Pawnbroker Curve

A story by Keith Croes

The guy was dead. Face like blue cheese dressing, flesh-hanging-off-the-frame dead. Wearing a duck-billed hat, a hat with printing on it like GAGGLIARDI CONSTRUCTION or FRAM or PITTSBURGH PIRATES. A gaunt stack of wiper-whapping bones in the rain, almost fluorescent in the headlights, walking the same washed-out walk from head to toe as though it were leaving the scene of an accident.

John Elliott drove by without slowing down because, after all, the guy was walking. He thought about it, thought about moving his foot from the accelerator to the brake, easing the Porsche off the wet pavement and onto the gravel shoulder, stopping, backing up, watching the figure grow larger through the waving rear windshield wiper. Just to prove himself wrong.

But the guy was walking. That was proof enough, wasn't it? That was proof enough for any sane passerby.

The Porsche took an unalteringly smooth line through the curve and John shuddered, a spasm that startled him with its intensity. Somehow, it wasn't. It wasn't proof enough.

His foot had almost left the accelerator. Headed for where? For proof that dead men didn't walk? Or just the opposite, that indeed dead men can and do walk, very nearly like live men? It came to him suddenly that perhaps he'd only wanted to help someone who might be injured, and that lie was quickly replaced by another: that he hadn't stopped because he was afraid of what he'd find. He'd viewed the thing with no sense of hope or compassion; he'd watched it as helplessly as one might witness the unfolding of a terrible natural disaster. No part of him had thought that the man might only be injured, and as the moment transpired he'd held no fear of a dead man walking. If the guy was dead, it would make no difference whether he stopped or not. The only proof that awaited his stopping was proof of his own insanity.

And that he didn't fear either. Not on a Sunday night. If dead men walked, then the threads on the light bulb of reality wound in the opposite direction. What he feared was the embarrassment of discovering that he'd been twisting it the wrong way for the whole of his life.

Another mile and he turned right at the light. The Big Bass Inn was two miles down Route 291 on the left. He lit a cigarette.

The road gleamed and swam in rainy fuzz, black slicked with streetlights and bank signs and auto lot halogens, a mean random pounding beneath the methodical precision of the FM. The music suddenly sounded contrived to the point of physical discomfort and he switched it off. Instantly came the white noise of the flooded Pirelli's, the chastising clack of the wiper blades, and the image rose of the colorless redneck specter, dead as a spitted hog, flitting momentarily through the passing headlights. Headed for where? Washed-out denim pants and jacket, wallet soggy with increeping grave-musty moisture, dead puckered hands shoved deep in its pockets, mushy eyes straight ahead. Washed-out frosty in the headlights. Cold, the lint at the bottom of its pockets with the same musty smell, a round can of snuff in its breast pocket thumping against its hollow meat-rack ribcage.

The guy was dead. Dead as a box of Goodwill clothes, a walking stack of deadness. John wanted to cry but felt he might vomit instead.

Ed was the latest Sunday night bartender, the only night John went to the Big Bass. Something about Sunday nights always sent him there, pitched tighter than a harpsichord. He stumped out the butt of the cigarette in a black plastic ashtray, failing to acknowledge the other people at the bar, four or five men and maybe a woman. A college baseball game on ESPN occupied two television screens high to the left and right. The color quality was different on each set, but each had something to commend it. John always preferred whichever one he happened to be looking at and always wondered why. The audio was nearly imperceptible, which meant that the juke box had recently spun its last tune and gone silent. Ed stood in front of him.

"I just saw a dead man walking down the road," John said.

"The usual?"

"Yes, thank you." John looked at the people seated to his right, who were now staring at him, and said, "I just saw a dead man walking down the road." He sat, leaning left and right out of his jacket, thinking about how his voice had carried in the quiet bar, thinking about acoustics.

"Where, honey?" A woman had spoken.

John cocked his head in some direction and palmed the rain off his face. "Down Pawnbroker Road, just a few miles."

"Is that where the girl was killed the other night?"

There immediately erupted some infighting among the group to his right, during which John watched Ed scoop a highball glass full of ice from a stainless steel sink and douse it with Jack. The men seemed to be of differing opinions, with one thinking that it was a teenage boy, another that it was an older man, another that it was a middle-age woman. Ed placed the drink on a waterlogged Amstel coaster in front of him.

"I didn't hear anything about it."

Ed volunteered the opinion that it was a boy, snatching the ashtray away and emptying it into a plastic garbage can lined with a plastic bag like a black-green hole, reflectionless. He returned the ashtray to the bar and came away in one motion with John's bill, a five.

"They found her in an open grave in that cemetery on the curve," the woman said, and the men loudly disagreed, one of them insisting that the police had found the body in a construction site, another mentioning a wooded area near the construction site, where the Hoovers were building, and it wasn't a her, it was a him, etc., etc. John took a sideways look at the woman and found medium-length brown hair that went in curlers every night, dark-framed glasses, the intelligent, squarish face of an English teacher, blissful with alcoholic concern at the moment. The men wore navy-blue jackets, the one with his back toward him bearing the words in white script, JEFFERSON COUNTY VOLUNTEER FIRE CO. NO. 5.

Ed had topped off the glass and John spilled a slug on the way up and another down his chin on the way in, knowing absolutely that his shaking hand was going to let him down.

As he wiped his mouth with his hand he realized the others were watching him. "I don't know anything about it," he repeated. "All I know is that I just saw a corpse walking down the road. Keep a tab, will ya?"

He could've taken a different route, gone maybe a few miles out of his way, but he was drunk enough when he left the Big Bass Inn that he drove home the same way he came.

He'd never known that there was a cemetery along that piece of Pawnbroker Road, and though he told himself he would look for it, he forgot until he was halfway around the long curve.

At the end of the curve on the left was the stark frame of what must be the Hoover house, and he remembered that it was alongside this wooden skeleton that he had seen the figure in the headlights. For a moment it made sense to think that it was a construction worker putting in some weekend overtime, maybe coming out special to throw a tarp over some bags of concrete or equipment that might be damaged by the rain. The guy had looked like a construction worker.

A postmortem construction worker.

John knew something about construction work, and enough about construction workers to think that one in a million would travel to a site on a rainy Sunday night to throw a tarp over their naked mothers, let alone a pile of concrete.

And if he'd never seen a corpse in his life, which he had on a number of occasions, he would've known that sickening flash in the rain to be a corpse.

He and his wife had moved to Walston, 30 miles east of Pittsburgh, about four years ago, and had bought a house less than two miles from a cemetery he hadn't known about until tonight. A year since she left him. He slowed to the 35-mile-an-hour speed limit, past the Hoover's skeletal home, the stretch of road where he'd seen the dead man, then gunned the Porsche over the railroad tracks, fishtailing to the greatest possible speed he could attain on the wet asphalt and still make a calm right turn into his gravel driveway.

One hundred and five.

Monday morning was the sob from nowhere, the ineffably lonely smell of coffee. Sally had bought the machine and left it. Left most everything, in fact. A clean break. Wearing a burgundy terrycloth bathrobe, he pushed the glass door down its runners and stepped out on the deck. Coffee mixed with pine. He held the white cup, embossed with the blue logo of Elliott Hi-Speed Accessories, in his right hand, and looked at his left palm. Dark streaks of sap remained from the night before where he'd leaned against a tree; tiny threads from his bedding clung to the sticky tracks.

" -- High today around 60, currently it's 54 degrees, 52 at the airport. Let's check the traffic with Captain Bob in the WPIX chopper -- " a woman's tinny voice drifted from the radio.

John slurped the coffee and looked out across the gray sky's choppy cast on the lake through the trees. Rough and moist, the redwood planking chilled the soles of his feet. A round thermometer mounted in an aluminum bracket outside the kitchen window read 45 degrees. Rolling the door closed behind him, he returned inside, set his coffee on the bar between the kitchen and dining room and took the handset of the wall phone. The press of a single button brought the blossom of his office number, a tiny familiar sequence of tones.

"Hi, Beth. I'm gonna work at home today. Yeah, I know, I know. Bye."

Took hardly anything at all. Just wanted out, away from Walston and the Walston Speedway, where he had once burst from the champion bubble and Sally left no part of his greasy face unkissed. John picked up the cup, poured new coffee into old and padded down the carpeted hallway to the third bedroom, which he used as an office. He'd been on a sales call to Bradford that day. She was sitting at the bottom of the steps up to the living room in the split level foyer, waiting for him when he returned. Bradford, home of the Zippo lighter and a zillion acres of state forest land. Sitting there in jeans and leather jacket, waiting, her duffel bag parked on the terra cotta tiles of the entranceway, she spoke at him urgently but he heard only the words a clean break. Then she was gone in the dark in the Camaro she had owned since he first met her.

He sat at his desk, the old regret seeming new, intense and painful as ever. He would've gone with her. If she'd taken the time to talk to him, to listen, to let him understand the situation, she would've discovered that he wanted her more than Elliott Hi-Speed Accessories, more than Walston, more than anything. He would've gone with her. They could've gone together. He had a duffel bag that could tell a few stories of its own about the time before he was Mr. Businessman. Before he'd met a pouty teenager in a yellow halter top, a dark-haired darling who seemed to turn up at most of the stops on the circuit. Before he'd been compelled to build a life with her, a life that would eventually drive her away.

It was tax time. He pulled open the lower left-hand drawer of the desk where he kept his financial files and retrieved a calculator from the shallow drawer in front of him, hand brushing the black leather holster of a nine-shot .22-caliber revolver. Beth insisted that he was crazy for doing his own taxes. But he knew within a few hundred dollars what he would owe and spent the morning verifying it.

For lunch he had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of borderline milk. Then he was fishing laundry from a white plastic basket, tossing it into the open mouth of the washing machine, and among the T-shirts and jockey shorts were her panties, stained in the crotch.

"You haven't killed yourself yet?"

He shrugged. "I would've gone with you, Sally."

"What makes you think I would've wanted you to come?"

Her sweater was there, some halter tops. He carefully put them aside. He was doing whites. "You only left because you didn't think I would."

"I left because you were killing me. Just like you killed my family."

"I love you."

"Yeah, off and on. Mostly off."

He flushed with an unexpected anger. "You needed cock, is that it?"

"Yes, I needed cock."

"Well try this on for size."

He awoke on the wraparound living room sofa with a scratchy erection. The Casio on the glass coffee table read 4.30, but the gloomy afternoon took little interest in coming inside. He shed the terrycloth bathrobe, took a long shower and donned a polo shirt and a pair of jeans.

He watched a movie on the Sony, then caught the last three innings of a Pirates game against the Phillies. The Phillies won, 7-3. He looked for dinner and found a frozen pizza, then poured himself several straight-up ounces of Jack Daniels. "Jesus, Sal," he said over Steely Dan on the CD player, "I would've gone with ya."

Items on the coffee table seemed to float in front of him. An amber cut-glass ashtray cradling a nest of cigarette butts smoked and snuffed at almost identical lengths. A postage-paid business reply envelope and the warranty to a new electric shaver he had purchased at Jamesway that weekend. Portions of the Pittsburgh Press Sunday edition: the sports section and the comics. A wooden coaster inlaid with cork. Two remote-control keypads, one for the TV, one for the VCR. Beneath them through the glass he saw his feet, toes curling.

"I'll be right there!" he shouted. He gazed around the room and realized that all the lights were on. The suspended globe over the wraparound sofa. Two table lamps and another floor lamp in the living room. The chandelier over the dining room table. The two ceiling lamps in the kitchen and the 25-watt bulb under the range hood. He stood, flexing his chest muscles, his buttocks. Someone was knocking on the glass door to the deck.

The place filled with light, making his arms look pale, freckles and hair standing out on arms like ghost arms reaching out to withdraw the curtain from the expanse of the sliding glass doors. He saw the outline of a figure standing on the deck and with his left hand found the switch to the outside light. Inches away through the double-pane glass, the dead man appeared like a tattered statue, a monument to the unknown rotting redneck. The face was hidden in the shadow beneath the duck-billed cap.

John staggered backwards, thudding into the kitchen table.

Crystal-perfect Steely Dan on the CD: ...and die behind the wheel...

Crouching, he backed into the hallway, then turned and ran for the office bedroom. The first fall of the hammer would land on an empty chamber, he knew, so he pulled the trigger once coming back through the hallway. Kneeling on the edge of the kitchen linoleum, he peeked out around the cabinets. The figure leaned, palms on the glass, skull twisted strangely, resting on one bony shoulder.

...drink scotch liquor, all night long...

He fired three times, forming a high-pitched tinkling triangle of holes in the double-pane glass of the left-hand door. The corpse disappeared from view as if it had been snatched aside by a rope.

...and die behind the wheel...

One hand holding the pistol up against his chest, he scrambled on his knees to the glass door and looked out at the deck, then reached up for the telephone. The police department was a rapid sequence of tones, a single button he had never pressed before. "Twelve fifty-eight Pawnbroker Road," he hissed. "Get out here quick!"

In a wave of inspiration, he sprinted across the living room to the bay window at the front of the house. Though he couldn't remember turning them on any more than he could remember turning on the lights of the rooms behind him, the two spotlights along the drive illuminated the red Porsche, the trunks of the tall spruces and the figure of a man dodging through the trees, alongside the car and down the drive. With his elbow he punched out one of the panes before him, and as he discharged the remaining five cartridges, he was aware of the fading crunch of the dead man's feet on the gravel of the driveway. Fading as the figure retreated toward Pawnbroker Road.

The two-tone doorbell reminded him that he'd called the police. Bing-bong, and he rose from the sofa and headed down the stairs of the split foyer entryway with no recollection of what he'd told them. Had he mentioned a dead man? Through the narrow panel of glass panes beside the door he saw the edge of two uniformed men, dark blue pants with light-blue stripes down the legs, shiny black leather jackets, and he heard the clack and squawk of a police radio. He opened the door. One of the men greeted him and asked him a question, and he tried to speak, failed. Drizzle was a nimbus around them in the outside lights. He motioned with his head in a way he hoped they would recognize meant for them to step inside and they did, one a white man his size, the other a black man built like a Penn State linebacker, which is exactly what the cop had once been. They stood on the terra cotta tiles.

"Some guy tried to get in," his voice said from far away. "I shot him."

"You okay?" The black officer was subsonic, a rumble as deep as plate tectonics. He reached out and held John's elbow. "Why don't you sit down and tell us what happened."

John turned and clutched the handrail, moving his feet.

"You're John Elliott, aren't you. Saw you in the Pocono 500."

A new voice, the white guy, and John had to bend his legs and raise his knees against double gravity, each step a mountain of indeterminate height. He moaned again, a soft complaining sound, and by the time he reached the top of the stairs he was sobbing. He heard the white officer speak into the radio and he fell onto the sofa, turning suddenly calm.

These men come complete with something heavier than .22's, he thought. He opened his eyes. The black officer was standing, looking down through the glass surface of the coffee table.

"I'm not drunk," he said. "Not very. He was on the deck. I fired three shots through the glass doors."

"Uh-huh."

The other cop disappeared into the kitchen and John heard a commotion at the front door. Red streaks zipped across the bay window.

"Where's the gun, Mr. Elliott?"

Footsteps and low, official voices coming up the stairs. John reached under the pillow and withdrew the pistol.

The black officer displayed his pale palms. "Okay, okay." Several more police officers entered the living room. John suddenly felt tired, satisfied. "Just put it on the table, Mr. Elliott."

John looked at the pistol as if he'd never seen it before. It seemed grossly underpowered. He placed it on the coffee table in a series of three distinct clicks and fell back on the sofa, appreciating a distant chorus of male voices. After a while -- maybe as long as an hour -- a sort of orderly silence brought him up to a sitting position. A man stood on the other side of the coffee table. A large white man with light-blue stripes up his pants legs.

"Mr. Elliott, I'm Sergeant Kelly of the Walston Police Department. Can you tell me where you got this pistol?" He held it near his chest in what looked like a zip-lock sandwich bag, and then it disappeared inside his jacket.

"An uncle gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday."

"Do you have a permit for it?"

"It's an antique. I mean, you can't buy pistols anymore that take .22 long rifles. It's a family heirloom."

"You live here alone, Mr. Elliott?"

John looked up at the officer. "Yes."

Kelly had keen gray eyes and a head like a crewcut block of soapstone, square and smooth. "We can't find any blood. How do you know you hit him?"

"I don't."

"You shot at him through the front window, too?"

"Yes."

"And then reloaded?"

"I don't think so."

"You reloaded," Kelly said, pointing to the top of the glass table. John's glance fell immediately on the cardboard box of cartridges he usually kept in a desk drawer in the bedroom office.

"I -- I don t remember. Guess I must have."

Slowly, his jacket squeaking, Kelly sat in an armchair on the diagonal from John. Four other cops, arms folded, stood talking to each other across the room. The bay window continued its silent red pulsing. "What telephone did you use to call the police?"

"Kitchen."

"Was that after you shot at the man?"

"Uh, he was on the deck. I shot at him. Then I called. Then I shot at him again through the front window. Eight shots in all."

"Then you reloaded."

"I guess I must have. I don t remember."

"The pistol was loaded."

"I must have reloaded the thing, okay? I don't remember."

John could hear nothing of the conversation across the room, just murmurs. Kelly squeaked.

'It holds nine shells," he said.

"So?"

"So why did you only fire eight shots?"

"I keep it that way...so the first shot lands on an empty chamber. It doesn't have a safety."

"Was he armed?"

John paused. "Not that I know of."

"Did he do anything threatening, make any threatening gestures?"

"I...No."

"So you shot at an unarmed man on your deck, called the police, shot at him again out the front window and then reloaded while you waited for us to arrive?"

"I guess so."

"Did you know him?"

John shook his head.

"Did you get a good look at him?"

"No, not really."

Kelly unsnapped the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a small notepad. "What was he wearing?"

"Jeans and a denim jacket, yellow T-shirt. A baseball cap, dark with some kind of logo on it."

"How tall was he?"

"My size. Six-two or so. Skinny, though."

"Black? White?"

"White. Real white." John felt Kelly's glance. "Pale, you know? At least I think so. I couldn't see his face."

"Pale, but you couldn't see his face. Any tattoos? Birthmarks?"

"Not that I saw."

"Are you married, Mr. Elliott?"

"No, I told you -- "

"Divorced?"

"Separated. Why?"

"How long?"

"A year."

"What was your wife's name?"

"Sally. What's that have to do with anything?"

"Her maiden name?"

"Hey -- "

"Just need to ask these questions, Mr. Elliott. Her maiden name?"

"Fox."

"Excuse me a moment." Kelly rose and joined the other cops across the room. John stretched back in the sofa, exhaling for a long time, blinking. He thought of the soiled panties in his dream, tossing them naturally into the washer. No embarrassment in marriage, he thought. A half hour may have passed; he dozed off at the edge of impatience. When his eyes opened Kelly was talking to him.

"Mr. Elliott, we'd like you to come with us."

He was thirsty now and sober and saw something in Kelly's face that brought on a momentary hallucination of yanking a stick shift, feet pounding against the pedals. Kelly had the look of a man against the wall, and John felt the old thrill of dancing on the thin, cold-blooded edge of destruction. Dancing with Sergeant Kelly, a man not at all happy about being against the wall, for which John felt not the slightest responsibility. They were where they were. The trick now was to come out of it alive.

"Am I under arrest?"

"We'd like to question you in connection with a homicide. We'd like you to come voluntarily."

"Why?"

"Because if we arrest you, there's more paperwork. Besides, we don't have any evidence. Not until we get the ballistics results from your pistol."

"Who's been killed?"

"We'll discuss it at the station."

A girl-boy-man-woman in an open grave/freshly dug foundation. A dead man strolling by in the rain. A foot contemplating leaving the accelerator. Headed for where? "No thank you," he said.

"Then you're under arrest, Mr. Elliott."

"For what?"

Kelly patted his chest lightly, eyebrows rising on his forehead. "Possession of an unregistered weapon."

John shrugged, then set about finding his socks and sneakers, retrieving a tan jacket from the closet, where he leaned against the wall momentarily. "Let's go," he said finally. Making his way toward the flashing lights at the front of the house, he realized that he'd rather be where he was at that moment than walking back to his empty bedroom. Yet it didn't feel anything like a checkered flag.

The Walston Police Department, in an old granite building on Allegheny Street adjacent to the courthouse, had a high-ceilinged lobby that was almost gracious, but John guessed correctly that the lobby was where it ended. The big black cop and the white cop who were the first to arrive at his house disappeared down a hallway that led to the right off the lobby. Kelly spoke to a man named Chester at the front desk, who took John a short way down the hallway and into a small room, fingerprinted him and took his picture, front and side.

I would've gone with you, sweetheart.

Chester had begun to put handcuffs on him, but Kelly gave a tiny shake of his soapstone head John knew the cop hadn't meant for him to see. The walls of the fingerprint/photo room were painted the black-hole green of a trash bag, and then Chester left him alone in a conference room full of fluorescent light where he sat on a folding chair at a folding fake-woodgrain table. He found a small aluminum ashtray, and three cigarettes later the door opened and two men wearing coats and ties entered. One lingered in the doorway and spoke to someone out of sight behind him, saying something about photos, that they wouldn't be needed, that her mother wouldn't be able to recognize her.

The other sat down across from him. "Mr. Elliott, we'd like to ask you a few questions."

"It was a woman?"

"What was a woman?"

The second man sat, squealing a chair beneath him. The first was fair and trim, shorter and younger than John. The second was pot-bellied, middle-aged, whatever that was, and balding. He could've been John's age.

"I want a lawyer."

The first cop sighed and John knew he was smart, took it for granted that he was also dangerous. "When's the last time you saw your wife, Mr. Elliott?"

"I want a lawyer."

"Well sure, you can have a lawyer. But I don't think you have much to worry about on the weapons charge." The man touched the chest of his jacket. "It was a family heirloom?"

John nodded.

"Then we'll give you some forms to fill out. You'll get it registered. Right?"

Motionless, John stared at the man.

"The weapons charge is the least of our worries, Mr. Elliott. You read the papers. Where were you Friday night?"

John shrugged.

"Were you at home?"

"Look, whoever you are -- " John lit another cigarette, the gas-hiss of the red disposable seeming loud in the room, the flame wobbling just a bit more than he'd like, then leaned back in his folding chair. " -- so happens I don t read the papers. Not at all. Don't watch the news. Now what do you want?"

The man's eyes narrowed and he cocked his head in the direction of his pot-bellied partner. "Get the photos, Walt."

Surprised, Walt jerked backward, parted quickly with his banging chair and left the room. He returned in a few moments with a manila envelope, during which time John finally broke eye contact with the peering, fair-haired cop and sucked on his cigarette, sucked and blew, sucked and blew. The envelope came skittering toward him on a cushion of air, ticked against the ashtray and stopped, spilling two of the butts and a wave of ash on the fake woodgrain.

"What's this?"

"Have a look."

"No thanks."

The young cop rose calmly and reached across the table, almost daintily plucking the closed end of the envelope upward and spreading a group of color eight-by-tens in front of John like a bad Mexican dinner. Face-up, John thought immediately, Did he know they would be face-up? and his thoughts became something else as he glanced at them, something desperate and grasping and numb. Color now, they use color now, and he couldn't for the life of him, for the still-beating heart of him, tell if the twisted, faceless, muddy figure was a boy or girl or woman or man. Red clay, the sticky kind, the kind that clings to your boots like weights at...At a construction site. He extended his wavering cigarette toward the ashtray with one hand and pushed the photos away with the other.

"Am I a suspect?"

"Maybe. When's the last time you saw your wife?"

"I want a lawyer."

"You already told Sergeant Kelly that the last time you saw your wife was a year ago. Is that true?"

"Was it a woman?"

"An answer for an answer."

John looked from the younger man to the older. "Yes," he said. "A year ago."

"Does she have any family?"

"Was it a woman?"

"Does she have any family?"

"Fuck you."

The young cop stood and left the room, returning quickly with Kelly and another uniformed cop John recognized from his home, a man who had stood with folded arms in his living room. Up there on Pawnbroker Road where next to nothing happens all the time. "Mr. Elliott is going to spend the night here," he said, pulling a plastic bag from his inside jacket pocket and handing it to Kelly. "Get this to ballistics," he said.

"I want a lawyer."

"Fuck you."

Yes, it was true. He hadn't seen his wife for a year. One year tomorrow, as a matter of fact. Or was it today? John glanced at his wrist and was surprised not to find his watch. The fluorescent lights passed overhead in long intervals down the hallway. The uniformed cop had relieved him of his cigarettes and lighter and walked behind him now, offering terse directions.

"Here."

They passed through a pair of stubborn swinging doors, light green with smudged aluminum push panels.

"Down."

Like him, she had diddly-squat for family, foster parents killed in a car crash a year before he met her strutting her fertile, heady stuff around an oval in Youngstown, Ohio. But he had caught glimpses of her before then -- in Cleveland, Detroit, Erie. Must be today. Surely it was after midnight. He looked at his wrist again, unconvinced, and was again surprised. He tried to imagine the Casio floating on the glass surface of the coffee table.

"Right."

They had come to the bottom of a stairwell. Through another pair of swinging doors was a latticework of flat steel bars, dimly lit cages. He turned right toward a passionate, choppy snoring and came to a stop at the deadend of a short hallway, the snoring hearty to his left. The cop passed alongside him and in front of him and unlocked the cell door. It all seemed very formal, as if the cop were doing him a favor.

"Thank you," John said.

"This isn't county," the cop answered. "You gotta share tonight."

Peering into the shadows, John slowly discerned a figure sitting on one of the two bunks, the duck-billed cap, the face like sagging papier-mache. "Sorry about that," the cop said. John stepped inside and stood as the cell door slammed behind him.

STP had bought them a camper that Doug Cassidy hauled behind a brown Chevy pickup. Underestimating the hazy sun, John touched the underside of his upper arm against the hood, swore and pulled away, smiling painfully.

"Hot," he noticed. "Yeah, yeah, I've seen you around."

She wore shorts cut from jeans, frayed edges higher than the Twin Towers around her tanned legs, and a yellow halter top, and was something more than what she was, John saw suddenly, like the taste of dust here, the filmy grass, the splintered, boot-spiked outthrusting of a million-candle-power light pole nearby. His words were nearly obscured by the high-octane echoes in his head, small talk behind a bomber squadron. He reached out a hand for hers and thought, There is magic beneath the dust. That's what they come to see. This is the sweaty, grubbing heart of my life, all I have and all I am, and when the lights blaze on upstairs, honey, no one cares about the ugly fucking pole. The light, the light cuts through the dust.

She reached out to him. "Dottie pointed you out up in Erie this spring." Her breath caught up sharply, as if the atmosphere had disappeared. Instead of grasping her hand, he hooked one finger inside the high edge of her shorts.

"Dottie?" he said.

"My friend."

He pulled her close, index finger finding the new, smooth edge of her panties, sliding to the right against her thigh, then left to her pubic hair, two fingers then three, scratching her as if he knew she itched. "Dottie no longer exists."

He did not withdraw from the heat between her legs, though he thought it hotter than the hood of the Chevy. With one finger inside her, he led her back to the camper, where he reentered her with the afternoon bright out the slatted windows, every pore, every follicle visible. His head thundered: You are my future. You are my death, if that's what you want. Death beneath the dust, beneath a black melting wail of rubber, beneath a quarter-turn of the wheel before the stretch, beneath the slightest miscue of eye and arm and hand. That's what I've come to see. Death and magic beneath the dust. That's what I've come...

And he was terrified as he came, every spasm welding some kind of seal on his future. His body felt as flounderingly weak as tissue paper. He had perhaps broken through somehow, passed on, as he took a hesitant step in the dim light of the Walston Police Department lockup. The terror was the same. Here was Death. Here was the pathetic maggot-lunch of the human body.

He stood, paralyzed, and felt his throat work. "Who are you?"

"Shit." The corpse shook its head. "Look, man, I didn't say shit. I can't fucking believe this. You get in trouble?"

Like an athlete warming up, John suddenly swung his arms in front of him, flexed his chest and buttocks. He felt strong. He was still alive, alive in the still-beating heart of him. He sat on a metal-framed plywood bunk suspended from the wall on chains. His brain slammed against both temples as if it were trying to spill out. "What time is it?" he asked.

"Right." The corpse wrapped itself in a strange silence for several seconds. "Look, I didn't say shit."

"What time is it?"

"What, I look like Big Ben?"

Except for the snoring coming from another cell, it was quiet for a long moment, then John heard a faraway, sorrowful sound. It was himself moaning. "Goddam it," he said when he recognized it. "It must be after midnight."

"All I wanted was to use your fuckin' phone, man."

"Who are you?"

'Lloyd Riggins," he heard, and he squinted across the cell at something that looked like an unwrapped mummy. "I didn't say shit about what happened. I was picked up a while later. Vagrancy, or some goddam thing. Me and Mr. Sinus next door here."

"What time is it?"

"Jesus, man, who the fuck cares? You'd think we had a constitutional right to know what time it is. It's no time. It's sometime. It's pretty damn late. What time do you want it to be?"

John was leaning back on the plywood now, and he let himself drop so that he was flat on his back. "You scared the hell out of me, partner, and now they think I killed somebody."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

"Well, I didn't tell the motherfuckers anything."

"You okay?"

"You didn't hit me, if that's what you're wondering. But I sure appreciate your thoughtfulness in asking."

"Maybe you did it," John yawned.

"Did what?"

"Turned somebody's face into a burrito." John had a glimmer of appreciation for the incomprehensibility of his falling asleep at this point, but made no effort to slow the downward course of a heavy gate that suddenly appeared, determined to blot out the baffled noise of his conscious mind. "Somebody," he said. "Someone. Somebody."

John was awakened by the squeaky wheels of a meal cart, and hadn't even come to a sitting position before his stomach took a nauseating roll at the thick, yeasty smell of scrambled eggs. That was followed immediately by a giant jolt of panic as the events of the previous night rushed back. He glanced quickly toward the other bunk and was relieved to find that, in the light coming through the latticework of their cage, the other man resembled a human being. For the briefest instant, John saw a sad smile of contrition.

"Ain't this a kick in the ass," the man said loudly. He had removed his cap, revealing longish dark-brown hair in the matted style of someone on a weeklong campout. His denim jacket was clenched around one fist, and he wore a light-blue T-shirt. He was pale, very pale, but very much alive. He rose from the bunk, withdrawing the cap from a rear pocket of his jeans where he had apparently deposited it with the visor folded in half, and in a stride was whapping it back and forth against the cell door. "Get a move on, old man!" he shouted. "We're hungry over here!"

"Pipe down, punk!" John turned at the guttural bark that had come from the snoring man in the next cell, a rotund monster sitting now in a black T-shirt with splitting seams. The bulky figure hunched over and hacked mightily, looked wildly around for something to spit in, then lumbered over to an open commode and dropped a heavy discharge into the water.

John leaned forward and looked through a diamond-shaped hole in the latticework up the short hallway, where a cop who appeared about ten years past retirement age was handing something off the cart to someone several cells away.

The hoarse voice, not much cleared, bellowed, "This punk tried to roll me!" John moved back out of the path of his pointing finger as the black-shirted man stood planted before the toilet. "I want to press charges against this sonuvabitch!"

"Pipe down yourself, Elmo," the old cop said in a weary voice. "They didn't find nothin' on him. Not a damn thing."

Elmo slapped himself vigorously in the ass and gargled. "Then where's my fuckin' money?"

The pale man had backed away from the cell door a bit, and swung his hat now in slow wide arcs, barely brushing the door. "You were broke when I ran into you, Elmo. Remember? At the park?" Holding his head in his hands, Elmo crashed down on his bunk, shaking the walls, and the pale man's hat began slapping the cell door with renewed momentum. "Come on, old man! You've got customers over here!" With a feeling like mice climbing up the back of his neck, John glanced down the pale man's skinny pants legs, down to his boots, looking for traces of clay.

Red and heavy.

The man's boots were scuffed but free of mud. They'd probably been black once, shiny black. They looked like military boots, favored by a lot of drivers because they were light and the rubber soles took a good grip on the pedals.

John looked down at himself, realized he was still wearing his tan jacket, an Izod polo shirt, designer jeans and an eighty-dollar pair of sneakers. "Jesus," he said as he looked at his empty wrist. "What time is it?"

He thought perhaps that the pale man gave him a pitying glance, but the flailing hat went back into the back pocket and the man stepped forward, gripping the metal latticework, ten fingers through the diamond-shaped holes, and he was shouting. John noticed that the old cop was sliding a tray of scrambled eggs to Elmo through a slit in the cell door. "Hey, if you're gonna arrest me for no reason, the least you can do is feed me. We're hungry over here!" John swallowed the urge to vomit.

"Look, mister," the old cop almost whispered, and the man grew silent. "I gotta feed Elmo because Elmo tested point-three last night and he's gonna do a three-day drunk-and-disorderly. And it ain't the first time. But you weren't drinkin', they tell me, and pretty soon they're gonna be down here to let you out. So maybe I'll give you a cup of coffee if you can manage not to yell at me for a few seconds, but the taxpayers don't owe you no breakfast."

At that moment two things happened. Elmo took his tray and, roaring, dumped it in the toilet, and one of the swinging doors down the hallway opened. A young, muscular cop strode through and, passing the old cop with a nod, unlocked the door to John's cell. "Mr. Elliott," he said, "come with me, please." As they pushed through the light-green swinging doors down the short hallway, John listened to an eerie shouting duet featuring Elmo and the pale man. Belligerent disbelief for vastly unrelated reasons.

John knew that the dreamlike quality of his surroundings was attributable to shock, but the dream itself, moment upon moment, filled him with dread. It was something he'd experienced before -- walking away from a wicked tangle of former automobile, or a firefight in Nam. And the sensation always triggered the same thought, one he remembered only on those occasions when he felt as he did now: What good is shock if it offers so little protection?

The world was ticking. The small-town grandeur of the lobby, sunshine through tall windows, the polished brown-black mahogany of the front desk, cops and others not so readily identifiable assuming their morning patterns, comfortable, with places to see and people to go, the very ordinariness of events around him went ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka, adding to some ominous stockpile, a stockpile with a limit somewhere. A limit he never wanted to reach.

The muscular cop made a palm-up gesture. "Wait here, Mr. Elliott," then stepped behind the desk. What power these people have, he marveled, that they can hurl the citizenry into this place where the weakest must surely near critical mass, and the palpable edge of his own madness felt suddenly natural. It happened every time with startling clarity. This is life, he thought. A billion accidents on a billion accidents. Comfortable patterns are an illusion, the trained rat's streamlined path through the maze, a happy guppy's happy fishbowl. No way for people to live. Life was a stockpile, ticking and ominous. The cop clattered a number of items from a manila envelope across the chest-high counter: key chain, brown trifold wallet, Casio digital watch, red Bic lighter and a Marlboro box he knew was nearly empty.

"It's yours, isn't it?" His vacant head must've been staring out his face; he managed a nod and reached first for the Casio, hitching it on and checking the date -- TU 4-10 in the upper right of the display.

Happy anniversary, baby.

"You remember Detective Farnsworth?" Slipping the cigarettes into his jacket, he shook his head. "Young guy, plainclothes, talked to you last night?" After a pause, John nodded. "He's gonna call you this afternoon. He'd like you to be home. Okay?"

The swinging door of the stairwell opened to his right near the mouth of the corridor and the pale man walked into the lobby, trailed by another cop -- how many did they have in this burg? -- up to the wooden desk. Another of life's accidents, one of the billions. With the floppy dome of his cap bobbing on his rear, the man with the face of Death, the nightcrawling corpse himself, walked up and leaned on the desk next to John, smacking the shiny surface with one hand and glancing over at him. "Can't even get a cup of coffee out of this, man."

The muscular cop pointed a blue ball-point pen at him. "We'll get to you. Mr. Elliott, will you sign here for your valuables, please?" John took the pen and stared at the pale man until, miffed, the sallow face turned away, then signed a small three-copy invoice. Not that he remembered what they had taken from him. "And here, for your release." Another form, and as John signed, the cop said, "You guys could be before and after."

"Anything else?" John caught the last of a grin flee the cop's mouth.

"Uh, this afternoon, Mr. Elliott? Detective Farnsworth would like to talk to you?"

John nodded.

"Do you need a ride home?"

"I'll walk."

The cop handed him two yellow copies of the forms he'd signed, then turned his attention to the pale man. "Let's see, uh, you didn't have any valuables."

"Hey," came the response in a marvelously sincere voice. "I came in here with a pound of twenties!"

"Just sign here -- "

John made his way toward the high wooden front doors of the Walston police station, doors the color of milky coffee with gilt-edged panels, and stood at the bottom of a half-dozen concrete steps, blinking in the sun. He could sense the pale man materialize at his right elbow. Allegheny Street honked and rattled and blew. That's how shock protects you, he thought. It let's you see the truth -- that the ticking stockpile of life is the most unlikely dream of all. The man's eyes were hidden in the shadow beneath his visor.

"What's your name again?"

"Lloyd Riggins."

"The least I can do is buy you breakfast," he said. He had four hundred dollars in his wallet.

Angel's Cafe was a block away. A shadow passed over the street and John looked up. A dark-bellied sky flowed eastward, which was the direction he headed.

"Some fuckin' night, eh?"

"Yeah."

Curbs and cracks and sidewalk joints, shady corners around and between buildings wore damp patches from the previous night's rain. TU 4-10 with more on the way.

"Goddam Elmo didn't want to stay, know what I mean? Fuckin' walkin' barfight of a hair-trigger hick. Jesus Horatio Jones, never met a less jolly fat man. 'Cept last night he was a different guy, like we was lifelong buddies. Different, only the same, know what I mean? Hair-trigger prick of a hick."

John spoke without looking at the man. "You don't have a wallet?"

"Got fuckin' rolled at a truckstop on Interstate 80. Thumbed all the way out from Arizona."

"Yeah, gotta watch those truckers. Rob you blind." They stopped suddenly in front of a storefront at Kendall and Allegheny, and John shouldered partway through an aluminum-framed glass door. "Hey Beth!" he hollered. "I'm taking the day off!"

Riggins backpedaled and looked at the modest plastic sign, yellow with red letters, hanging from a black cast-iron pipe anchored in the brickwork above the door: elliott hi-speed accessories. From a desk at the back of a neat storeroom, Beth saw two silhouettes and waved. "Okay, John. No sweat," she called out.

John bolted across Allegheny against the light, forcing the other man to wait for traffic, and was already seated near the window at Angel's by the time Riggins caught up with him. And by the time the pale man was sliding into the booth across from him, snatching his hat from his matted head, John had decided that after a serving of eggs Benedict and coffee, he never wanted to see the man again. He pointed. "What's that say?"

Surprised, Riggins held the cap up in both hands by his shoulder like a model in a TV commercial. "Tucson Desert Jam," John read, shaking his head involuntarily. "I always wanted to run in that."

"Yeah, it's a fuckin' scene, man. My fuckin' ears are still ringin'."

"Look -- " John bowed his head and took a deep breath. "Do you think you could use the word fuck any more often?" Glancing up at Riggins' puzzled face, he exhaled. "I'm sorry. Use it whenever you want. None of my business."

Assuming an introspective look that surprised John with its sincerity, Riggins buried the hat in his lap, apparently shoving the visor down the front of his pants. "You're right, man. Don't apologize. I'm sorry."

Sally appeared at the table -- Sally the waitress at Angel's, not Sally the absent wife. John didn't know her, didn't know much of anyone in Walston, really, but always imagined that the smart-assed 17-year-old was absolutely convinced that waiting tables at Angel's was leagues above finishing high school. And chances are, he'd only recently understood, that belief was reinforced by her imminent marriage to a 42-year-old plumber in the area. She offered John an arrogant glance, her customary greeting. "I know, eggs Benedict. What'll your friend have?"

"Pancakes and two eggs over easy, patty sausage on the side," Riggins said immediately, "and can you put the eggs on top of the pancakes? Coffee and orange juice. Black. Not the orange juice. I like orange juice orange."

Sally whinnied and stepped away, scribbling on her green pad.

"I thought your shirt was yellow," John said, and Riggins looked downward, checking. "It was because of my bug light," John realized at that instant. "I have a bug light out on the deck. It makes everything look yellow."

Riggins straightened in mock offense. "Perhaps I have another fuckin' shirt, monsieur," he said.

John laughed a laugh he couldn't fathom.

"So," Riggins said carefully, "who did you kill?"

"I don't know. A woman, I guess." Though you'd never know it from the pictures, Jack. If she took a .22, she took it along with a baseball bat. "So what happened to you?"

"Me?"

"You look like -- " before and after, leapt to mind. " -- you've been sick."

"Oh, yeah. Mononucleosis. I was flat on my back most of the winter."

Sally unloaded coffee and orange juice and a basket of muffins in front of them.

"You're here to see a friend?"

Resurrecting a dry English muffin from its napkin shroud, Riggins nodded and went in frantic search of butter and knife. "Yeah. He lives in the trailer park just down the road from you. Or used to. Randy Hart?"

John shook his head and sipped his coffee. "When did you get to town?"

Cheeks distended, Riggins tried to smile and chomped for a minute, then answered, "Yesterday."

"Yesterday? Monday?"

"Uh-huh."

All right, John thought, here it starts. TU 4-10 with more on the way. What was this guy up to? How big a pile was good old Lloyd ready to shovel up? And why?

Only one way to find out, he decided by the end of the meal. Offer to put him up for a few days. See how quick he'll dig his own grave. Could be entertaining, some ticka-ticka in his silent life. The silence that occasionally had him talking to himself and culminated in his Sunday night forays to the Big Bass Inn, near blind in his need to rub elbows with somebody, anybody, which was usually what he got. It had been a long time since he'd felt that old ticka-ticka. And looking at the emaciated goon with the campout hairdo across the table from him, he felt it bone-deep.

The food spread through him like a drug. He was approaching lighthearted by the time Sally delivered the check, asking in a voice overflowing with neighborliness, "So John -- " She said it like one word, so-john. " -- is this your brother?"

"No," John said with a mystified glance at Riggins.

Looking out the window at the traffic until she had walked away, he said, "You got any way to get some money?"

He thought he saw some grim, inner irony pass through Riggins' eyes, replaced quickly by the come-what-may good humor of a drifter with nothing to lose. Another shovelful of dirt from the grave of a liar. "Yeah, find a job."

"No friends or relatives?"

"I'd like to look around for Randy a little more. But money? Shit, I never have any money. Do you mind shit?"

"No relatives who could wire you some cash?"

Riggins shook his head. "Nah. My parents are dead. Got a sister who may as well be dead."

For some reason, John was not surprised. Sally returned with his change and two mints. "You can stay at my place a few days," he said.

"Sure. Thanks."

"I owe you one. I really don't understand why you didn't turn me in."

"It ain't that hard to figure out, man. Number one, I didn't know who the fu...who you were until you came marching into the cell last night. I mean, you were just some face behind a sliding glass door. And if I brought it up this morning, I woulda had some explaining of my own to do. I'd be there right now instead of sitting here a free man with a full belly. And thinkin' about the way it came down, well, maybe I was askin' for it. Actually, I was thinkin' maybe you'd turn me in."

Ticka-ticka. John swallowed and thought: For what? "For what?" he said.

"Yeah, for what?"

John shrugged away the unsettling question of why turning Riggins in had never for a second entered his mind.

"Did you talk to a detective named Farnsworth last night?"

Riggins shook his head and wiped his pursed lips with a napkin.

"Why didn't you come to the front door?"

"I came the back way. You know, through the cemetery and the woods. There's a path there."

John stood. "Let's go," he said.

"Where we goin'?"

They had walked about a mile west on Allegheny Street, past Brubaker Park where Riggins had been arrested the night before, to the intersection at the edge of town where the street became Route 19, then left on Fleming Road.

"Choate Creek. A place I know. I skinny-dip there in the summer. I feel like hanging out for awhile."

"How far is it?"

John caught the desperation in the voice and glanced over. Riggins seemed shrunken within the denim jacket. "Not far. It's on the way. Two miles, maybe. You all right?"

Riggins nodded grimly.

"You know -- " John shook his head in disbelief. " -- except for the color of your T-stirt, I described you pretty accurately to the cops last night. They didn't even question you?"

"Nope."

"Course, you might already have been in custody by then."

"I was arrested an hour after you shot at me, if that's what you mean."

"Still, one of them might have put two and two together."

"Maybe they thought you were full of shit, lyin' out your ass and guilty as hell of whatever it is they think you did."

John laughed loudly. A pair of blackbirds vacated a telephone line overhead.

"Looks like rain."

John gazed upward. "Nah. Tonight, maybe." But who knew? Who the fuck really knew?

Life was a billion accidents on a billion accidents.

John lay on a rippled slab of granite 150 million years old.

Following his unaccountably persistent urging, the two of them had rolled up their jeans and waded around the edges of Choate Creek, hoisting rocks from their sucking moorings to see what might reside underneath. Soon the cold water pained their calves and feet. It was, after all, TU 4-10. Now the granite ripples were vigorously uncomfortable, and John rotated to his side. Despite the clouds, it was a warm day.

"Ever done any racing?" he said loud enough to carry over the white-noise rush of the creek. Riggins was straddling the trunk of a willow that arched gracefully out of the bank and over the water.

"No. I, uh, worked a hot-dog stand at the Jam. Made 200 dollars that day. But don't tell the guy I was working for. You race?"

"Used to."

"That's neat. Takes quick reactions, huh?"

John thought of Riggins leaping from the path of three .22 longs tinkling through a sliding glass door. "Lloyd, why didn't you just walk around the house to the front?" he asked.

"Hey, rub it in, man. The place was lit up like partytime, jumpin' with music. I guess I thought it wouldn't matter."

"I want you to take me there."

"Where?"

The answer failed to find exit past the descending gate, and John's next inkling of reality was an insistent poking at his shoulder. He rolled painfully to his back and held the wrist with the Casio up against a bright sky fringed by black waving branches. After some squinting, he made it out: 3:08.

The road to the cemetery emptied out onto Pawnbroker Curve farther from the railroad tracks than John had imagined and on the opposite side from the Hoover site. In that direction, his was the first and nearest property -- no more than a mile and a half away. There was no sign at the entrance, just a rusty chain sagging between two short wooden posts. The road itself was nothing more than two muddy ruts in a mottled-brown carpet of leaves.

John walked on the center hump with Riggins abreast of him on the other side of the rut to the left. The sky had darkened above the bare trees and a strong, directionless wind had picked up. Branches collided, extending acoustically forever out from them: ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka.

"Chain's not doing much of a job, is it?" John noticed aloud.

"Hmmm?" Riggins had one of Angel's toothpicks traveling from one corner of his face to the other.

"Been a lot of vehicles back here lately."

Riggins grunted in revelation.

A hundred yards into the woods the headstones appeared on the right like someone in camouflaged clothing suddenly becoming visible, and a large, gesturing elm marked the end of their thoroughfare. John took a few steps into the underbrush and stood.

"You came through here at night?" He glanced over as the dancing toothpick drew alongside him.

"No. I mean, yes. I came through yesterday about noon on my way to Randy's. He sent me a map about a year ago. It was in my wallet. But I remembered the curve and thought this might be a shortcut. Got to the trailer park and found no one, no name on the mailbox, nothing, and went back into town to ask around. He used to tend bar at the hotel, but the son of a bitch quit six months ago."

Good answer, John thought, and Riggins grinned at him as if he'd read John's mind. "So -- " John said flatly, giving in to the irresistible urge to let one eyebrow rise on his forehead, " -- did you have a light last night?"

"Sure I did, Mr. Curious. One of those disposable jobs. Blue, I think, but I must've dropped it when someone opened fire on me."

"Why were you going back to the trailer park?"

"Jesus Horatio Jones. Where the fu...where else was I supposed to go? Then it started rainin', and lo and behold, here was this warm, brightly lit house beckoning to me in the night, the Elliott residence, I think it was, and me with no money, and I thought, well, shit, I'll borrow the phone, call my girl..."

Transfixed by something on the far edge of the graveyard, John raised a hand and placed it on the other man's shoulder, pointing with the other. "Sorry," he said, "I really am. What's that?"

"What?" Riggins replied, peering, but John was already striding off through the brush and around the headstones. "Hey, man, what is it?"

A piece of bright yellow. John felt his heartbeat -- the still-beating heart of him -- ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka, and the accusation came screaming into his mind: You needed cock, is that it? Briars tore at his pants and he stumbled, recovered, and there were young, skinny trees in the cemetery, trees nurtured by the dead, and one rammed his right shoulder, staggered him, and he ran on. A piece of bright yellow becoming a line of bright yellow becoming a trapezoid of bright yellow.

"Riggins!" What he meant as a yell came out a strangled gasp. Then Riggins was beside him at the edge of an open grave. The dirt was the dark loam of forest soil, but red clay was smeared on its shallow floor. The yellow tape brushed his shins with its endless black-lettered message: -- police line do not cross police line do not cross police line do not --

"You see this yesterday?" he said.

"No way, man. God, let's get the fuck out of here."

"Gee, I was thinking of maybe moving in."

A path began just beyond the big elm at the end of the road and led to within a hundred feet of John's two acres, then veered off, apparently paralleling the rear of the other properties bordering the lake. A deer trail, John thought, not obvious but there, probably used by kids now and then during the day. The woods were intermingled evergreen and deciduous: spruces, maples, birches, elms, chestnuts, oaks, cedars -- all poking through a brown blanket of needles and leaves veined by fallen branches and punctuated by outcroppings of mossy rock. John set a fast, wordless pace ahead of Riggins, who fell even farther behind as John approached the stairs to his deck.

The sliding glass doors were locked, but the curtain was open and John could see the various lights glowing dimly inside. He turned toward Riggins, who stood now breathing heavily at the bottom of the redwood steps, and his eye caught sight of something blue at the base of the tarp covering the picnic table. "We'll have to go around front," he said, retrieving the disposable flashlight and pressing it into Riggins' hand as they passed the brick facing of the foundation at the side of the house.

After instructing Riggins to make himself at home -- as if that were necessary, and there wasn't much luggage to worry about, was there? -- John went first to the answering machine in the bedroom office, as he always did, where a red light told him someone had called. He expected a business message.

What he got was Farnsworth. "Mr. Elliott, I sure wish you were there. It would make me feel so much more secure. Let's try this. I'll call back and you'll answer the phone yourself. It would be better all the way around."

That was it. An electronic beep and it was over. As John shouldered out of his jacket, the phone chirped. He picked up the receiver.

"Hello."

"Mr. Elliott? This is Detective Farnsworth." John provided some kind of appropriate response, but was distracted by the click of someone else coming on the line -- maybe someone on Farnsworth's end, maybe someone on John's end. Maybe Riggins in the kitchen. "I have good news and bad news."

"Look, Farnsworth, I didn't do anything, so there's nothing you could say that would be bad news."

"The good news is that the ballistics test was inconclusive. The bad news is that the ballistics test was inconclusive. You're a big question mark, Elliott. Big enough that an assistant DA named Myers would like to take your statement. Do you think you could find the time for that?"

"I'm sorry, I missed the bad news. The ballistics test was inconclusive?"

"That means you could've fired the shots that were primarily responsible for a corpse whose fate has assumed an important place in my life."

"Man or woman?"

"Come on, Elliott, get off it. For your convenience, Myers has agreed to make a house call. Would 10 o'clock tomorrow morning be suitable? Fine. It's a sworn statement, Elliott. Know what that means?"

"I go to hell if I lie?"

"Be there, Elliott. Consider that as the most polite request you'll get as part of a homicide investigation. Everything clear, pal?"

"You're wasting your time, Farnsworth. How about my pistol?"

"You can pick it up at the station. Just bring the completed forms, citizen."

Farnsworth hung up and John looked at the mouthpiece.

"Riggins?" There was no response, no sound, nor did he hear anything out the open door of the office. He returned the receiver to its cradle. "What fucking forms?" he said to himself.

"We don't need no stinking forms!"

After placing two venison steaks wrapped in white freezer paper on a plate on the counter, John had hunted down the Jack. Jack for him and vodka for Riggins. Riggins, freshly showered, was wearing a burgundy terrycloth robe and reclined in a beige recliner, choking with laughter.

"Oh, shit," John said, feeling the time limitation on him like a pit stop and scrambling from the couch to the kitchen phone, where the press of one button brought the musical blossom of Beth's home number.

"Hi," he said, listening to the intro music of the 6-o'clock news in the next room. "You know that vacation I was going to take next month? Well, it's been moved up. Yes, I got the taxes done. Yes, don't worry. He's a...friend. Monday at the latest. I'll call. Don't worry. Love ya."

John never watched the 6-o'clock news or any news, for that matter, but had enough sense -- Jack or no -- to try now, and it was from the mouth of a blonde woman who could've been a model that he heard about the murder of a woman in Walston. Second story, right after a report on a serial killer in Boston. The gruesome elements appealed to these vultures, apparently, which was why he hated television news. They had pictures.

Open grave with yellow police line taken by wobbly camera.

"This is you! This is you!" Riggins hissed.

Mayor Joe Ciaccio at a rostrum in the hotel ballroom propounding on the rarity of the event and the relative peacefulness of the borough.

Farnsworth on the steps of the Walston Police Department appearing highly put upon, straight-arming people out of the way, then stopping to share his jut-jawed determination to bring the perpetrator to justice.

The Jefferson County medical examiner describing the injuries, holding a human skull in one hand and a sharpened number-two pencil in the other.

A young woman, in her mid-twenties. Shot and brutally beaten. John was surprised that the Pittsburgh station would take such an interest in a suburban murder. The gruesome elements, he thought. Good pictures. And there was a lot of money in Walston. Riggins watched, bug-eyed.

Then the male anchor began talking and the scene shifted to a hallway outside the chambers of the Pittsburgh city council, where a strident group of picketers cried out the need for low-income housing. John pressed the off-button on the remote control and there was darkness. Rain outside had driven up to a medium thrum. Breeze through the broken pane of the bay window fluttered the sheer inner curtain, whose vertical pleats were bars against the twilight. John's eyes adjusted. He lifted his glass from the coaster, which clung to it halfway up and fell clattering on the table.

"April showers," Riggins said.

"Yeah. Look, do you think you could find something to do tomorrow morning? They're coming to take a statement."

Riggins waited for a grumbling of distant thunder to pass. "Sure," he said, gazing at the muted window. "I'll go look for Randy."

John stood, glanced at Riggins profile and felt insects scratching up the back of his neck. Cupped contemplatively in the open palm of the lounger, showered, shaved and blow-dried in John's burgundy bathrobe, Riggins was lost in thought.

So-john, is this your brother? It was Sally's voice, Sally the missing wife. "Happy anniversary, sweetheart," he whispered.

"What?"

"We better eat."

Riggins was gone when John awoke. He sipped coffee on the deck beneath low, heavy clouds, then inside dumped a wasted bowl of Wheaties down the garbage disposal followed by a half-gallon of rancid milk. He showered and shaved. At 10 o'clock the doorbell sounded: bing-bong.

Farnsworth and his buddy Walt stood behind a redhead who made John's breath catch, a reaction she seemed not to notice. He instantly understood that she saw it all the time. "I'm Andrea Myers from the DA's office. I believe you've met Detectives Farnsworth and Ochler."

"Yes, we've met." John let the trio inside and they followed him up the stairs, where he gestured around at the furniture, feeling like a tour guide.

"Do you have a table where we could all sit, maybe a dining room table?" the woman asked. He was unprepared for the longing that swept through him at the sound of a woman's voice in his home. "I'm going to be recording this, and it would make it easier."

"0h. Sure." They followed him through the kitchen. The table was oval and small, as John had little use for the leaves that allowed it to be enlarged --couldn't even remember offhand where he'd stored them. Andrea Myers sat across the narrower portion from him and the two men sat on either side at the long ends of the oval, Farnsworth on the left and Ochler on the right. The table was dusty and held only a piggyback pair of leather gloves, which John retrieved and tossed onto the buffet behind him. Sally's dried-flower centerpiece had long since departed, though he couldn't remember precisely when, only that he was responsible. A clean break.

"Anyone like some coffee?" he asked. "It's a fresh pot." Removing their coats and hanging them on the backs of the chairs, the two men shook off the invitation, but Andrea smiled, a brightness unhampered by any makeup John could see.

"Yes. Black, please."

John rose and went into the kitchen, where he reached into a cupboard for an earthenware mug, changed his mind and took down one of the white cups with the blue logo: elliott hi-speed accessories. Finding his own cup in the stainless steel sink, he filled both and returned to the table, now occupied at its center by a cassette player and small microphone propped on a triangular stand and pointing toward his seat A thick file in a manila folder that the woman had carried in with her was on the table to her left. As briefly as possible, he thought of the photographs.

"Good thing you don't take milk," he said, reaching over to place the cup in front of her. He caught her eyes and smiled fleetingly. "Haven't had a chance to get to the store lately."

"Thank you." He watched her hands travel to the cassette player, but he'd already anticipated precisely how they would look -- slim and small and made of lightly freckled porcelain. She wore a ring on her right hand but none on her left. Holding the machine steady, she depressed the record and play buttons.

John shifted in his seat. After a brief pause, she began to speak rapidly in a detached, professional tone John had difficulty equating with the warm smile of a moment before. "This is assistant district attorney Andrea Myers representing the Jefferson County prosecutor's office -- " She opened the file and glanced at the top document. " -- taking a sworn statement from Mr. John T. Elliott, of 1258 Pawnbroker Road, Walston, Wednesday, April 11, 1981. Also present are county detectives Randall Farnsworth and Walter Ochler. Mr. Elliott, these proceedings will be transcribed and kept on file at the prosecutor's office attendant to the investigation of homicide victim Jane Doe. Detective Farnsworth?"

Farnsworth slapped something on the table and pushed it with his fingertips toward John. A book. John stared at it vacantly.

"Mr. Elliott, place your left hand on the Bible and raise your right hand," the woman said, paging slowly through the file. John grasped the edge of the table. "But I'm not religious. I'm not going to swear on a Bible."

She glanced at him for a second, then resumed her stroll through the file. "The county will waive the swearing in with the stipulation that the subject understands that any false testimony will expose him to prosecution for perjury. Do you so understand, Mr. Elliott? Please respond audibly."

"I -- I can't do this."

Myers turned off the cassette player and took a sip of her coffee. John took a sip of his coffee. "What's the matter, Mr. Elliott?"

"I want an attorney."

Farnsworth emitted a disgusted cluck.

"Mr. Elliott, a voluntary statement such as this one does not require that you have an attorney present or that we offer you the option of having an attorney present. You are not charged with anything." She glanced at Farnsworth. "Was that explained to you?"

"No."

"That doesn't surprise me. However, the county at this time is prepared to charge you with first-degree murder, in which case you will be arrested and taken from here to the Jefferson County Prison in Brookville. There you will be entitled to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed you by the court."

John knew there were a million reasons not to want to be arrested for murder, but the first that came to mind was the thought of Riggins returning to his empty house, eventually figuring out what had happened -- maybe seeing it on the news -- and then just...remaining.

"Do you have any evidence?"

"Preliminary evidence would be presented at a hearing, which must be held within 48 hours of your incarceration."

"But do you have any?"

She gave one quick shake of her head, convinced. "We have no obligation to reveal evidence at this time, Mr. Elliott."

John sat for a moment. "This stinks," he said finally, twirling an index finger in a circle. "Yeah, yeah, let 'er rip."

With the flowing economy of a recording engineer, Myers lovely hands found the buttons. "Mr. Elliott, are you willing to resume this voluntary statement understanding that you may be prosecuted for perjury for any false testimony?"

"Yesssss," John answered. "Only if the record shows that I have just been threatened with arrest for first-degree murder if I don't provide it."

His eyes were already there when she looked, and he fell into such a greenness that he almost missed the brief smile. "Mr. Elliott, where were you on the night of Friday, April 6?"

"Here. Right here. All night."

"Was anyone with you?"

"No. All night."

"Did you work that day?"

"Yes."

"Where do you work?"

"I have my own business."

"The name and address, please."

"Elliott Hi-Speed Accessories, 251 Allegheny in Walston."

"And you came directly home from work?"

"Ah, no. I stopped at a 7-Eleven. Bought two packs of cigarettes, a six-pack of Diet Coke, a box of Tic-Tacs and this week's TV Guide. Gary Coleman on the cover?"

"What time was that?"

"Six-thirty."

"And you saw no one that night?"

"No one. All night."

She sipped her coffee, one hand in the file. "Would you describe what happened here at your home on Monday, April 9, just prior to the arrival of two Walston police officers at 10:32 p.m.?"

Farnsworth and Walt sat, saying nothing. Walt wore the expression of a bored man in church. Farnsworth was poised like a cat over a rathole. John recounted Monday evening as best he could, neglecting only his certainty that he was firing on a walking corpse, a corpse he had seen the night before through the whacka-whacka wipers of his Porsche. A corpse that shared his cell in the Walston lockup.

And he was surprised. He was surprised that he was simply unable to tell them about Riggins. While it seemed prudent the other night to avoid babbling on about the walking dead, any embarrassment he might suffer from his folly should be a trifle in the face of murder charges. He had no reason to protect the man and many reasons to reveal him.

But the still-beating heart of him knew it wasn't folly. He had seen a dead man in the flashing rain. No matter that the peripatetic husk had assumed flesh and now chose to be known as Lloyd Riggins. It was dead. It had no relevance to life. You couldn't implicate it. You couldn't castigate it. You couldn't fornicate it. It was dust. Or mud.

And he was surprised by the seamless story that flowed out of him, a story in which Lloyd Riggins took no part.

"According to the detectives' report, you have been separated from your wife, the former Sally Fox, for about a year. Is that correct?"

He nodded.

"Please answer out loud, Mr. Elliott."

"Yesssss."

"Do you have a picture of her?"

John paused and the assistant district attorney turned off the cassette player. "We'll wait here, Mr. Elliott."

John shook his head. "No. I don't have any pictures."

After what seemed like a long time, Myers again put the tape player in record. "Does your wife have any identifying marks?"

John slammed his palms on the table, causing Farnsworth to reach beneath his jacket and waking Walt. The triangular microphone stand bounced up and fell over. "I don't get it. Can't you tell if it's her or not?"

Myers came unsettled, then fell naturally to sympathy. "We don't know who she is, Mr. Elliott. A photo would help."

"I don't have any photos. And you don't have any evidence, do you?"

Myers closed the file and looked at Farnsworth icily.

"No, Mr. Elliott, we don t have any evidence."

"Then I'd appreciate -- "

"But we do have some more questions." She plucked off the tape recorder and he fell once again into her green eyes.

"Where is she, Mr. Elliott? All we need to do is talk to her and you'll never see us again."

"I -- I don't know." John hoped she saw something in his face that said he really wouldn't mind all that much seeing her again.

"Does she have family?"

"No. Her parents are dead. She, uh, lived with an aunt in a dinky town in Ohio I've never even been to. She left there to marry me."

"How old is she?"

"Twenty-four last month."

"And you have no idea how we might get in touch with her?"

"No."

"How is it that you're so.. separated?"

"She left. She came, she left. I wasn't all that great a husband."

"And your family?"

It was as if someone had dipped him in an oil slick.

Sweat and grease. The cool, dark insides of the trailer seemed to make him sweat all the more. His eyebrows were saturated beyond their evolutionary purpose, raining down on him, stinging his eyes. His hands were scaled with the black plaque from the belly of Sally's Camaro.

"Sally," he called for her.

He walked into the kitchen and squirted dishwashing detergent over his hands, leaving black smudges over black smudges on the plastic container.

"Sally."

Water thudded to a halt in the thin walls, and he realized the end of her shower. He washed his hands, his forearms, his arms up to the sleeves of his sweat-soaked, grease-mottled Marine Corps T-shirt, and was bending over the kitchen sink splashing his face when her jabbing thumbs in his sides brought him upright with a grunt. He whirled and latched onto her shoulders. She was naked except for a burnt-orange towel cocooning her head. Beads of water on her chest grouped and swam and fell like diamonds from her tight brown nipples, joining the runoff from his elbows on the linoleum. She smiled expectantly.

"Hey," he said, motioning with his head, "Mrs. Taylor will be glad to know that your exhaust system is now up to spec."

She stretched upward on tiptoe and kissed him, being careful not to involve herself with his grimy frontside.

He waited for her tongue to disentangle. "I've got something to tell you." Again he motioned with his head. She turned and looked at the kitchen table. A sheet of trifolded paper had its legs pointing skyward, its torso straining up as if attempting to do a sit-up next to a raggedly torn envelope expired alongside it.

"Yeah, I saw it. But I didn't read it. What is it?"

"My father's dead."

He felt her involuntary squeeze at the base of his ribcage. She knew little about John's father except not to bring him up, that he'd abandoned John after the death of John's mother when John was eight, left him with relatives -- the sister of his late wife and the sister's husband. He'd been a mechanic or something. He'd never contacted John or anyone else in John's adoptive family. He'd been dead until now. And now he was dead. She knew that John felt a loss on a loss, and they stood there, orphans.

"Where's he been?" she asked finally.

"Doesn't say."

With a hollow sound like a wet sail catching the wind, John extricated himself from his T-shirt. She marveled at the furry definition of his chest, which she touched with ten spread fingers. "Is that from a lawyer?"

"Yes." He drew her toward him until they almost touched. She was aware of how close her nipples were to him and she knew he meant this as a message, that it was his way of saying "Listen up." Their eyes were inches apart and his breath was moist and smelled vaguely of cigarettes but mostly of sunshine, hardworking and sweaty and honest. "He left me some money."

He licked at her mouth momentarily like some primitive grooming ritual.

"Not a lot, but enough to get us out of this fucking box."

He lifted her and she clung to him as he walked them back to the bedroom, where they made love and imagined two very disparate futures.

"'What town, Mr. Elliott?" The four of them were at the door, stepping on the echoing tiles.

"Ah, heck. Echelon. Or Edgemont. Over-the-Edge. It's near Youngstown."

She stood directly in front of him and looked up. "Would you find out and let me know? Here's my card. Her aunt's address would be very helpful."

Farnsworth had shouldered the door open and turned now, his close-cropped head silhouetted in the cloudy day's milky sky. "There's evidence, Elliott," he said in a cracking voice. "You can bet your ass."

"What've you got, Farnsworth?"

"A corpse, for one thing. But you know that."

John shook his head sadly at Myers, who shrugged, then closed the door and watched a slice of them through the vertical panel as they walked away. He saw the men's trench coats, belts tied in the back. Some kind of fashion statement. He thought of Riggins. He thought of the photograph he had of her in his wallet.

WE 4-11 with more on the way. Riggins returned that afternoon as the rain started. He seemed harmless, hardly worth acknowledging as John made his way out to the Porsche.

He stopped at the end of the drive and deposited his tax return in the mailbox, leaving the flag pointing skyward, then headed slowly toward Pawnbroker Curve.

I would've gone with you, sweetheart.

He held off using the windshield wipers as long as he could, and when he finally flicked them on they were deafening, sending him scrambling for the radio -- WFTZ, Pittsburgh's home of rock-n-roll -- where he latched onto the pounding final minutes of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." The bartender was not Ed, not anybody he cared to know, and the Big Bass Inn was a different place, dotted sparsely with silent old men bailing alcohol into the empty hull of their retirement.

"Jack on the rocks," he said, plucking a cocktail napkin from a stack near a plastic bin of cherries and wiping his face. "And keep a tab." Frank Sinatra came on the jukebox. It was a very good year.

Unaccountably he arrived home as sober as he left, entering the dark foyer quietly. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, listening to Riggins on the phone.

"Uh-huh. Any calls? Okay, no, just taking it easy. Yeah. Yeah."

He took the first step, the second.

"Well, aside from the fact that there's nothing to eat in this entire place, I'm having the time of my life."

Riggins laughed and he took the third step, from where his view was just above the level of the living room carpet. Dust balls lodged against chair legs. Riggins stood in the bright kitchen. His voice was deeper, his articulation more defined, as though he were trying to impress someone.

"No, no, I'm fine. But, hey, I love you."

John stood in the kitchen archway and Riggins turned, his pasty face whiter than the white receiver.

"Yeah, well, I gotta go. Bye." He turned away to hang up the phone and his voice rediscovered its whiny twang.

"Collect call, man, to my girl," and then he spun around. "Where the fuck have you been? I guess you know there's not a fuckin' thing -- I 'm sorry -- a friggin' thing to eat here except English muffins and peanut butter."

John elbowed out of his jacket, placed it carefully over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and walked past Riggins around the bar and into the dark dining room, where the chandelier blazed on and the hinges of the hutch creaked.

"We've got whiskey," he said. "High fiber, no preservatives, scores of Kentuckians swear by it. Your job, should you decide to accept it, revolves around ice cubes."

"So -- " Riggins said, and John heard the freezer door of the refrigerator open. " -- does it offend you when Kentuckians swear?"

"The glasses are in the cupboard to the left."

"Gotcha."

The furnace came on. John looked up at his elbows in the television light, dropped a hand to an empty glass and struggled to a sitting position. Riggins had been stretched out in the recliner talking at the ceiling, and for the last few uncomfortable minutes, John had had the feeling that Riggins words came from everywhere. Omnidirectional. "Where's the waitress?" he interrupted.

"Never one around when you need one."

"'Nother?"

"Why don't you just bring in the bottle?"

"'Cause we're out, I think."

"Out?"

"Yeah, out. What were you saying?"

"When?"

"Just now. You were saying something."

"Oh, man," Riggins whined. "I went through all that and you didn't even hear?"

"I heard. It just didn't register."

"What happened to 'nother?"

"T'is no 'nother."

"T'was 'nother just a minute ago."

"I've got some vodka, maybe."

"Vodka's good."

"Yeah." John stood slowly, left the room and returned with the bottle, filling both their glasses. "You were talking about Randy," he said.

"Randy's gone."

"Gone?"

"Elsewhere." A swarm of rain dashed and died against the glass doors. "The sun ever come out around here?"

"Not at night. Is Randy dead?"

"Yeah. He's in Minnesota or Iowa or some goddam place."

John sat. "Who are you, Riggins?"

"Just a stupid fuck -- pardon the expression -- like any other stupid fuck. Makin' my way."

"And what's your way?"

"My way's my way. I go where I go. I am what I am."

"I'm Popeye the sailor man, whoo- whoo!"

"I appreciate your hospitality."

"Yeah, well, that's nice. How long do you think it will last?"

"Oh, 'bout this long." Riggins downed his glass of vodka. "More, sir?"

John rose and filled it. "You know, they think I did it."

"I bet you wish they didn't."

"Have you ever killed anyone?"

"A nice guy like me?"

"You re a stupid fuck, remember? And stupid fucks kill people all the time."

"Like any other stupid fuck. No ice, huh?"

"You look so comfortable sitting there in my chair."

"I'm sorry. Did I forget to thank you?"

"You forgot to answer the question."

"What question?"

"Uh -- " John leaned back in the sofa, searching. " -- did you ever kill anyone?"

"You were in the Marines, huh?"

"How'd you know that?"

"Shoulder patch, Johnny boy."

John realized he was wearing his fatigues with the corps insignia, a shirt so soft and old he considered it a robe of sorts, suitable only for wear around the house. He couldn't remember putting it on.

"I was Airborne, myself. Helped you guys out during the 69 Tet offensive."

"You kicked ass, motherfucker."

"Yeah, well, that's what I was gonna say."

"Airborne?"

"One-oh-worst. You sound surprised."

"You seem too stupid to be Airborne, if that's possible."

"I am what I am, whoo-whoo."

"Well, I didn't kill her."

"You seem too smart to be a jarhead."

"I didn't kill her."

"You killed somebody."

"I didn't kill her."

"Who?"

"Her! Her!"

"You killed somebody."

"We've all killed somebody."

"But you killed her."

"Her? Her?"

"Somebody killed her. And you killed somebody."

"I'd kill whoever killed her."

"Would you kill yourself?"

"I've considered it."

"With all you've got? Man, I knew you were a weenie in a Joe Cool mask. You have it made. Or you had it made."

"Not without her."

"Who?"

"Her."

"No woman is worth that."

"We all have something we'd die for, troop."

"Fuck, I'm already dead."

John laughed loudly over the weak cry of the crowd at Three Rivers stadium, low on the audio as someone homered for the home team. "You know, I've been meaning to ask you about that."

"Ask me anything."

"Did I kill her?"

"No. Impossible. Yes, you killed her. Who the hell are we talkin' about?"

"Jane Doe. Yellow ribbons round the old oak tree."

"Then I'll stay on the bus, forget about us and put the blame on me?"

"I'm talking to myself."

"And the conversation wanes."

"Who were you talking to?"

"What?"

"Tonight. On the phone. You were talking to Beth, weren't you?"

"Who?"

"Her! Her!"

"I was talkin' to my girl."

"Bullshit. Dead men don't have girls."

"Dead men have cemeteries full of girls. You were there. You saw it."

"Oh. Yeah."

The world ticked.

Lap and mile 291 of the Walston 500. Rob Nagel and Steve Podose had been up his ass for 200 miles. Dodge, Porsche, Dodge, Porsche in the rearview mirror, dirty, mean-faced machines trading places, one blue and white, one red and white, both whining and groaning alternately in his draft. Dangerous as armored bees. He felt their swollen inertia as tonnage on his triceps, a constricted metal band around his neck. His eyes burned.

He blinked at the sign in his pit, black magic marker on white poster board: "SMOKE" Doug Cassidy's arm had transformed into a propeller. He immediately sought out the oil pressure gauge.

"Goddam," he said.

Nobody spoke to him at the stop. Half-amused, he watched them scramble. Drones around the queen, no less important for their servitude, efficiently fulfilling their vital functions: ministering to the most measly mechanical ails of the fickle bitch. After 58 seconds he entered the track in fifth place, fully fueled and quickly breaking in a new oil pump.

The lights had come on above the stands, and they made him happy. Left curve, right curve, hard hard left, then straightaway, right curve, left curve, hard hard left, then straightaway, his heart on an ecstatic rail. In the groove.

The tach like a metronome, his body reacting in perfect cadence. For the first time in his life, he was in the champion bubble, invincible. He was in the present, where it was all happening, and the deadliest thing in the world would've been for him to think about it, and the next deadliest thing would've been to think about thinking about it, and for the first time none of it, not the least bit of it, entered his head.

He drove. Past Lynch. Past Miller. Past Podose. Past Nagel. Not that he wanted to pass them. But that he could and would go faster. And when the checkered flag chopped down like an ax, he was relaxing comfortably against the limit of his Chevy, leaning there like a bored teenager forced to pilot a tricycle, thinking how much faster he could go with the right technology. Give me a jet, he thought. Give me a friggin' starship.

Sally pulled his helmet off, clipping his ears. Her kisses were a warm salve he swam in for a moment. But the cries tore him away. He turned and saw the flames across the infield, turned back and saw several women in the stands, hands to their faces. Camera crews evaporated, shouting and lugging their equipment over a scruffy turf like moonscape in the harsh light.

The officials suggested that the winner's circle ceremonies be severely curtailed. He accepted the trophy with a handshake from a squat, balding man he'd never seen before, the two of them standing in the midst of a dozen pit crew and fans in a shadowy gap of bleachers. The rest of the crowd had followed the camera crews, hypnotized by the flames and, now, the piercing wink of red emergency lights.

Podose had flipped and flipped on the final hard hard left. The bulk of the crowd persisted, waiting near the front gate and parting finally to let the ambulance exit with what was generally believed to be his charbroiled remains. John watched, awed by the number of women who had assumed the job of mourners.

Dead men get all the girls, he thought as he drove Sally back to the trailer park, a bomber squadron in his head. But that's what they come to see --

-- and come. At least Sally harbored no pretense about it. The driver made her hot; the businessman bored her to distraction. She hung in as long as she could, even tried to find the kick in money, but felt it dimly, as a hunger that could be realized fully only by adults. And she wasn't about to be an adult. Fort Knox itself couldn't make her wet. So she mourned for the lost driver, blaming herself at first, then him. She didn't even have Dottie's phone number anymore.

"Dottie no longer exists," he had told her. And he was right.

"I would've gone with you, sweetheart," John clutched at the empty room. Then he awoke, unsure of where he was, who he was. For a moment he struggled against it, then surrendered, his vapor-locked consciousness able only to liken the situation to a Chinese finger puzzle. Don't fight it, just pull up anchor and drift in the uneasy sea.

Drift with nothing as heavy as an identity, a purpose. It would all come soon enough, too soon maybe. Jutting from the dark like icebergs. The couch. The room. The empty room. A murder he didn't commit. A murder they thought he committed, thought in the black water that rolled into his mouth that he had taken a woman's life, and he was drowning.

"Riggins!"

He lurched into the dining room, where the chandelier glowed weakly, and into the kitchen, where muted light through the sliding glass doors poured stark and solemn, as into a tomb. Down the hallway, palms on the wall, to the guest bedroom. Inside, Riggins lay in state, arms folded over his chest.

"Oh, Christ."

The hallway was dark, floor angling unpredictably, walls swaying like a passage through a funhouse, so he entered the bathroom and threw up. Walking as unsteadily as an infant, he found his bed, fell. Fell again into the uneasy sea.

Below, monsters swam, able at any moment to eviscerate him. The sun was somewhere, high and warm and gray, but the sun didn't matter. The water pushed, banged, bruised, a Chinese water torture inside a Chinese finger puzzle, and he drifted in disease and dementia. The smell of clay.

The sun ever come up around here?

He was a corpse, face down in the blackness, water-puckered flesh sagging from his bones, and he welcomed the blackness, distracted for a moment only by the light flashing by and the sound of tires on wet asphalt. He sought the blackness, swam toward it with unworking lungs, welcoming. The pistol was no longer across the room in the desk drawer, advertising its ever-present alternative. But here was an underwater cave. As black as there ever was. He launched himself into it and died. Slept.

It was 4:34 p.m. on the Casio, held above him on his gyrating arm as he coughed and hacked, a cup of phlegm taking surprise residence in his mouth. TH 4-12 with more on the way. He thought of Elmo in the Walston lockup, fat in his rotting black T-shirt.

There was a tinkling sound like a machine-gun firing through stained-glass windows, and it was the phone ringing -- chirping. He knocked the receiver against his ear, socks constricting an itchy pain in his feet, jockey shorts chafing his crotch. Swallowing, he lay fully dressed on top of the bedspread, his jeans the consistency of aluminum siding. "Hello," he said, not bothering to withdraw the antenna.

"Mr. Elliott?" went the tentative male voice.

"Yes."

"I have something to tell you."

"Who is this?"

"Doesn't matter."

Suddenly, John knew. The white cop who was at his house Monday night after the shooting, the first to show up with his black linebacker partner. John got the sense of a routine day, full of people to go and places to meet, at the Walston Police Department on Allegheny Street, the old granite building with its elegant lobby. It was late afternoon. Most people were nearing the end of their work day, had been up for hours. This guy sat in the back somewhere, down the hallway with its fluorescent lights and linoleum-tiled floor. The voice was sincere, subdued. "I used to be a big fan of yours." There was a certain hollowness in the sound.

"So?"

"I saw you at the Pocono 500. Man, nobody thought you'd live. Everyone knew that Podose -- "

"What do you want?"

"We all thought you were dead, the way Podose rammed you...I mean, I was right there."

"So if I would've died, you'd've been a murder witness."

"Damn right. Damn right. But you walked away. And I saw you at the speedway the night Podose died. Served him right, right?"

"What do you want?"

"The Hoovers just reported an abandoned car at the back of their property. Along the Penn Central access road near the tracks. A blue 1972 Camaro."

John felt the pavement slip away, knew that he would soon be watching the world spin madly by. Helpless, bracing for the collision.

"The registration was in your wife's name at your current address. Detective Farnsworth is on his way to pick you up, and he's not alone."

John heard the click of someone hanging up on another line, and his brain sloshed around in the socket of his skull, rebounding off the door post, headrest, concrete wall, collapsed sheet-metal roof, roll bar, banging on the asphalt with each flip of the vehicle, his helmet a splintering sledgehammer on the road -- whacka-whacka-whacka-whacka.

"Mr. Elliott?"

He hung up and sprinted down the hallway and over to the bay window in the living room. He had earlier extracted the jagged teeth that remained in the pane of glass he had broken. Through the empty square he watched a drizzly dusk swallow up the fleeing figure of Lloyd Riggins, heard the dead man's feet punching into the gravel.

Intermittent wipers at full-slow, the Porsche fishtailed a spume of stones onto Pawnbroker Road and gathered a G force or two of acceleration on the way to the railroad tracks. John watched closely for Riggins, deciding early on that he would flatten the ghoul if given half a chance, but Riggins was apparently smart enough to leave the highway and take a more direct line through the darkening woods. Just over the tracks he turned right, and fifty yards up the overgrown access road he came to a stop behind the Camaro. Sally's Pennsylvania plate glowed gaudy in the headlights.

The wipers took a beat -- ker-thunk -- and disappeared.

He shut off the idling engine and was surrounded by the chill bones of night.

Suddenly, she was dead. The instinct that had sent him in pursuit of Riggins, he realized, was at least partly self-preservation, that any exoneration he might enjoy depended on the ungainly creep who stalked on foot through the nearby landscape. But it was a portion so small that now it seemed to disappear altogether. It disappeared behind a pile of eight-by-ten color photographs of a former woman with a Mexican-dinner face. Of a Polaroid snapshot he carried in his wallet. Quickly it gave way to a consuming need to know what happened to his missing wife. He had no confidence that anyone else could figure it out, nor did he much care what happened to himself in the process. He found the flashlight in the glove compartment.

The magnetic key case was where he had attached it five years before: in the I-beam of the frame on the driver's side. The dome light came on when he opened the door and he leaned in, his right knee sucking up cold water from the saturated ground. He was looking for nothing, anything, discovered a rush of memories: the seat covers he had installed; the shitty radio; the pine-tree deodorizer hanging from the mirror. The glove compartment was empty.

"Lookin' for this?"

He took the metallic cold behind his right ear to be a gun barrel, and replied, "Hey, Sally's eyes were slanted, not mine."

"You're of no use to me now whatsoever, motherfucker, so get the fuck out of there. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!"

John backed out of the car slowly and stood in the opened door, facing the dark woods where leaves dripped and the cloak of night lent a nauseating intimacy to their breathing and their voices. "Ever kill anyone who wasn't a slope?"

"I'm about to, asshole. And no one will even know I was here."

"What happened, Lloyd?"

John felt the sardonic grunt as a momentary jab of additional pressure behind his ear. "Fuckin' Farnsworth gummed up the works. But you'd've been dead in any event."

"Then all we have is the truth. I want to know the truth, Lloyd." He turned into the pressure, watched the barrel retreat a few inches before the grinning face.

"Recognize it? It's just like yours. She picked it out."

"What do you mean?"

The grin fled. "I'll tell you the truth, asswipe." The barrel waved. "We go to the track. Twenty-five miles, my Chevy against your import. You win and I'll tell you the truth. Why not. Why the fuck not."

"You re a driver?"

"Yeah, well, I never heard of you either. But they know me in the Southwest. I won the Jam last year, asswipe. That's how I met Sally. And the more I loved her, the more I hated you. The Great John Elliott. And she hated you too, you know that."

"Where is she?"

The grin reared like a cobra on his face. "The truth will cost you, jocko. Twenty-five miles. Or I could kill you now and get it over with."

"Sure, I'll race. Why not. Why the fuck not. But what do you get if you win?"

Riggins shrugged. "I win. Then I kill you and get the fuck out of here."

"And if I win you tell me the truth, kill me and get the fuck out of here."

The grin widened. "Good deal, huh? Now how long you think we ought to stand around here talkin' about it?"

John sped into the night with Riggins close behind. The Camaro had him by at least 50 horses, John knew, but the track had curves enough that both vehicles would be holding back most of the time, anyway. And what the Porsche lacked in muscle it made up for in surefootedness. Twenty-five miles, 25 laps, was enough. Twenty-five miles would tell the story. It was a good and proper figure, undoubtedly the product of sound reasoning. Short enough for the drivers to keep count, long enough for skill to make a difference. And racing Riggins right now was a decided improvement over standing in front of a loaded gun. There was also the chance that Farnsworth and the county cavalry would show up, arrest them both and down a tanker of coffee putting the pieces together, though John couldn't fathom why the cops might travel ten miles into the countryside to check out a racetrack not scheduled to open until Memorial Day.

The thought of the police was strikingly barren of consolation. Remaining neatly to the right of the double yellow lines on a turn of the familiar two-lane road, John hatched the unsettling conviction that it wouldn't matter if the cops showed up, that Riggins and the Camaro would simply disappear and he would be left alone to face them, babbling his unlikely story. Like the night several billion years ago when Riggins stood at the other end of the pistol -- She picked it out -- and he had fired on the gruesome intruder point blank. The police had come then -- had he called them? -- and he had let them into his house and they had taken him to jail. Their existence now was a threat without a shred of hope.

Point blank. He had fired on Riggins point blank. How many men had he missed at that distance? He could think of none. He knew for a fact they were corpses. They were all corpses.

Checking Riggins in the rearview mirror, he concentrated on imagining the track rushing at him, illuminated only by headlights. He had once driven in a European rally that wound itself through the night, finally trailed some Brit into fifth place and a tiny cash prize. At the time he thought he really wanted that race. As he rolled to a stop before the locked gate of the Walston Speedway, he knew that every race he ever ran was only a preliminary to this one. He had no choice but to trust Riggins, so he had every intention of blowing him away. In whatever way he could.

Riggins had pulled alongside him to the left and was leaning over and winding down the passenger-side window.

"What now, Einstein?" John said.

"This is where it starts. We go through and come out after lap 25."

"We go through the gate?"

"That gate's not gonna stop both of us." Riggins waved the pistol around. "We go through together. First one out wins. You want to know about Sally, don't you? Our little Sally? I'll be the starter."

He pointed the pistol straight into John's face, then held it out the window next to his shoulder and sent the small round like a pinprick into the night sky, simultaneously coming off the clutch and finding the accelerator. John hit the gate a fraction of a second behind him, and Riggins had judged the strength of the barrier well. It exploded inward and rebounded partially closed as the cars took to the track.

Winter had strewn the circuit with crap of all kinds, and a steady rain began. John fell in line behind Riggins for the first ridiculously slow lap, then held on amazed as the man picked up speed. One lap of the unfamiliar obstacle course and Riggins assumed a pace only 15 miles an hour slower than the one that had earned John a checkered flag five years before.

The rear quarter panels of the Camaro were spattered with orangish clay, and John studied them through wipers now on medium-fast -- whacka-whacka, whacka-whacka. The Camaro was more sluggish on the straightaway than he'd expected, lost some of its stuff in the last year, he speculated. But his reflexes worked like gears slogging through heavy oil, and he realized simultaneously that he must pass Riggins quickly and that he was panic-stricken, a roiling storm of fear at the controls of rust-bucket reactions.

He smiled in recognition. It was the way he always felt at the beginning of a race. It was the enemy, and the mere thought of it could kill.

Life was a billion accidents on a billion accidents. For now it was enough that he keep up, and by lap 10 he determined where he would make his move. By edging from one side to the other in Riggins' wake, he scouted the debris that lined their path and found an area before the far straightaway where he could come around. He would have to avoid a couple of branches and what looked to be a mailbox on the track, move to the right of them and pass Riggins before the final set of curves -- where Podose had lost the hard hard left. At the terminus of the final curve, an offshoot of the track led out through the front gate.

He thought for a moment that lap 23 would be the practice, that he would give it everything he had, and if it didn't work, he'd have another two laps to recover. But if it didn't work after he gave it everything he had, it didn't work, and everything he had was not enough. So what would another two laps matter?

He kept up. It was everything he could do to keep up. The Chevy moved gamely ahead of him, red clay spattered on its hind legs. Lap 22. Red clay, spattered. Lap 23. Red clay, spattered. Back and forth in the headlights. Pulling away from him on the straightaway, moving closer on the curves. Neither had the advantage.

Lap 25, slingshotting to the right of the branches, the mailbox, holding nothing back on the straightaway, fed up with the hypnotizing sway of the spattered red clay, back and forth, back and forth, beating the Camaro into the hard hard right, the left, the hard hard left, past the point where Podose had flipped like a charbroiled chicken on the runaway spit of the gods, hard hard left in the rain faster than he had for the checkered flag, slamming out through the half-closed gates, sending one of the wire and aluminum-tubed rectangles cartwheeling behind him and off into a dark grassy lawn. Brakes locked, he burst from the champion bubble and shuddered sideways to a stop.

Whacka-whacka. Ticka-ticka.

Seconds later Riggins roared by him and headed north on state road 197.

He caught sight of the taillights now and then. He couldn't remember following. He remembered looking at his gauges, not quite ready to extricate himself from the unity he'd achieved with the machine-organism steel-glass-rubber extension of himself that had sliced so neatly through the rainy night and now idled, warm engine-heart in controlled detonation, sliding against itself, wearing down. Dying. He couldn't remember the moment when he found first gear and accelerated onto the public thoroughfare, nor an inkling of his motive.

The race is over, he thought. The race is over, asswipe.

North toward St. Marys and Johnsonburg. Hardworking, grungy little coal towns stranded in the worn Alleghenys. The Camaro's taillights seemed to drift backwards to a point where he could see them clearly, but he could make no further progress despite what he believed to be his continued acceleration.

Route 197. A few years ago he had come this way a couple of times a week, pitching distributors in Freeport and Kittaning. Mulling strategies, miles of unseen scenery slipping by. An I-80 exit up here somewhere, not far. Sally alone in the house on Pawnbroker Road. He shipped to the distributors now, everything on the phone. Had their names in his Rolodex, and their secretaries' names, and their wives', some of them scratched out, some of them with new names written in. There was nothing ahead of him on 197 now except a few company Christmas cards no one even bothered to sign anymore. There was nothing behind, either.

What did she do at 1258 Pawnbroker Road? What was it like for her? He wondered it for the first time, really wondered it, and swept behind Riggins up Interstate 80's eastbound entrance ramp.

He glanced at the speedometer and wasn't surprised to see it pinned to the no-man's land above 180 miles per hour, but still the twin red eyes of the Camaro's backside kept their unblinking distance. He wondered about her eyes.

She hates you, you know that.

Had he ever seen hate in those eyes? Had there been hate behind the love he thought he'd seen? Had he seen anything at all in those eyes, any part of the person?

Briefly startled, he held his breath as the Dubois, Clearfield and Snow Shoe exits expanded and dwindled in a flurry of green-and-white road signs and head-ducking overpasses. He knew them to be miles apart, and then came the Bellefonte exit, and he kept the impossibly constant distance behind Riggins off the interstate and into the countryside.

They were the roads of his motorhead youth, his inconsequential education, his missing-father family, and they leapt at him not unlike the old days, coming from every direction but disappearing always and evenly beneath him, painted lines equidistant left and right, yellow ribbons --

...do not cross...

-- and he heard the trailing keening of spinsters and hags. Left them behind. Past the cemetery where his mother was buried --

A family heirloom. His uncle had given him the same fucking gun, the same fucking gun in his mouth, in his mother's mouth, the same fucking gun.

-- the orchard where he lost his virginity, down 322 to Harrisburg, where he had once traveled by bus with his draft notice tucked in the pocket of a denim jacket.

I would've gone with you, sweetheart.

In Harrisburg Riggins blew through the tollgate of the Pennsylvania turnpike, headed west. John chased the red eyes through the rain, wipers on full-fast, and realized he was being led on a tour of his life. They smashed through gates at tracks in Chambersburg, Altoona, Johnstown, sites of his earliest racing, and made the charade of spinning around the courses, locked in their constant distance, before resuming the torqued and twisted Pennsylvania roads.

It mocked his ambition, the grubbing heart of his life, and laid bare his dichotomy with death -- That's why they come -- that he ran from death and chased death at the same time, and the eyes were the eyes of a Vietnamese icon, a statue he had seen. Always he was strapped into the machine. Always he hurtled.

"We're all in the same boat, motherfucker!" he bellowed.

He recognized the turnpike again, knew they were traveling northwest just to the east of Pittsburgh, that they would pass to the north of the city. That they were headed for Youngstown, Ohio.

He ran from death and chased death, and he didn't know which he was doing now -- nothing behind, nothing ahead -- and he ran from Sally and chased Sally, and the question was, Did he deny her? Did he subjugate her? Did she loathe him, loathe the sight and sound and smell of him?

They twirled mocking around the Youngstown oval, one chasing the other, and on to Akron, Detroit and Erie. He checked the Casio. It was almost midnight. The Pennsylvania roads were dark snaking tunnels, the back roads through Oil City, Titusville and Butler, his merchant routes, origin of piles of unsigned Christmas cards, tossed quickly in the trash. Sally alone on Pawnbroker Road.

He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her exercising in the living room, glass-topped coffee table pushed out of the way. She wore a bright green halter top and white gym shorts, and her black-silk hair was a living thing washing around her. She stopped suddenly in the television light, put her hands to her face and sobbed, narrow shoulders wracking, then dropped to the floor and did two sit-ups, her right hand slipping under the shorts.

-- and come.

The familiar curve unwound beneath him and the Camaro shot between the low posts, the chain flailing backwards in the night rain and cracking his windshield. Whatever else had happened, he thought at that moment, they had once loved one another. For their own reasons they had both chased death, and for a time they had ignored it, in so doing transcended it. They had stopped running. No one alive or dead could change the fact that they loved. For a minute. For an hour. They loved.

The Camaro was parked in front of the elm, the driver's-side door open. Across the cemetery he saw the bright spearing of a flashlight and walked toward it. Riggins sat on the edge of the open grave, his back to the yellow ribbon.

"Get in," he said. The flashlight slanted down to the remnant smears of red clay on the dark-earth floor of the hole. The pistol motioned in his other hand.

"What?"

"Get in."

John straddled the plastic tape, stepped over it and fell to a mucky landing, looking up at flitting rain through the bright white beam. "Is she dead?"

An unbelieving, staccato laugh filled the woods around them. "Yes, she's dead, asswipe."

"You promised you'd tell me."

"Sure. Sure."

John stood. He could see Riggins' legs from the knees down. Jeans. Army boots. Above that he was blinded by the flashlight. "You gave me your word," he said.

"Shut up." The tone was matter-of-fact frozen, and John braced for the collision of rotating lead bullet with his flesh, an image he greeted with something like distaste.

"You're the one who should be dead. We came up here to kill you."

"You and Sally?"

"I looked like you. I could talk like you. You run your goddam business by phone, and we could've stepped right in. Beth fell for it. Only Farnsworth fucked it up. You fucked it up. You got yourself implicated in a murder. And how? By shooting at a stranger on your back porch. What a fucking dipshit. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"Beth saw you. She saw us together. At the store."

"I don't think so. Neither do you. I was out in the street."

"And you were talking to Beth last night. You think she bought it?"

"I know she bought it. I sound like you. I look like you."

"And you came up here to take my business?"

"Frankly, I think our little Sally was tired of slumming it. Giving it away, you know? But she didn't want you. She wanted me. She wanted me, Johnny boy, this gorgeous Vietnamese princess -- just like old times, right?"

John could imagine Riggins' grin. "So what happened?"

"The closer we got to Pittsburgh, the colder her feet. She didn't want your money all that much. Not enough to kill you. So, you killed her."

"I didn't kill her, Riggins. You killed her."

"I didn't chase her away. Man, she was wandering around the Jam, took one look at me and that was that. Then she tells me about her old man, about how we can make out, and I go for it. She has second thoughts -- because of you -- and she's dead. That ain't your fault?"

John's sneakers sucked in and out of the mud. "Don't be an asshole. You killed her. You killed her, Lloyd. You shot her, probably over by the Hoover place, then you bashed her face in."

"Shot her with a gun meant for you."

"And now you're going to kill me, leave me here?'

"No, I was thinking of moving in."

John recognized his own voice and insects scrambled up the back of his neck. He fell to his knees. "You don't look anything like me," he said. "You look like a fucking corpse."

"Yeah, well, I was in an accident. A Baja cross-country gig. Sally came to see me every day in the hospital. Every fucking day. I was lucky to come out of it alive. Bad stuff, man."

You killed my family.

And here's your revenge, sweetheart, John thought. He looked up at the black, featureless soles of Riggins' boots silhouetted in the misting flashlight beam. TH 4-12 with more on the way. "Lloyd," he said sadly, "I've got something to tell you. You didn't come out of it alive. You're dead, as dead as it gets." He lunged for the boots, flinched at the sound of the pistol's discharge.

There was no place to go, everywhere to go. Couldn't take either car, couldn't go back to the house. So he walked, neither chasing nor running, just walked down the twin ruts to Pawnbroker Road, pulling the denim jacket around him in the rain and tugging the bill of his cap.

He crossed the road and turned right, a plan forming in his mind. He'd hitch up to I-80, walk if he had to, and then decide which direction he'd go, east or west. Flip a coin if he had to.

His hand cupped some change in his jeans pocket as a car passed, capturing him briefly like a washed-out statue in its headlights as it took an unaltering line around Pawnbroker Curve. Leaving the scene of an accident, rain hissing its countless splashes on the asphalt. He glanced to the left at the skeleton of the Hoover house, site of a future happy fishbowl.

Life is a billion accidents on a billion accidents, he thought. With no protection.

And he heard it ticking.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com