had believed so, too, once upon a time, but I had not reckoned on the heat... the blisters... the exhaustion... the steady pain in my back.

Stop for a minute, but not too long. Measure the slant of the trench.

it's not as bad as you thought, is it, darling? At least it's roadbed and not desert hardpan.

I moved more slowly along the length of the grave as the hole got deeper. My hands were bleeding now as I worked the controls. Ram the drop-lever all the way forward until the bucket lay on the ground. Pull back on the drop-lever and shove the one that extended the armature with a high hydraulic whine. Watch as the bright oiled metal slid out of the dirty orange casing, pushing the bucket into the dirt. Every now and then a spark would flash as the bucket slid over a piece of flint. Now raise the bucket... swivel it, a dark oblong shape against the stars (and try to ignore the steady throbbing pain in your neck the way you,re trying to ignore the even deeper throb of pain in your back)... and dump it down in the ditch, covering the chunks of asphalt already there.

Never mind, darling you can bandage your hands when it's done. When he,s done.

"She was in pieces," I croaked, and jockeyed the bucket back into place so I could take another two hundred pounds of dirt and gravel out of Dolan,s grave.

How the time flies when you are having a good time.

Moments after I had noticed the first faint streaks of light in the east. I got down to take another measurement of the floor,s incline with the carpenter,s level I was actually getting near the end. I thought I might just make it. I knelt, and as I did I felt something in my back let go. It went with a dull little snap.

I uttered a guttural cry and collapsed on my side on the narrow, slanted floor of the excavation, lips pulled back from my teeth, hands pressing into the small of my back.

Little by little the very worst of the pain passed and I was able to get to my feet.

All right, I thought. That,s it. it's over. It was a good try, but it's over.

Please, darling, Elizabeth whispered back impossible as it would have been to believe once upon a time, that whispering voice had begun to take on unpleasant undertones in my mind; there was a sense of monstrous implacability about it. Please don,t give up. Please go on.

Go on digging? I don,t even know if I can walk!

But there,s so little left to do! the voice wailed it was no longer just the voice that spoke for Elizabeth, if it had ever been; it was Elizabeth. So little left, darling!

I looked at my excavation in the growing light and nodded slowly. She was right. The bucket-loader was only five feet from the end; seven at most. But it was the deepest five or seven, of course; the five or seven with the most dirt in it.

You can do it, darling I know you can. Softly cajoling.

But it was not really her voice that persuaded me to go on. What really turned the trick was an image of Dolan lying asleep in his penthouse while I stood here in this hole beside a stinking, rumbling bucket-loader, covered with dirt, my hands in flaps and ruins. Dolan sleeping in silk pajama bottoms with one of his blondes asleep beside him, wearing only the top.

Downstairs, in the glassed-in executive section of the parking garage, the Cadillac, already loaded with luggage, would be gassed and ready to go.

"All right, then," I said. I climbed slowly back into the bucket-loader,s seat and revved the engine.

I kept on until nine o,clock and then I quit there were other things to do, and I was running out of time. My angled hole was forty feet long. It would have to be enough.

I drove the bucket-loader back to its original spot and parked it. I would need it again, and that would mean siphoning more gas, but there was no time for that now. I wanted more Empirin, but there weren,t many left in the bottle and I would need them all later today... and tomorrow. Oh, yes, tomorrow Monday, the glorious Fourth.

Instead of Empirin I took a fifteen-minute rest. I could ill-afford the time, but I forced myself to take it just the same. I lay on my back in the van, my muscles jumping and twitching, imagining Dolan.

He would be packing a few last-minute items in a Travel-All now some papers to look over, a toilet kit, maybe a paperback book or a deck of cards. Suppose he flies this time? a malicious voice deep inside me whispered, and I couldn,t help it a moan escaped me. He had never flown to LA before always it had been the Cadillac. I had an idea he didn,t like to fly. Sometimes he did, though he had flown all the way to London once and the thought lingered, itching and throbbing like a scaly patch of skin.

It was nine-thirty when I took out the roll of canvas and the big industrial stapler and the wooden struts. The day was overcast and a little cooler God sometimes grants a favor. Up until then I,d forgotten my bald head in consideration of larger agonies, but now, when I touched it with my fingers, I drew them away with a little hiss of pain. I looked at it in the outside passenger mirror and saw that it was a deep, angry red almost a plum color.

Back in Vegas Dolan would be making last-minute phone calls. His driver would be bringing the Cadillac around front. There were only about seventy five miles between me and it, and soon the Cadillac would start to close that distance at sixty miles an hour. I had no time to stand around bemoaning my sunburned pate.

I love your sunburned pate, dear, Elizabeth said beside me.

"Thank you, Beth," I said, and began taking the struts over to the hole.

The work was now light compared to the digging I,d done earlier, and the almost unbearable agony in my back subsided to a steady dull throb.