbon
would not be an effective tranquilizer in this case.

Julie seemed to reach the same conclusion, and put her glass aside too.

"James-or Candy, if you wish-was born with four testes instead of two,
but with no male organ.  Now, at birth, male infants all carry their
testes safely in their abdominal cavity, and the testes descend later,
during infant maturation.  But Candy's never descended and never could,
because there was no scrotum for them to descend into.  And for another
thing, there's a strange excrescence of bone that would prevent their
descent.  So they've remained within his abdominal cavity.  But I would
guess they've functioned well, busily producing quite large amounts of
testosterone, which is related to development of musculature and partly
explains his formidable size."

"So he's incapable of having sex," Bobby said.

"With his testicles undescended and no organ for copulation, I'd say
he's got a shot at being the most chaste man ever lived."  Bobby had
come to loathe the old man's laugh.

"But four gonads, he's producing a flood of testosterone, and does more
than help build muscles-doesn't it?"  Fogarty nodded.

"To put it in the language of a med journal: excess testosterone, over
an extended period of time alters normal brain function, sometimes
radically, and it's causative factor of socially unacceptable levels of
aggressi To put it in layman's language: this guy is seriously stoked
sexual tension he can't possibly release, he's rechanneledenergy into
other outlets, mainly acts of incredible viole and he's as dangerous as
any monster any moviemaker dreamed up."  ALTHOUGH SHE HAD released the
owl as the storm drewViolet still inhabited Darkle and Zitha, taking
their fear a from them when the lightning flared and the thunder boo
Even as she stood before Candy, at the door to his room, was listening
to Fogarty tell the Dakotas about her brother's deformity.  She knew
about it already, of course, for within family their mother had referred
to it was God's sign that Candy was the most special of all of them.
Likewise, and in some way Violet had been aware that this deformity was
related to great wildness in Candy, the thing that made him so po fully
attractive.

Now she stood before him, wanting to touch his huge a feel the sculpted
muscles, but she restrained herself.

"He' Fogarty's house."  That surprised him.

"Mother said Fogarty was an instrument of God.  He brought us into the
world, four virgin bi Why would he harbor Frank?  Frank's on the dark
side no

"That's where he is," Violet said.

"And a couple.  His na BobbY.  Hers is Julie."

"Dakota," he whispered.

"

At Fogarty's.  Make him pay for Samantha, Candy.  Bring him back here
after you've killed him, and let us feed him the cats.  He hated the
cats, and he'll hate being part offorever."  JULIE'S TEMPER, not always
easily controlled, was dangerously near the flashpoint.  As lightning
shocked the night outside and thunder again protested, she counseled
herself about the necessity for diplomacy.

Nevertheless, she said,

"You've known all these years that Candy is a vicious killer, and you've
done nothing to alert anyone to the danger?"

"Why should I?"  Fogarty asked.

"Haven't you ever heard of social responsibility?"

"It's a nice phrase, but meaningless."

"People have been brutally murdered because you let that man-"

"People will always and forever be brutally murdered.  His shit buried
millions.  Stalin, tory is full of brutal murder.  Hitler murdered many
millions more.  Mao Tse-tung, more millions than anyone.  They're all
considered monsters now, but they had their admirers in their time,
didn't they?  And there're people even now who'll tell you Hitler and
Stalin only did what they had i to do, that Mao was just keeping the
public order, disposing of ruffians.  So many people admire those
murderers who are bold about it and who cloak their bloodlust in noble
causes like brotherhood and political reform and justice-and social
responsibility.  We're all meat, just meat, and in our hearts we know
it, so we secretly applaud the men bold enough to treat us as what we
are.  Meat."  By now she knew that he was a sociopath, with no
conscience, no capacity for love, and no ability to empathize with other
people.  Not all of them were street hoodiumr even high-class, high-tech
thieves like Tom Rasmussen, who had tried to kill Bobby last week.  Some
got to be doctorsr lawyers, TV ministers, politicians.  None of them
could be reasoned with, for they had no normal human feelings.

He said,

"Why should I tell anyone about Candy Pollard?

I'm safe from him because his mother always called me God's instrument,
told her wretched spawn I was to be respected.  It's none of my
business.  He's covered his mother's murder to avoid having the police
tramping through the house, told people she moved to a nice oceanside
condo near San Diego.  I don't think anybody believes that crazy bitch
would suddenly lighten up and become a beach bunny, but nobody questio
it because nobody wants to get involved.  Everybody feels it' none of
their business.  Same with me.  Whatever outrage Candy adds to the
world's pain are negligible.  At least, give his peculiar psychology and
physiology, his outrages will be more imaginative than most.

"Besides, when Candy was about eight, Roselle came to thank me for
bringing her four into the world, and for keepin my own counsel, so that
Satan was unaware of their blessed presence on earth.  That's exactly
how she put it!  And as token of her appreciation, she gave me a
suitcase full of mone enough to make early retirement possible.  I
couldn't figur where she'd gotten it.  The money that Deeter and
Elizabeth piled up in the thirties had long ago dwindled away.  So she
to explain that she'd never want for cash.  That was the firs told me a
little bit about Candy's ability, not much, but enough time I realized
there was a genetic boon tied to the genetic did saster."  Fogarty
raised his glass of bourbon in a toast that they did not return.  "To
God's mysterious ways."  LIKE THE ARCHANGEL come to declare the end of
the worl in the Book of the Apocalypse, Candy arrived just as the
heavens sundered and the rain began to fall in earnest, althoug this was
not black rain as would be the deluge of Armageddon nor was it a storm
of fire.  Not yet. Not yet.

He materialized in the darkness between two widely space street lamps,
almost a block from the doctor's house, to be sur that the soft trumpets
that unfailingly announced his arrive would not be audible to anyone in
Fogarty's library.  As he walked toward the house through the hammering
rain, he believed that his power, provided by God, had now grown s
enormous that nothing could prevent him from takingachieving anything he
desired.

"IN SIXTY-SIX, the twins were born, and physically they were as normal
as Frank," Fogarty said as rain suddenly splattered noisily against the
window.

"No fun in that.  I couldn't believe it, really.  Three out of four of
the kids, perfectly healthy.  I'd been expecting all sorts of cute
twists-harelips at the- very least, misshapen skulls, cleft faces,
withered limbs, or extra heads!"  Bobby took Julie's hand.  He needed
the contact.

He wanted to get out of there.  He felt burnt out.  Hadn't they heard
enough?

But that was the problem: he didn't know what was left to hear, or how
much of it might be crucial to finding a way of dealing with the
Pollards.

"Of course, when Roselle brought me that suitcase full of money, I began
to learn that the children were all freaks, mentally if not physically.
And seven years ago, when Frank killed her, he came to me, as if I owed
him something-understanding, shelter.  He told me more about them than I
wanted to know, too much.  For the next two years, he'd periodically
return here, just appear like a ghost that wanted to haunt me instead of
a place.  But he finally understood there was nothing for him here, and
for five years he stayed out of my life.  Until today, tonight."  In his
wingback chair, Frank moved.  He shifted his body and tipped his head
from the right to the left.  Otherwise, he was no more alert than he had
been since they had entered the room.  The old man had said that Frank
had come around a few times and had been talkative, but it couldn't be
proved by his behavior during the past hour or so.

Julie, who was the closest to Frank, frowned and leaned toward him,
peering at the right side of his head.

"Oh, my God."  She spoke those three words in a bleak tone of voice that
was as effective a refrigerant as anything used in an air conditioner.

With a chill skittering up his spine, Bobby slid along the sofa,
crowding her against the other end, and looked past her at the side of
Frank's head.  Wished he had not.  Tried to look away.  Couldn't.

When Frank's head had been tilted to his right, almost lying against his
shoulder, they had not been able to see that temple.

After leaving Bobby at the office, still out of control, travelin
against his will, Frank evidently had returned to one of those craters
where the engineered insects shit out their diamond His flesh was lumpy
all the way along his temple to his ja and in some places the rough
gemstones that were the caus of the lumpiness poked through, gleaming,
intimately melded with his tissue.  For whatever reason, he had scooped
up handful to bring with him, but when reconstituting himself he had
made a mistake.

Bobby wondered what treasures might be buried in the so gray matter
within Frank's skull.

"I saw that too," Fogarty said.

"And look at the palm his right hand."  Although Julie protested, Bobby
pinched the sleeve Frank's jacket and pulled until he twisted the man's
arm of the chair and revealed his palm.  He had found the partial roac
that had once been welded into his own shoe.  At least it a peared to be
the same one.  It was sprouting from the meat part of Frank's hand,
carapace gleaming, dead eyes staring u toward Frank's index finger.

CANDY CIRCLED the house in the rain, passing a black cat sitting on a
windowsill.  It turned its head to glance at him, then put it face to
the windowpane again.

At the rear of the house, he stepped quietly onto the porch and tried
the back door.  It was locked.

Vague blue light pulsed from his hand as he gripped the knob.  The lock
slipped, the door opened, and he stepped insid JULIE HAD heard and seen
enough, too much.

Eager to get away from Frank, she rose from the sofa an walked to the
desk, where she considered her unfinished bourbon.  But that was no
answer.  She was dreadfully tired, stru gling to repress her grief for
Thomas, striving even hardermake some sense out of the grotesque family
history that F garty had revealed to them.  She did not need the
complicatio of any more bourbon, appealing as it might look there in the
glass.

She said to the old man,

"So what hope do we have of dealing with Candy?"

"None."

"There must be a way."

"No."

"There must be."

"Why?"  "Because he can't be allowed to win."  Fogarty smiled.

"Why not?"

"Because he's the bad guy, dammit!  And we're the good guys.  Not
perfect, maybe, not without flaws, but we're the good guys, all right.
And that's why we have to win, because if we don't, then the whole game
is meaningless."  Fogarty leaned back in his chair.

"My point exactly.  It is all meaningless.  We're not good, and we're
not bad, we're just meat.  We don't have souls, there's no hope of
transcendence for a slab of meat, you wouldn't expect a hamburger to go
to Heaven after someone ate it."  She had never hated anyone as much as
she hated Fogarty at that moment, partly because he was so smug and
hateful, but partly because she recognized, in his arguments, something
perilously close to the things she had said to Bobby in the motel, after
she had learned about Thomas's death.  She had said there was no point
in having dreams, that they never came true, that death was always there
watching even if you were lucky enough to grasp your personal brass
ring.  And loathing life, just because it led sooner or later to death
...  well, that was the same as saying people were nothing but meat.

"We have just pleasure and pain," the old physician said

"so it doesn't matter who's right or who's wrong, who wins or loses."

"What's his weakness?"  she demanded angrily.

"None I can see."  Fogarty seemed pleased by the hopelessness of their
position.  If he had been practicing medicine in the early 1940s, he had
to be nearing eighty, though he looked younger.  He was acutely aware of
how little time remained to him, and was no doubt resentful of anyone
younger; and given his cold perspective on life, their deaths at Candy
Pollard's hands would entertain him.

"No weaknesses at all."  Bobby disagreed, or tried to.

"Some might say that his weakness is his mind, his screwed-up
psychology."  Fogarty shook his head.

"And I'd argue that he's mad strength of his screwed-up psychology. He's
used this business about being the instrument of God's vengeance to
armor him self very effectively from depression and self-doubt and a
thing else that might trip him up."  In the wingback chair, Frank
abruptly sat up straight shook himself as if to cast off his mental
confusion thea dog might shake water from its sodden coat after coming
from the rain.  He said,

"Where...  Why do I...  Is it is it...  is it...  ?",Is it what, Frank?"
Bobby asked.

"Is it happening?"  Frank said.  His eyes seemed slowly be clearing.

"Is it finally happening?",is what finally happening, Frank?"  His voice
was hoarse.

"Death.  Is it finally happening?  Is i CANDY HAD crept quietly through
the house, into the hallway that led to the library.  As he moved toward
the open door the left, he heard voices.  When he recognized one of them
Frank's, he could barely contain himself.

According to Violet, Frank was crippled.  His control of telekinetic
talent had always been erratic, which is why Can had enjoyed some hope
of one day catching him and finishing him before he could travel to a
place of safety.  Perhaps the moment of triumph had arrived.

When he reached the door, he found himself looking at the woman's back.
He could not see her face, but he was sure it would be the same one that
had been suffused in a beautiful glow in Thomas's mind.

Beyond her he glimpsed Frank, and saw Frank's eyes widen at the sight of
him.  If the mother-killer had been too confused to teleport out of
Candy's reach, as Violet had claimed, he was now casting off that
confusion.  He looked if he might pop out of there long before Candy
could lay a had on him.

Candy had intended to throw the library into a turmoil sending a wave of
energy through the doorway ahead of him setting the books on fire and
shattering the lamps, with the purpose of panicking and distracting the
Dakotas and Doc Fogarty, giving him a chance to go straight for Frank.
But now he was forced to change his plans by the sight of his brother
trembling on the edge of dematerialization.

He entered the room in a rush and seized the woman from behind, curling
his right arm around her neck and jerking her head back, so she-and the
two men-would understand at once that he could snap her neck in an
instant, whenever he chose.  Even so, she slashed backward with one
foot, scraping the heel of her shoe down his shin, stomping on his foot,
all of which hurt like hell; it was some martial-art move, and he could
tell by the way she tried to counterbalance his grip and stance that she
had a lot of training in such things.  So he jerked her head back again,
even harder, and flexed his biceps, which pinched her windpipe, hurting
her enough to make her realize that resistance was suicidal.

Fogarty watched from his chair, alarmed but not sufficiently to rise to
his feet, and the hush and came off the sofa with a gun in his hand, Mr.
Quick-Draw Artist, but Candy was not concerned about either of them. His
attention was on Frank, who had risen from his chair and appeared about
to blink out of there, off to Punaluu and Kyoto and a score of other
places.

"Don't do it, Frank!"  he said sharply.

"Don't run away.  It's time we settled, time you paid for what you did
to our mother.  You come to the house, accept God's punishment, and end
it now, tonight.  I'm going there with this bitch.  She tried to help
you, I guess, so maybe you won't want to see her suffer."  The hush and
was going to do something crazy; seeing Julie in Candy's grip had
clearly unhinged him.  He was searching for a shot, a way to get Candy
without getting her, and he might even risk firing at Candy's head,
though Candy was half crouching behind the woman.  Time to get out of
there.

"Come to the house," he told Frank.

"You come into the kitchen, let me end it for you, and I'll let her go.
I swear on our mother's name, I'll let her go.  But if you don't come in
fifteen minutes, I'll put this bitch on the table, and I'll have my
dinner, Frank.  You want me to feed on her after she tried to help you,
Frank?"  Candy thought he heard a gunshot just as he got out of the In
any event, it had been too late.  He rematerialized in the kitchen of
the house on Pacific Hill Road, with Julie still locked in the crook of
his arm.

NO LONGER concerned about the danger of touching Frank, Bobby grabbed
handsful of his jacket and shoved him backward against the wide-louvered
shutters on the library window.

"You heard him, Frank.  Don't run.  Don't run this time, or I'll hang on
to you and never let go, no matter where you take me, I swear to God,
you'll wish you'd put your neck on Candy's platter instead of mine."  He
slammed Frank against the shutters to make his point, and behind him he
heard Lawrence Fogarty's soft, knowing laughter.

Registering the terror and confusion in his client's eyes, Bobby
realized that his threats would not achieve the effect he desired.  In
fact, threats would almost certainly frighten Frank into flight, even if
he wanted to help Julie.  Worse, by stooping to violence as a first
resort, he was treating Frank not as a person but as meat, confirming
the depraved code by which the corrupt old physician had led his entire
life, and that was almost as intolerable as losing Julie.

He let go of Frank.

"I'm sorry.  Listen, I'm sorry, I just got a little crazy."  He studied
the man's eyes, searching for some indication that sufficient
intelligence remained in the damaged brain for the two of them to reach
an understanding.  He saw fear, stark and terrible, and he saw a
loneliness that made him want to cry.  He saw a lost look, too, not
unlike what he had sometimes seen in Thomas's eyes when they had taken
him on an excursion from Cielo Vista,

"out in the world," as he had said.

Aware that perhaps two minutes of Candy's fifteen-minute deadline had
passed, trying to remain calm nonetheless, Bobby took Frank's right
hand, turned it palm up, and forced himself to touch the dead roach that
was now integrated with the man's soft white flesh.  The insect felt
crisp and bristly against his fingers, but he did not permit his disgust
to show.

"Does this hurt, Frank?  This bug mixed up with your cells here, does it
hurt you?"  Frank stared at him, finally shook his head.  No.

Heartened by the establishment of even this much dialo Bobby gently put
his fingertips to Frank's right temple, fee the lumps of precious gems
like unburst boils or cancerous soars.

"Do you hurt here, Frank?  Are you in pain?"

"No," Frank said, and Bobby's heart pounded with excitement at the
escalation to a spoken response.

From a pocket of his jeans, Bobby removed a folded Klein and gently
blotted away the spittle that still glistened Frank's chin.

The man blinked, and his eyes seemed to focus better.

From behind Bobby, still in the leather chair at the!"  perhaps with a
glass of bourbon in his hand, almost cert with that infuriatingly smug
smile plastered on his face, garty said,

"Twelve minutes left."  Bobby ignored the physician.  Maintaining eye
contact his client, his fingertips still on Frank's temple, he said
quickly

"It's been a hard life for you, hasn't it?  You were the no one, the
most normal one, and when you were a kid you all wanted to fit in at
school, didn't you, the way your sisters brother never could.  And it
took you a long time to remember your dream wasn't going to happen, you
weren't goingin, because no matter how normal you were compared to rest
of your family, you'd still come from that goddam house, out of that
cesspool, which made you forever an outsider to other people.  They
might not see the stain on your heart might not know the dark memories
in you, but you saw, you remembered, and you felt yourself unworthy
because the horror that was your family.  Yet you were also an outsider
at home, much too sane to fit in there, too sensitive to the nightmare
of it.  So all your life, you've been alone."

"All my life," Frank said.

"And always will be."  He wasn't going to travel now.  Bobby would have
be it.

"Frank, I can't help you.  No one can.  That's a hardbut I won't lie to
you.  I'm not going to con you or threaten YOU."

Frank said nothing, but maintained eye contact.

"Ten minutes," Fogarty said.

"The only thing I can do for you, Frank, is show you a way to give your
life meaning at last, a way to end it with purpose and dignity, and
maybe find peace in death.  I have an idea, a way that you might be able
to kill Candy and save Julie, and if you can do that, you'll have gone
out a hero.  Will you come with me, Frank, listen to me, and not let
Julie die?"  Frank didn't say yes, but he didn't say no, either.  Bobby
decided to take heart from the lack of a negative response.

"We've got to get moving, Frank.  But don't try teleporting to the
house, because then you'll just lose control again, pop off to hell and
back a hundred times.  We'll go in my car.  We can be there in five
minutes."  Bobby took his client's hand.  He made a point of taking the
one with the roach embedded in it, hoping Frank would remember that he
had a fear of bugs and perceive that his willingness to overrule the
phobia was a testament to his sincerity.

They crossed the room to the door.

Rising from his chair, Fogarty said,

"You're going to your death, you know."  Without glancing back at the
physician, Bobby said,

"Well, seems to me, you went to yours decades ago."  He and Frank walked
out into the rain and were drenched by the time they got into the car.

Behind the wheel, Bobby glanced at his watch.  Less than eight minutes
to go.

He wondered why he accepted Candy's word that the fifteen-minute
deadline would be observed, why he was so sure that the madman had not
already torn out her throat.  Then he remembered something she had said
to him once: Sweetcakes, as long as you're breathing, Tinkerbell will
live.

Gutters overflowed, and a sudden wind wound skeins of rain, like silver
yarn, through his headlights.

As he drove the storm-swept streets and turned east on Pacific Hill
Road, he explained how Frank, through his sacrifice of himself, could
rid the world of Candy and undo his mother's evil the way he had wanted
to undo it-but had failed-when he had taken the ax to her.  It was a
simple concept.  He was able to go over it several times even in the few
minutes had before pulling to a stop at the rusted iron gate.

Frank did not respond to anything that Bobby said.  T was no way to be
sure he understood what he must do if he had even heard a word of it. He
stared straight ah his mouth open an inch or so, and sometimes his head
tic back and forth, back and forth, in time with the windshield wipers,
as if he were watching Jackie Jaxx's crystal pen swinging on its gold
chain.

By the time they got out of the car, went through the garage and
approached the decrepit house, with less than two minutes of the
deadline left, Bobby was reduced to proceeding on faith.

WHEN CANDY brought her into the filthy kitchen, pushed into one of the
chairs at the table, and let go of her, J reached at once for the
revolver in the shoulder holster her corduroy jacket.  He was too fast
for her, however, and it from her hand, breaking two of her fingers in
The pain was excruciating, and that was on top of theness in her neck
and throat from the ruthless treatment he dealt out at Fogarty's, but
she refused to cry or complain.

stead, when he turned away from her to toss the gun o drawer beyond her
reach, she leapt up from the chair sprinted for the door.

He caught her, lifted her off her feet, swung her around, body-slammed
her onto the kitchen table so hard she passed out.  He brought his face
close to hers and said,

"You're going to taste good, like Clint's woman, all that vitality in
veins, all that energy, I want to feel you spurting in mouth."  Her
attempts at resistance and escape had not arisen from courage as much as
from terror, some of which sprang the experience of deconstruction and
reconstitution, which hoped never to have to endure again.  Now her fear
doubled as his lips lowered to within an inch of hers and as his cha
house breath washed over her face.  Unable to look away from his blue
eyes, she thought these were what Satan's eyes would be like, not dark
as sin, not red as the fires of Hell, not craw with maggots, but
gloriously and beautifully blue-and utterly devoid of all mercy and
compassion.

If all the worst of human savagery from time immemorial could be
condensed into one individual, if all of the species' hunger for blood
and violence and raw power could be embodied in one monstrous figure, it
would have looked like Candy Pollard at that moment.  When he finally
pulled back from her, like a coiled serpent grudgingly reconsidering its
decision to strike, and when he dragged her off the table and shoved her
back into the chair, she was cowed, perhaps for the first time in her
life.  She knew that if she exhibited any further resistance, he would
kill her on the spot and feed on her.

Then he said an astonishing thing:

"Later, when I'm done with Frank, you'll tell me where Thomas got his
power."

She was so intimidated by him that she had difficulty finding her voice.

"Power?  What do you mean?"

"He's the only one I've ever encountered, outside our family.  The Bad
Thing, he called me.  And he kept trying to keep tabs on me
telepathically because he knew sooner or later you and I would cross
paths.  How can he have had ahy gifts when he wasn't born of my virgin
mother?  Later, you'll explain that to me."  As she sat, actually too
terrified either to cry or shake, in a storm's-eye calm, cradling her
injured hand in the other, she had to find room in her for a sense of
wonder too.  Thomas?

Psychically gifted?  Could it be true that all the time she worried
about taking care of him, he was to some extent taking care of her?

She heard a strange sound approaching from the front of the house.  A
moment later, at least twenty cats poured into the kitchen through the
hall doorway, tails sweeping over one another.

Among the pack came the Pollard twins, long-legged and barefoot, one in
panties and a red T-shirt, the other in panties and a white T-shirt, as
sinuous as their cats.  They were as pale as spirits, but there was
nothing soft or ineffectual about them.  They were lean and vital,
filled with that tightly coiled energy that you always knew was in a cat
even when it appeared to be lazing in the sun.  They were ethereal in
some ways, yet at the same time earthy and strong, powerfully sensual.
Their I presence in the house must have cranked up the unnatural
tensions in their brother, who was dolibly male in the matter testes but
lacking the crucial valve that would have allow release.

They approached the table.  One of them stared down Julie, while the
other hung on her sister and averted her ey The bold one said,

"Are you Candy's girlfriend?"  Thereunmistakable mockery of her brother
in the question.

--you shut up," Candy said.

"If you're not his girlfriend," the bold one said, in a voice as soft as
rustling silk,

"you could come upstairs with us, have a bed, the cats wouldn't mind,
and I think I'd like you

"Don't you talk like that in your mother's house," Candy said fiercely.

His anger was real, but Julie could see that he was also more than a
little unnerved by his sister.

Both women, even the shy one, virtually radiated wildn as if they might
do anything that occurred to them, regard! of how outrageous, without
compunctions or inhibitions.

Julie was nearly as scared of them as she was of Candy From the front of
the moldering house, echoing ahoveroar of the rain on the roof, came a
knocking.

As one, the cats dashed from the kitchen, down the hall the front door,
and less than a minute later they returned escort to Bobby and Frank.

ENTERING THE KITCHEN, Bobby was overcome with gra tude-to God, even to
Candy-at the sight of Julie alive.  She was haggard, gaunt with fear and
pain, but she had never looked more beautiful to him.

She had never been so subdued, either, or so unsure of herself, and in
spite of the banshee chorus of emotions that roar and shrieked in him,
he found capacity to contain a separ sadness and anger about that.

Though he was still hoping that Frank would come through for him, Bobby
had been prepared to use his revolver if worst came to worst or if an
unexpected advantage presented itself, But as soon as he walked in the
room, the madman said,

" move your gun from your holster and empty the cartridges of it."  As
Bobby had entered, Candy had moved behind the chair in which Julie sat,
and had put one hand on her throat, his fingers hooked like talons.
Inhumanly strong as he was, he could no doubt tear her throat out in a
second or two, even though he lacked real talons.

Bobby withdrew the Smith & Wesson from his shoulder holster, handling it
in such a way as to demonstrate that he had no intention of using it. He
broke out the cylinder, shook the five cartridges onto the floor, and
put the revolver down on a nearby counter.

Candy Pollard's excitement grew visibly second by second, from the
moment Bobby and Frank appeared.  Now he removed his hand from Julie's
throat, stepped away from her, and glared triumphantly at Frank.

As far as Bobby could tell, it was a wasted glare.  Frank was there in
the kitchen with them-but not there.  If he was aware of everything that
was happening and understanding the meaning of it, he was doing a good
job of pretending;otherwise.

Pointing to the floor at his feet, Candy said,

"Come here and kneel, you mother-killer."  The cats fled from the
section of the cracked linoleum which the madman had indicated.

The twins stood hipshot but alert.  Bobby had seen cats feign
indifference in the same way but reveal their actual involvement by the
prick of their ears.  With Violet and Verbina, their true interest was
betrayed by the throbbing of their pulses in their temples and, almost
obscenely, by the erection of their nipples against the fabric of their
T-shirts.

"I said come here and kneel," Candy repeated.

"Or will you really betray the only people who ever lifted a hand to
help you in these last seven years?  Kneel, or I'll kill the Dakotas,
both of them, I'll kill them now.

Candy projected the awesome presence not of a psychotic but of a
genuinely SUPERNATURAL being, as if his name were Legion and forces
beyond human ken worked through him.

Frank moved forward one step, away from Bobby's side.

Another step.

Then he stopped and looked around at the cats, as if something about
them puzzled him.

Bobby could never know if Frank had intended to evoke the bloody
consequences that ensued from his next act, whether his words were
calculated, or whether he was speaking out befuddlement and was as
surprised as anyone by the tune that followed.  Whatever the case, he
frowned at the!"  looked up at the bolder of the twins, and said,

"Ah, is Mother still here, then?  Is she still here in the house with
us?" The shy twin stiffened, but the bold one actually appeared to
relax, as if Frank's question had spared her the trouble deciding on the
right time and place to make the revelat herself.  She turned to Candy
and favored him with thesubtly textured smile Bobby had ever seen: it
was mocking, it was a would-be lover's invitation, as well; it was
tentat with fear, but simultaneously challenging; hot with lust, with
dread; and above all, it was wild, as uncivilized and fe cious as any
expression on the face of any creature that roa any field or forest in
the world.

Her smile was met by Candy with an expression of stark horror and
disbelief that made him appear, briefly and for the first time, almost
human.

"You didn't," he said.

The bold twin's smile broadened.

"After you buried her, dug her up.  She's part of us now, and always
will be, part us, part of the pack."  The cats swished their tails and
stared at Candy.

The cry that erupted from him was less than human, a the speed with
which he reached the bold twin was uncan He drove her against the
refrigerator with his body, crushed her against it, grabbed her by the
face with his right hand and slammed her head against the yellowed
enamel surface, again.  Lifting her bodily, his hands around her narrow
was he tried to throw her as a furious child might cast away a!"  but
cat-quick she wrapped her limber legs around his waist and locked her
ankles behind him, so she was riding him with breasts before his face.
He pounded at her with his fists, she would not let go.  She held on
until the blows stopped raing on her, then loosened her lock on him so
she slid do far enough to bring her pale throat near his mouth.  He
seing the opportunity that she thrust upon him and tore the life of her
with his teeth.

The cats squealed hideously, though not as one creaturetime, and fled
the kitchen by several routes.

To the sound of his anguished screams and her eerily ero cries, Candy
extinguished his sister's life in less than a minute Neither Bobby nor
Julie attempted to intervene, for it was clear that to do so would be
like stepping into the funnel of a tornado, ensuring their death but
leaving the storm undiminished.  Frank only stood in that curious
detachment that was now his only attitude.

Candy turned immediately to the shy twin and destroyed her even more
quickly, as she offered no resistance.

As the psychotic giant dropped the brutalized corpse, Frank at last
obeyed the order he had been given, closed the distance between them,
and surprised his brother by taking his hand.  Then, as Bobby had hoped,
Frank traveled and Candy went with him, not under his own power but as a
sidecar rider, the way Bobby had gone.

After the tumult, the silence was shocking.

Sweating, clearly ill from what she had witnessed, Julie pushed back her
chair.  The wooden legs stuttered on the linoleum.

"No," Bobby said, and quickly came to her, stooped beside her,
encouraging her to sit down.  He took her uninjured hand.

"Wait, not yet, stay out of the way.

The hollow piping.

A blustery whirl of wind.

"Bobby," she said, panicking,

"they're coming back, let's go, i I let's get out of here while we have
the chance."  He held her in the chair.

"Don't look.  I have to look, be sure, make certain Frank understood,
but you don't need to see."  The atonal music trilled again, and the
wind stirred up the scent of the dead women's blood.

"What are you talking about?"  she demanded.

"Close your eyes."  She did not close her eyes, of course, because she
had never been one to look away or run away from anything.

The Pollards reappeared, back from the brief visit they had made in
tandem to someplace as far away as Mount Fuji or as close as Doc
Fogarty's house, more likely to several places.

Recklessly rapid and repeated travel was key to the success of the
trick, just as Bobby had outlined it to Frank in the car.

The brothers were no longer two distinct human beings, for Frank's had
been the guiding consciousness on their Journeys, and his ability to
shepherd them through error-free reconstitution was declining rapidly,
worse with each jaunt.  They were re biologically tangled than any
Siamese twin fused, most of Frank's left arm disappeared into Candy's
right side, as if had reached in there to fish among his brother's
internal o gans- Candy's right leg melted into Frank's left, giving the
only three to stand on.

There were more strangenesses, but that was all Bobby could comprehend
before they vanished again.  Frank needed to keep moving, stay in
control, give Candy no chance to exert hispower, until the scramble was
so complete that proper reco stitution of either of them would be
impossible.

Realizing what was happening, Julie sat perfectly still, her broken hand
curled in her lap, holding fast to Bobby with her good hand.  He knew
she understood, without being told, that Frank was sacrificing himself
for them, and that the least they could do for him was bear witness to
his courage, just as they would keep Thomas and Hal and Clint and Felina
alive memory.

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duti good friends and
family performed for one another: they tended the flame of memory, so no
one's death meant an imm diate vanishment from the world; in some sense
the deceas would live on after their passing, at least as long as those
w loved them lived.  Such memories were an essential weap against the
chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some con nuity from generation
to generation, an endorsement of ord and of meaning.

Piping, wind: the brothers returned from another series rapid
deconstructions and reconstitutions, and now they were essentially one
creature of cataclysmic biology.  The body large, well over seven feet
tall, broad and hulking, for it inco porated the mass of both of them.
The single head had a nigh mare face: Frank's brown eyes were badly
misaligned; slanted mouth gaped between them where a nose should had
been; and a second mouth pocked the left cheek.  Two torture screaming
voices filled the kitchen.  Another face was set inchest, mouthiess but
with two eye sockets, in one of which I an unblinking eye as blue as
Candy's; the other socketfilled with bristling teeth.

The slouching beast vanished, then returned once moor after less than a
minute.  This time it was an undifferentiated mass of tissue, dark in
some places and hideously pink in others, prickled with bone fragments,
tufted with sparse clumps of hair, marbled with veins that pulsed to
different beats.  Along the way, Frank had no doubt visited that
alleyway in Calcutta or someplace like it, for he had conveyed with him
dozens of roaches, not just one, and rats as well; they were
incorporated into the tissue everywhere that Bobby looked, further
ensuring that Candy's flesh was too diffused and polluted ever to be
properly reconstituted.  The monstrous and obviously dysfunctional
assemblage fell to the floor, flopped and shuddered, and finally lay
still.  Some of the rodents and insects continued to quiver and writhe,
trying to get free; inextricably bonded to the dead mass, they also
would soon perish.

THE HOUSE was simple, on a section of the coast that was not yet
fashionable.  The back porch faced the sea and wooden steps led down to
a scrubby yard that ended the beach.  There were twelve palm trees.

The living room was furnished with a couple of chairs, a low seat, a
coffee table, and a Wurlitzer 950 stocked with records from the big-band
era.  The floor was bleached oak, tight made, and sometimes they pushed
the furniture to the wall rolled up the area rug, punched up some
numbers on the juke and danced together, just the two of them.

That was mostly in the evenings.

In the mornings, if they didn't make love, they poured through recipe
books in the kitchen and whipped up bak goods together, or just sat with
coffee by the window, watched the sea, and talked.

They had books, two decks of cards, an interest in the bir and animals
that lived along the shore, memories both good and bad, and each other.
Always, each other.

Sometimes they talked about Thomas and wondered what gift he'd possessed
and had kept secret all his life.  She said made you humble to think of
it, made you realize everyone and everything was more complex and
mysterious than you could know.

To get the police off their backs, they had admitted workin on a case
for one Frank Pollard from El Encanto Heights, who believed his brother
James was trying to kill him over a misunderstanding.  They said they
felt James may have been a comPlete psychotic who had killed their
employees and Thomas merely because they had dared to try to settle the
matter between the brothers.  Subsequently, when the Pollard house was
found torched with gasoline, with a confusing arra of skeletal remains
in the aftermath, police pressure was slowly lifted from Dakota &
Dakota.  It was believed that Mr. James Pollard had killed his twin
sisters and his brother, as well, and was currently on the run, armed
and dangerous.

The agency had been sold.  They didn't miss it.  She no longer felt she
could save the world, and he no longer needed to help her save herself.

Money, a few more red diamonds, and negotiation had convinced Dyson
Manfred and Roger Gavenall to invent another source for the biologically
engineered bug when, eventually, they published their work on it.
Without the cooperation of Dakota & Dakota, they would never know the
actual source, anyway.

In the finished attic of the beach house, they kept the boxes and bags
of cash they had brought back from Pacific Hill Road.  Candy and his
mother had tried to compensate for the chaos of their lives by storing
up millions in a second-floor bedroom, just as Bobby and Julie had
suspected before they had ever gotten to El Encanto Heights.  Only a
small portion of the Pollards' treasure was now in the beach-house
attic, but it was more than two people could spend; the rest had been
burned, along with everything else, when they'd torched the house on
Pacific Hill Road.

In time he came to accept the fact that he could be a good man and still
sometimes have dark thoughts or selfish motives.  She said this was
maturity, and that it wasn't such a bad thing to live outside of
Disneyland by the time you reached middle age.

She said she'd like a dog.

He said fine, if they could agree on a breed.

She said you clean up its poop.

He said you clean up its poop, I'll take care of the petting and Frisbee
throwing.

She said she had been wrong that night in Santa Barbara when, in her
despair, she had claimed no dreams ever came true.  They came true all
the time.  The problem was, you sometimes had your sights set on a
particular dream and missed all the others that turned out your way:
like finding him, she said, and being loved.

One day she told him she was going to have a baby.  He held her close
for a long time before he could find the words to ex press his
happiness.  They dressed to go out for champagne dinner at the Ritz,
then decided they would rather celebrate at home, on the porch,
overlooking the sea, listening to Tommy Dorsey recordings.

They built sandcastles.  Huge ones.  They sat on the porch and watched
the incoming tide wreck their.  constructions.

Sometimes they talked about the wordburst he had recei in the car on the
freeway, from Thomas at the momentdeath.  They wondered about the words

"there is a light loves you," and dared to consider dreaming the biggest
dream of all-that people never really die.

They got a black Labrador.

They named him Sookie, just because it sounded silly.

Some nights she was afraid.  Occasionally, so was he.

They had each other.  And time.
