Steve Ames was breaking one of the Five Commandments - the last one on the list, as a matter of fact.

The Five Commandments had been given to him a month ago, not by God but by Bill Harris. They had been sitting in Jack Appleton's office. Appleton had been Johnny Marinville's editor for the last ten years. He was present for the handing down of the commandments but did not participate in this part of the conversation until near the end - only sat back in his desk chair with his exquisitely manicured fingers spread on the lapels of his suitcoat. The great man himself had left fifteen minutes before, head up and studly gray hair flying out behind him, saying he had promised to join someone at an art gallery down in SoHo.

"All these commandments are thou shalt nots, and I don't expect you to have any trouble remembering them," Harris had said. He was a tubby little guy, and there probably wasn't much harm in him, but everything he said came out sounding like the decree of a weak king. "Are you listenin?"

"Listening," Steve had agreed.

"First, thou shalt not drink with him. He's been on the wagon for awhile - five years, he claims - but he's stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous. and that's not a good sign. Also, for Johnny the wagon's always had a nonstick surface, even with AA. But he doesn't like to drink alone, so if he asks you to join him for a few after a hard day on the old Harley, you say no. If he starts bullying you, telling you it's part of your job, you still say no.

"Not a problem," Steve had said.

Harris ignored this. He had his speech, and he intended to stick to it.

"Second, thou shalt not score drugs for him. Not so much as a single joint.

"Third, thou shalt not score women for him . . . and he's apt to ask you, particularly if some good-looking babes show up at the receptions I'm setting up for him along the way. As with the booze and the drugs, if he scores on his own, that's one thing. But don't help him."

Steve had thought of telling Harris that he wasn't a pimp, that Harris must have confused him with his own father, and decided that would be fairly imprudent. He opted for silence instead.

"Fourth, thou shalt not cover up for him. If he starts boozing or drugging - particularly if you have reason to think he's doing coke again - get in touch with me at once. Do you understand? At once.

"1 understand," Steve replied, and he had, but that didn't mean he would necessarily comply. He had de-cided he wanted this gig in spite of the problems it pre-sented - in part because of the problems it presented; life without problems was a fairly uninteresting proposition - but that didn't mean he was going to sell his soul to keep it, especially not to a suit with a big gut and the voice of an overgrown kid who has spent too much of his adult life trying to get some payback for real or imagined slights he had suffered in the elementary-school playground. And although John Marinville was a bit of an asshole, Steve didn't hold that against him. Harris, though . . . Harris was in a whole other league.

Appleton had leaned forward at this point, making his lone contribution to the discussion before Marinville's agent could get to the final commandment.

"What's your impression of Johnny?" he asked Steve. "He's fifty-six years old, you know, and he's put a lot of hard mileage on the original equipment. Especially in the eighties. He wound up in the emergency room three dif-ferent times, twice in Connecticut and once down here. The first two were drug ODs. I'm not telling tales out of school, because all that's been reported exhaustively in the press. The last OD may have been a suicide attempt, and that is a tale out of school. I'd ask you to keep it to yourself."

Steve had nodded.

"So what do you think?" Appleton asked. "Can he really drive almost half a ton of motorcycle cross-country from Connecticut to California, and do twenty or so readings and receptions along the way? I want to know what you think, Mr. Ames, because I'm frankly doubtful."

He had expected Harris to come busting in then, touting the legendary strength and iron balls of his client - Steve knew suits, he knew agents, and Harris was both - but Harris was silent, just looking at him. Maybe he wasn't so stupid after all, Steve thought. Maybe he even cared a little for this particular client.

"You guys know him a lot better than I do," he said. "Hell, I only met him for the first time two weeks ago and I've never read one of his books."

Harris's face said that last didn't surprise him at all.

"Precisely why I'm asking you," Appleton replied. "We have known him for a long time. Me since 1985, when he used to party with the Beautiful People at 54, Bill since 1965. He's the literary world's Jerry Garcia."

"That's unfair," Harris said stiffly.

Appleton shrugged. "New eyes see clear, my grandmother used to say. So tell me, Mr. Ames. do you think he can do it?"

Steve had seen the question was serious, maybe even vital, and thought it over for almost a full minute. The two other men sat and let him.

"Well," he had said at last, "I don't know if he can just eat the cheese and stay away from the wine at the recep-tions, but make it across to California on the bike? Yeah, probably. He looks fairly strong. A lot better than Jerry Garcia did near the end, I'll tell you that. I've worked with a lot of rockers half his age who don't look as good."

Appleton had looked dubious.

"Mostly, though, it's a look he gets on his face. He wants to do this. He wants to get out on the road, kick some ass, take down some names. And. . ." Steve had found himself thinking of his favorite movie, one he watched on tape every year or so: Hombre, with Paul Newman and Richard Boone. He had smiled a little. "And he looks like a man who's still got a lot of hard bark left on him."

"Ah." Appleton had looked downright mystified at that. Steve hadn't been much surprised. If Appleton had ever come equipped with hard bark, Steve thought it had probably all rubbed off by the time he was a sophomore at Exeter or Choate or wherever he'd gone to wear his blazers and rep ties.

Harris had cleared his throat. "If we've got that out of the way, the final commandment - "

Appleton groaned. Harris went on looking at Steve, pretending not to hear.

"The fifth and final commandment," he had repeated. "Thou shalt not pick up hitchhikers in thy truck. Neither male nor female shalt thou pick them up, but especially not female."

Which was probably why Steve Ames never hesitated when he saw the girl standing beside the road just outside Ely - the skinny girl with her nose bent and her hair dyed two different colors. He just pulled over and stopped.

2

She opened the door but didn't get into the cab at first, just looked up at him from across the map-littered seat with wide blue eyes. "Are you a nice person?" she asked.

Steve thought this over, then nodded. "Yeah, I guess so," he said. "I like a cigar two or three times a day, but I never kicked a dog that wasn't bigger'n me, and I send money home to my momma once every six weeks."

"You're not going to try to slap the make on me, or anything?"

"Nope," Steve said, amused. He liked the way her wide blue eyes remained fixed on his face. She looked like a little kid studying the funny pages. "I'm fairly well under control in that regard."

"And you're not like a crazy serial killer, or anything?"

"No, but Jesus Christ, do you think I'd tell you if I was?"

"I'd probably see it in your eyes," the skinny girl with the tu-tone hair told him, and although she sounded grave enough, she was smiling a little. "I got a psychic streak. It ain't wide, but it's there, buddy. It's really there."

A refrigerator truck roared past, the guy laying on his horn all the way by, even though Steve had squeezed over until the stubby Ryder was mostly on the shoulder, and the road itself was empty in both directions. No big sur-prise about that, though. In Steve's experience, some guys simply couldn't keep their hands off their horns or their dicks. They were always honking one or the other.

"Enough with the questionnaire, lady. Do you want a ride or not? I've got to roll my wheels." In truth, he was a lot closer to the boss than the boss would maybe approve of. Marinville liked the idea of being on his own in America, Mr. Free Bird, have pen will travel, and Steve thought that was just how he'd write his book. That was fine, too - great, totally cool. But he, Steven Andrew Ames of Lubbock, also had a job to do; his was to make sure Marinville didn't have to write the book on a Ouija board instead of his word processor. His view on how to accomplish that end was simplicity itself: stay close and let no situation get out of hand unless it absolutely couldn't be helped. He was seventy miles back instead of a hundred and fifty, but what the boss didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

"You'll do, I guess," she said, hopped up into the cab, and slammed the door shut.

"Well, thank you, cookie," he said. "I'm touched by your trust." He checked the rearview mirror, saw nothing but the ass end of Ely, and got back out on the road again.

"Don't call me that," she said. "It's sexist."

"Cookie is sexist? Oh please."

In a prim little no-nonsense voice she said: "Don't call me cookie and I won't call you cake."

He burst out laughing. She probably wouldn't like it, but he couldn't help it. That was the way laughing was, sort of like farting, sometimes you could hold it in but a lot of times you couldn't.

He glanced at her and saw that she was laughing a little too - and slipping her backpack off - so maybe that was all right. He put her at about five-six and skinny as a rail - a hundred pounds max, and probably more like ninety-five. She was wearing a tank-top with torn-off sleeves. It gave an awfully generous view of her breasts for a girl worried about meeting Ted Bundy in a Ryder van. Not that she had a lot to worry about up there; Steve guessed she could still shop in the training-bra section at Wal-Mart, if she wanted to. On the front of the shirt, a black guy with dreadlocks grinned from the middle of a blue-green psychedelic sunburst. Bent around his head like a halo were the words NOT GONNA GIVE IT UP!

"You must like Peter Tosh," she said. "It can't be my tits."

"I worked with Peter Tosh once," he replied.

"No way!"

"Way," he said. He glanced in the rearview and saw that Ely was already gone. It was spooky, how fast that happened out here. He supposed that if he were a young female hitchhiker, he might ask a question or two himself before hopping willy-nilly into someone's car or truck. It might not help, but it sure couldn't hurt. Because once you were out in the desert, anything could happen to you.

"When did you work with Peter Tosh?"

"1980 or '81," he said. "I can't remember which. Madi-son Square Garden, then in Forest Hills. Dylan played the encore with him at Forest Hills. 'Blowin in the Wind,' if you can believe that."

She was looking at him with frank amazement, unmixed

- so far as he could tell - with doubt. "Whoa, cool! What were you, a roadie?"

"Then, yeah. Later on I was a guitar tech. Now, I'm Yes, that was a good start, but just what was he now? Not a guitar tech, that was for sure. Sort of demoted to roadie again. Also part-time shrink. Also sort of like Mary Poppins, only with long brown hippie hair that was starting to show some gray along the center part. "Now I'm into something else. What's your name?"

"Cynthia Smith," she said, and held out a hand.

He shook it. Her hand was long, feather-light inside of his, and incredibly fine-boned. It was a little like shaking hands with a bird. "I'm Steve Ames."

"From Texas."

"Yeah, Lubbock. Guess you heard the accent before, huh?"

"Once or twice." Her gamine grin lit up her whole face. "You can take the boy out of Texas, but - "

He joined her for the rest of it and they grinned at each other, already friends - the way people can become friends, for a little while, when they happen to meet on American back roads that go through the lonely places.

3

Cynthia Smith was clearly a flake, but Steve was a veteran flake himself, you couldn't spend most of your adult life in the music business without succumbing to flakedom, and it didn't bother him. She told him she had every reason to be careful of guys; one had nearly torn off her left ear and another had broken her nose not so long ago. "And the one who did the ear was a guy I liked," she added. "I'm sensitive about the ear. The nose, I think the nose has character, but I'm sensitive about the ear, God knows why."

He glanced across at her ear. "Well, it's a little flat on top, I guess, but so what? If you're really sensitive about it, you could grow your hair out and cover it up, you know."

"Not happening," she said firmly, and fluffed her hair leaning briefly to the right so she could get a look at her self in the mirror mounted on her side of the cab. The half on Steve's side was green; the other half was orange. "My friend Gert says I look like Little Orphan Annie from hell That's too cool to change."

"Not gonna give them curls up, huh?"

She smiled, patted the front of her shirt, and lapsed into a passable Jamaican imitation. "I go my own way - just like Peter, mon!"

Cynthia Smith's way had been to leave home and her parents' more or less constant disapproval at the age of seventeen. She had spent a little time on the East Coast ("I left when I realized I was gettin to be a mercy-fuck," she said matter-of-factly), and then had drifted back as far as the Midwest, where she had gotten "sort of clean" and met a good-looking guy at an AA meeting. The good- looking guy had claimed to be entirely clean, but he had lied. Oh boy, had he lied. Cynthia had moved in with him just the same, a mistake ("I've never been what you'd call bright about men," she told Steve in that same matter-of- fact voice). The good-looking guy had come home one night fucked up on crystal meth and had apparently de-cided he wanted Cynthia's left ear as a bookmark. She had gone to a shelter, gotten a little more than sort of clean, even worked as a counselor for awhile after the woman in charge had been murdered and it looked as if the place might close. "The guy who murdered Anna is the same guy who broke my nose," she said. "He was bad. Richie - the guy who wanted my ear for a bookmark - he only had a bad temper. Norman was bad. As in crazy."

"They catch him?"

Cynthia solemnly shook her head. "Anyway, we couldn't let D & S go under just because one guy went crazy when his wife left him, so we all pitched in to save it. We did, too."

"D & 5?"

"Stands for Daughters and Sisters. I got a lot of my confidence back while I was there." She was looking out the window at the passing desert and rubbing the ball of her thumb pensively along the bent bridge of her nose. "In a way, even the guy who did this helped me with that."

"Norman."

"Yep, Norman Daniels, that was his name. At least me and Gert - she's my pal, the one who says I look like Orphan Annie - stood up to him, you know?"

"Uh-huh.."

"So last month I finally wrote home to my folks. I put my return address on the letter, too. I thought when they wrote back, if they ever did, they'd be righteously pissed - my dad, especially. He used to be a minister. He's retired now, but..

"You can take the boy out of the hellfire, but you can't take the hellfire out of the boy," Steve said.

She smiled. "Well, that's sorta what I expected, but the letter I got back was pretty great. I called them. We talked. My dad cried." She said this with a touch of wonder. "I mean, he cried. Can you believe that?"

"Hey, I toured for eight months with Black Sabbath Steve said. "I can believe anything. So you're going home, huh? Return of the Prodigal Cookie?" She gave him a look. He gave her a grin. "Sorry."

"Yeah, sure you are. Anyway, that's close."

"Where's home?"

"Bakersfield. Which reminds me, how far are you going?"

'San Francisco. But - "

She grinned. "Are you kidding? That's so cool!"

"But I can't promise to take you that far. In fact, I can't absolutely promise to take you any farther than Austin - the one in Nevada, you know, not the one in Texas."

"I know where Austin is, I've got a map," she said, and now she was giving him a stupid-big-brother look that he liked even better than her wide-eyed Miss Prim gaze. She was a cutie, all right. ., and wouldn't she just love it if he told her that?

"I'll take you as far as I can, but this gig is a little weird. I mean, all gigs are kind of weird, show-business is weird by nature, and this is showbiz . . . I guess, anyway but. . . I mean. .

He stopped. What did he mean, exactly? His span of employment as a writer's roadie (an ill-fitting title, you didn't have to be a writer yourself to know that, but the only one he could think of) was almost over, and he still didn't know what to think of it, or of Johnny Marinville himself. All he knew for sure was that the great man hadn't asked Steve to score him any dope or women, and that he'd never answered Steve's knock on his hotel room door with whiskey on his breath. For now that was enough. He could think about how he was going to describe it on his r��sum�� later.

"What is the gig?" she asked. "I mean, this doesn't look big enough to be a band truck. Are you touring with a folkie this time? Gordon Lightfoot, someone like that?"

Steve grinned. "My guy is sort of a folkie, I guess, only he plays his mouth instead of a guitar or a harmonica. He - "

That was when the cellular phone on the dashboard gave out its strident, oddly nasal cry: Hmeep! Hmeep!

Steve grabbed it off the dashboard but didn't open it right away. He looked at the girl instead. "Don't say a word," he told her as the phone hmeep-ed in his hand a third time. "You might get me trouble if you do. 'Kay?"

Hmeep! Hmeep!

She nodded. Steve flipped the phone's mouthpiece open and then pushed SEND on the keypad, which was how you accepted an incoming call. The first thing he was aware of when he put the phone to his ear was how heavy the static was - he was amazed the call had gone through at all.

"Hello, that you, boss?"

There was a deeper, smoother roar behind the static - the sound of a truck going by, Steve thought - and then Marinville's voice. Steve could hear panic even through the static, and it kicked his heart into a higher gear. He had heard people talking in that tone before (it happened at least once on every rock tour, it seemed), and he recog-nized it at once. At Johnny Marinville's end of the line, shit of some variety had hit the fan.

"Steve! Steve, I'm. . . ouble. . . bad..

He stared out at the road, running straight-arrow into the desert, and felt little seeds of sweat starting to form on his brow. He thought of the boss's tubby little agent with his thou shalt nots and his bullying voice, then swept all that away. The last person he needed cluttering up his head right now was Bill Harris.

"Were you in an accident? Is that it? What's up, boss? Say again!"

Crackle, zit, crackle.

"Johnny. . . ear me?"

"Yes, I hear you!" Shouting into the phone now, know-ing it was totally useless but doing it anyway. Aware, out of the corner of his eye, that the girl was looking at him with mounting concern. "What's happened to you?"

No answer for so long he was positive this time he had lost Marinville. He was taking the phone away from his ear when the boss's voice came through again, impossibly far off, like a voice coming in from another galaxy: "west . . . Ely . . . iffy."

No, not iffy, Steve thought, not iffy but fifty. "I'm west of Ely, on Highway 50." Maybe, anyway. Maybe that's what he's saying. Accident. Got to be. He drove his scoot off the road and he's sitting out there with a bust leg and blood maybe pouring down his face and when I get back to New York his guys are going to crucify me, if for no other reason than that they can 't crucify him - ot sure how far . . . least, probably more . . . RV pulled off the road. . . ittle farther up. . .

The heaviest blast of static yet, then something about cops. State cops and town cops.

"What's - " the girl in the passenger seat began.

"Shh! Not now!"

From the phone: ". . . my bike . . . into the desert wind. ., mile or so east of the RV..

And that was all. Steve yelled Johnny's name into the phone half a dozen times, but only silence came back. The connection had been broken. He used the NAME/MENU button to bring up J.M. in the display window, then pushed SEND. A recorded voice welcomed him to the Western Roaming Network, there was a pause, and then another recording told him that his call could not be completed at this time. The voice began to list all the reasons why this might be so. Steve pushed END and flipped the phone closed. "God damn it!"

"It's bad, isn't it?" Cynthia asked. Her eyes were very wide again, but there was nothing cute about them now. "I can see it in your face."

"Maybe," he said, then shook his head, impatient with himself. "Probably. That was my boss. He's up the line somewhere. Seventy miles'd be my best guess, but it might be as much as a hundred. He's riding a Harley. He - "

"Big red-and-cream bike?" she asked, suddenly ex-cited. "Does he have long gray hair, sort of like Jerry Garcia's?"

He nodded.

"I saw him this morning, way far east of here," she said. "He filled up at this little gas station - cafeteria place in Pretty Nice. You know that town, Pretty Nice?"

He nodded.

"I was eating breakfast and saw him out the window. I thought he looked familiar. Like I'd seen him on Oprah or maybe Ricki Lake."

"He's a writer." Steve looked at the speedometer, saw he had the panel truck up to seventy, and decided he could let it out just a little more. The needle crept up toward seventy-five. Outside the windows, the desert ran back-ward a little faster. "He's crossing the country, getting material for a book. He's done some speaking, too, but mostly he just goes places and talks to people and makes notes. Anyway, he's had an accident. At least I think that's what's happened."

"The connection was fucked, wasn't it?"

"Uh-huh."

"Do you want to pull over? Let me out? Because it's no problem, if that's what you want."

He thought it over carefully - now that the initial shock was receding, his mind seemed to be ticking away coldly and precisely, as it always had before in situations like this. No, he decided, he didn't want her out, not at all. He had a situation on his hands, one that had to be dealt with right away, but that didn't mean the future could be for-gotten. Appleton might be okay even if Johnny Marinville had highsided his Harley and fucked himself up bigtime, he had looked like the sort of man who could (blazers and rep ties notwithstanding) accept the idea that sometimes things went wrong. Bill Harris, however, had struck Steve as a man who believed in playing Pin the Blame on the Donkey when things went wrong . . . and jamming that pin as far up the donkey's ass as it would go.

As the potential donkey, Steve decided what he would really like was a witness - one who had never set eyes on him before today.

"No, I'd like you to ride along. But I have to be straight with you - I don't know what we're going to find. There could be blood."

"I can deal with blood," she said.

4

She made no comment about how fast he was going. but when the rental truck hit eighty-five and the frame began to shake, she fastened her shoulder-harness. Steve squeezed the gas-pedal a little harder, and when the truck got up around ninety, the vibration eased. He kept both hands curled around the wheel, though; the wind was kicking up, and at these speeds a good hard gust could swerve you onto the shoulder. Then, if your tires sank in, you were in real trouble. Flipping-over trouble. The boss would have been even more vulnerable to windshear on his bike, Steve reflected. Maybe that was what had happened.

By now he had told Cynthia the basic facts of his em-ploy: he made reservations, checked routes, vetted sound- systems at the places where the boss was scheduled to speak, stayed out of the way so as not to conflict with the picture the boss was painting - Johnny Marinville, the thinking man's lone wolf, a politically correct Sam Peckinpah hero, a writer who hadn't forgotten how to hang tough and lay cool.

The panel-truck, Steve told her, was empty except for some extra gear and a long wooden ramp, which Johnny could ride up if the weather got too foul to cycle in. Since this was midsummer, that wasn't very likely, but there was another reason for the ramp as well, and for the tiedowns Steve had installed on the floor of the van before setting out. This one was unspoken by either of them, but both had known it was there from the day they had set out from Westport, Connecticut. Johnny Marinville might wake up one morning and simply find him-self unwilling to keep riding the Harley.

Or incapable of it.

"I've heard of him," Cynthia said, "but I never read anything by him. I like Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel, mostly. I just read for pleasure. Nice bike, though. And the guy had great hair. Rock-and-roll hair, you know?"

Steve nodded. He knew. Marinville did, too.

"You really worried about him or just worried about what might happen to you?"

He likely would have resented the question if someone else had asked it, but he sensed no implied criticism in Cynthia's tone. Only curiosity. "I'm worried about both," he said.

She nodded. "How far have we come?"

He glanced down at the odometer. "Forty-five miles since I lost him off the phone."

"But you don't know exactly where he was calling from."

"You think he just fucked himself up, or someone else, too?"

He looked over at her, surprised. That the boss might've fucked someone else up was exactly what he was afraid of, but he never would have said so out loud if she hadn't raised the possibility first.

"Somebody else might be involved," he replied reluctantly. "He said something about state cops and town cops. It might've been 'Don't call the state cops, call the town cops.' I couldn't tell for sure."

She pointed to his cellular, which was back on the dashboard.

"No way," he said. "I'm not calling any cops until I see what kind of mess he's gotten himself into."

"And I promise that won't be in my statement, if you promise not to call me cookie anymore."

He smiled a little, although he didn't feel much like smiling. "Probably that's a good idea. You could always say -

" - that your phone wouldn't work anymore," she finished. "Everybody knows how finicky those things are."

"You're okay, Cynthia."

"You're not so bad yourself."

At just under ninety, the miles melted away like spring snowfall. When they were sixty miles west of the point where Steve had lost contact, he began slowing the truck a couple of miles an hour for each mile travelled. No police-cars had passed them in either direction, and he supposed that was good. He said so, and Cynthia shook her head doubtfully.

"It's weird, is what it is. If there's been an accident where your boss or maybe someone else got hurt, wouldn't you think a few cop-cars would've gone past us by now? Or an ambulance?"

"Well, if they came from the other way, west - "

"According to my map, the next town that way is Austin, and that's much farther ahead of us than Ely is behind us. Anything official - anything with sirens is what I mean - should be heading east to west. Catching up with us. Get it?"

"I guess so, yeah."

"So where are they?"

"I don't know."

"Me either."

"Well, keep looking for. . . well shit, who knows? Any thing out of the ordinary."

"I am. Slow down a little more."

He glanced at his watch and saw it was quarter to six The shadows had drawn long across the desert, but the day was still bright and hot. If Marinville was out there, they would see him.

You bet we will, he thought. He's going to be sitting at the edge of the road, probably with his head busted and half his pants torn off from when he spilled and rolled And likely making notes on how it felt. Thank God he wears his helmet, at least. If he didn't -

"I see something! Up there!" The girl's voice was excited but controlled. She was shading her eyes from the westering sun with her left hand and pointing with her right. "See? Could that. . . aw, shit no. That's way too big to be a motorcycle. Looks like a motor home."

"I think this is where he called from, though. Some-where around here, anyway."

"What makes you think so?"

"He said there was an RV off the road a little farther up - I heard that part quite clearly. He said he was about a mile east of it, and that's about where we are now, so - "

"Yeah, don't say it. I'm looking, I'm looking."

He slowed the Ryder truck to thirty, then, as they approached the RV, to walking pace. Cynthia had unrolled the passenger window and was halfway out of it, her tank top riding up to reveal the small of her back (the small of her back, Steve thought) and the ridge of her spine.

"Anything?" he asked her. "At all?"

"Nope. I saw glint, but it was way out on the desert floor - a lot farther than he'd gone if he'd cracked up. Or if the wind pushed him off the road, you know?"

"Probably the sun reflecting off the mica in the rocks."

"Uh-huh, could have been."

"Don't fall out that window, girl."

"I'm fine," she said, then winced her eyes shut as the wind, which was becoming steadily more grumpy, threw grit in her face.

"If this is the RV he was talking about, we're already past where he called from."

She nodded. "Yeah, but keep going. If there's some-body home in there, they might have saw him."

He snorted. "'Might have saw him.' Did you learn that reading Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel?"

She pulled in long enough to give him a haughty look but he thought he saw hurt beneath it. "Sorry," he said. "I was only teasing."

"Oh?" she said coolly. "Tell me something, Mr. Big Texas Roadie - have you read anything your boss has written?"

"Well, he gave me a copy of Harper's with a story of his in it. 'Heaven-Sent Weather,' it was called. I read that, sure did. Ever' word."

"Did you understand ever' word?"

"Uh, no. Look, what I said was snotty. I do apologize. Sincerely."

"Okay," she said, but her tone suggested that he was going to be on probation, at least for awhile.

He opened his mouth to say something that might be funny if he was lucky, something that would get her to smile (she had a nice one), and then he got a really good look at the RV. "Oh hey, what's this?" be asked, speaking more to himself than to the girl.

"What's what?" She turned her head to look out through the windshield as Steve coasted the Ryder truck to a stop on the shoulder, just behind the RV. It was one of the middle-sized ones, bigger than Lassie but smaller than the Godzillas he'd been seeing ever since Colorado.

"Guy must have run over some nails in the road, or something," Steve said. "Tires look like they're all flat."

"Yeah. So how come yours aren't?"

By the time it occurred to him that the people in the RV might have been public-spirited enough to pick up the nails, the girl with the punky tu-tone hair was out of the cab and walking up to the RV, hallooing.

Well, she knows a good exit-line when she gets one off give her that, he thought, and got out on his side. Wind struck him in the face hard enough to rock him back on his heels. And it was hot, like air blown over the top of an incinerator.

"Steve?" Her voice was different. The prickly pertness, which he thought might have been the girl's way of flirting, was gone. "Come over here. I don't like this"

She was standing by the side door of the RV. It was unlatched, banging back and forth in the wind a little even though this was the lee side, and the steps were down It wasn't the door or the steps she was looking at, though At the foot of the stairs, half-buried in sand that the wind had blown beneath the RV, was a doll with blond hair and a bright blue dress. It lay face-down and abandoned Steve didn't care for the look of this much, either. Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions, that was his opinion, at least, and to come upon one abandoned by the roadside, half-buried in blowing sand -

He opened the unlatched door and poked his head into the RV. It was brutally hot, at least a hundred and ten degrees. "Hello? Anybody?"

But he knew better. If they'd been here, the people who owned this RV, they would have been running the engine for the air conditioning.

"Don't bother." Cynthia had picked up the doll and was brushing sand from its hair and the folds of its dress. "This is no dimestore dolly. Not huge bucks, but expensive. And someone cared about her. Look." She pulled out the skirt with her fingers so he could see where a small - neat patch had been sewn over a rip. It matched the dress almost exactly in color. "If the girl who owned this doll was around, it wouldn't have been out lying in the dirt I practically guarantee you that. The question is, why didn't she take it with her when she and her folks left? Or at least put it back inside?" She opened the door, hesitated went up one of the two steps, hesitated again, looked back at him. "Come on."

"I can't. I have to find the boss."

"In a minute, okay? I don't want to go in here by myself. It's like the Andrea Doria, or something."

"You mean the Mary Celeste. The Andrea Doria sank "Okay, smarty-britches, whatever. Come on, it won't take long. Besides . . . She hesitated.

"Besides, it might have something to do with my boss? Is that what you're thinking?"

Cynthia nodded. "It's not that big a reach. I mean, they're both gone, aren't they?"

He didn't want to accept that, though - it felt like a complication he didn't deserve. She saw some of that on his face (maybe even all of it; she sure wasn't dumb) and tossed up her hands. "Oh shit, I'll look around myself."

She went inside, still holding the doll. Steve looked thoughtfully after her for a moment, then followed. Cyn-thia glanced back at him, nodded, then put the doll down in one of the captain's chairs. She fanned her tank-top at her neck. "Hot," she said. "I mean boo gery."

She walked into the RV's cabin. Steve went the other way, into the driver's area, ducking his head so as not to bump it. On the dashboard in front of the passenger seat were three packs of baseball cards, neatly sorted into teams - Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates. He thumbed through them and saw that about half were signed, and maybe half of the signed ones were personalized. Across the bottom of Albert Belle's card was this:

"To David - Keep sluggin'! Albert Belle."

And another, from the Pittsburgh pile:

"See the ball before you swing, Dave - Your friend, Andy Van Slyke."

"There was a boy, too," Cynthia called. "Unless the girl was into G.I. Joe and Judge Dredd and the MotoKops as well as dollies in blue dresses. One of the side-carriers back here is full of comic books."

"Yeah, there's a boy," Steve said, putting Albert Belle and Andy Van Slyke back into their respective decks. He just brought the ones that were really important to him, he thought, smiling a little. The ones he absolutely could not bear to leave home. "His name is David."

Startled: "How in the hell do you know that?"

"Learned it all watching X-Files." He picked up a gas credit-card receipt from the wad of papers jammed into the dashboard map-receptacle, and smoothed it out. The name on it was Ralph Carver, the address somewhere in Ohio. The carbon had blurred across the town name, but it might have been Wentworth.

"I don't suppose you know anything else about him, do you?" she asked. "Last name? Where he came from?"

"David Carver," he said, the smile widening into a grin.

"Dad's Ralph Carver. They hail from Wentworth, Ohio. Nice town. Next door to Columbus. I was in Columbus with South-side Johnny in '86."

She came forward, the doll curled against one mosquito-bump breast. Outside the wind gusted again, throwing sand against the RV. It sounded like hard rain "You're making that up!"

"No'm," he said, and held out the gas receipt. "Here s the Carver part. David I got from the kid's baseball cards He's got some high-priced ink, tell you that."

She picked the cards up, looked at them, then put them back and turned slowly all the way around, her face solemn and shiny with sweat. He was sweating himself, and plenty. He could feel it running down his body like a light, sticky oil. "Where did they go?"

"Nearest town, to get help," he said. "Probably some one gave them a lift. Do you remember from your map what's around here?"

"No. There is a town, I think, but I don't recall the name. But if that's what they did, why didn't they lock up their place when they left? I mean, all their shit is here She waved one hand toward the cabin. "Know what s back there by the studio couch?"

"Nope."

"The wife's jewelry caddy. A ceramic frog. You put your rings and earrings in the frog's mouth."

"That sounds tasteful." He wanted to get out of here and not just because it was so nasty-hot or because he had to track down the boss. He wanted to get out because the RV was like the fucking Mary Celeste. It was too easy to imagine vampires hidden away in the closets, vampires in Bermuda shorts and tee-shirts saying things like:

SURVIVED HIGHWAY 50, THE LONELIEST HIGHWAY IN AMERICA!

"It's actually cute," she said, "but that's not the point There's two sets of earrings and a finger-ring in it. Not real expensive, but not junk, either. The ring's a tourma line, I think. So why didn't they - "

She saw something in the map-holder, something that bad been revealed when he stirred the crammed-in papers and plucked out a dollar-sign moneyclip that looked like real silver. There were bills folded into it. She fanned them quickly with the tip of a finger, then tossed the moneyclip back into the map-holder as if it were hot.

"How much?" he asked.

"Forty or so," she said. "The clip itself s probably worth three or four times that much. Tell you what, pilgrim - this smells bad."

Another gust of wind splashed sand against the northern side of the RV, this one hard enough to rock it a little on its flat tires. The two of them looked at each other out of their sweat-shiny faces. Steve met the doll's blank blue gaze. What happened, here, honey? What did you see?

He turned for the door.

"Time for the cops?" Cynthia asked.

"Soon. First I want to walk a mile of backtrail, see if I can spot any sign of my boss."

"In this wind? Man, that's really dumb!"

He looked at her for a moment, not saying anything, then pushed past her and went down the steps.

She caught up with him at the foot of them. "Hey, let's call it even, okay? You made fun of my grammar, I made fun of your whatever."

"Intuition."

"Intuition, is that what you call it? Well, fine. Call it even? Say yeah. Please. I'm too spooked to want to piss in the catbox."

He smiled at her, a little touched by the anxiety on her face. "Okay, yeah," he said. "Even as even can be."

"You want me to drive the truck back? I can do a mile by the odometer, give you a finishing line to shoot for."

"Can you turn it around without - "

A semi with KLEENEX SOFTENS THE BLOW written on the side blasted past at seventy, headed east. Cynthia flinched back from it, shielding her eyes from flying sand with one Kate Moss arm. Steve put his own arm around her scant shoulders, steadying her for a moment or two.

" - without get-ting stuck?" he finished.

She gave him an annoyed look and stepped out from under his arm. "Course."

"Well . . . mile and a half, okay? Just to be on the safe side."

"Okay." She started toward the Ryder truck, then turned back to him. "I just remembered the name of the little town that's close to here," she said, and pointed east. "It's up that way, south of the highway. Cute name. You're gonna love it, Lubbock."

"What?"

"Desperation." She grinned and climbed up into the cab of the truck.

5

He walked slowly east along the shoulder of the westbound lane, raising his hand in a wave but not looking up as the Ryder truck, with Cynthia behind the wheel, rumbled slowly past. "I don't have the slightest idea what you're looking for!" she called down to him.

She was gone before he had any chance to reply, which was just as well; he didn't have any idea, either. Tracks? A ridiculous idea, given the wind. Blood? Bits of chrome or taillight glass? He supposed that was actually the most likely. He only knew two things for sure: that his instincts had not just asked him to do this but demanded it, and that he couldn't get the doll's glazey blue stare out of his mind. Some little girl's favorite doll. . . only the little girl had left Alice Blue Gown lying face-down in the dirt by the side of the road. Mom had left her jewelry, Dad had left his moneyclip, and son David had left his auto-graphed baseball cards.

Why?

Up ahead, Cynthia swung wide, then turned the bright yellow truck so it was facing back west again. She did this with an economy Steve wasn't sure he could have matched himself, needing to back and fill just a single time. She got out, started walking toward him at a good clip, hardly looking down at all, and he had time, even then, to be moderately pissed that she should have found what his instinct had sent him out here to look for. "Hey!" she said. She bent over, picked something up, and shook sand off it.

He jogged to where she was standing. "What? What is it?"

"Little notebook," she said, and held it out. "I guess he was here, all right. J. Marinville, printed right on the front. See?"

He took the small wirebound notepad with the bent cover and paged through it quickly. Directions, maps Steve had drawn himself, and jotted notes in the boss's topheavy scrawl, most of them about the scheduled receptions.

Under the heading St. Louis, Marinville had scribbled, Patricia Franklin. Redhead, big boobs. Don't CALL HER PAT OR PATTY! Name of org. is FRIENDS OF OPEN LIBES. Bill sez P.F. also active in animal-rights stuff Veggie." On the last page which had been used, a single word had been scrawled in an even more flamboyant version of the boss's handwriting: JOE.

That was all. As if he had started to write an autograph for someone and then never finished.

He looked up at Cynthia and saw her cross her arms beneath her scant bosom and begin rubbing the points of her elbows. "Bruh," she said. "It's impossible to be cold out here, but I am just the same. This keeps getting spookier and spookier.

"How come this didn't just fly away in the breeze?"

"Pure luck. It blew against a big rock and then sand covered the bottom half. Like with the doll. If he'd dropped it six inches to the right or left, it'd probably be halfway to Mexico by now."

"What makes you think he dropped it?"

"Don't you?" she asked.

He opened his mouth to say he really didn't think any-thing, at least not yet, and then forgot all about it. He was seeing a glint out in the desert, probably the same one Cynthia had seen while they were coming up on the RV, only they weren't moving now, so the glint was staying steady. And it wasn't just mica chips embedded in rock, he would bet on that. For the first time he was really, painfully afraid. He was running out into the desert, run-ning toward the glint, before he was even aware he meant to do it.

"Hey, don't go so fast!" She sounded startled. "Wait up!"

"No, stay there!" he called back.

He sprinted the first hundred yards, keeping that star point of sun directly in front of him (except now the star point had begun to spread to take on a shape he found dreadfully familiar), and then a wave of dizziness hit and stopped him. He bent over with his hands grasping his legs just above the knees, convinced that every cigar he had smoked in the last eighteen years had come back to haunt him.

When the vertigo passed a little and the padded jackhammer sound of his heartbeat began to diminish in his ears, he heard a distinct but somehow ladylike puffing from behind him. He turned and saw Cynthia approaching at a jog, sweating hard but otherwise fine and dandy. Her gaudy curls had flattened a little, that was all.

"You stick. . . like a booger on. . . the end of a finger, he panted as she pulled up beside him.

"I think that's the sweetest thing a guy ever said to me. Put it in your fucking haiku book, why don't you? And don't have a heart attack. How old are you, anyway?"

He straightened up with an effort. "Too old to be inter-ested in your giblets, Chicken Little, and I'm fine. Thanks for your concern." On the highway a car blipped by with-out slowing. They both looked. Out here, each passing car was a noticed event.

"Well, can I suggest we walk the rest of the way9 Whatever that thing is, it's not going anywhere."

"I know what it is," he said, and trotted the last twenty yards. He knelt before it like a primitive tribesman before an effigy. The boss's Harley had been hurriedly and indifferently buried. The wind had already freed one handlebar and part of another.

The girl's shadow fell over him and he looked up at her wanting to say something that would make her believe he wasn't completely freaked out by this, but nothing came He wasn't sure she would have heard him, anyway. Her eyes were wide and scared, riveted on the bike. She fell to her knees beside him, held out her hands as if measuring then dug a little distance to the right of the handlebars The first thing she found was the boss's helmet. She pulled it free, poured the sand out of it, and set it aside

Then she brushed delicately beneath where it had been. Steve watched her. He wasn't sure his legs would support him if he wanted to get up. He kept thinking of the stories you saw in the paper from time to time, stories about bodies being discovered in gravel pits and pulled out of the ever-popular shallow grave.

Along the scooped declivity she had made, he now saw painted metal bright against the gray-brown sand. The colors were red and cream. And letters:

HARL.

"That's it," she said. Her words were indistinct, be-cause she was rubbing one hand compulsively back and forth across her mouth. "That's the one I saw, all right."

Steve grabbed the handlebars and tugged. Nothing. He wasn't surprised; it was a pretty feeble tug. He suddenly realized something that was interesting, in a horrible sort of way. It wasn't just the boss he was worried about anymore. No sir. His concerns had widened, it seemed. And he had this feeling, this weird feeling, as if -

"Steve, my nice new friend," Cynthia said in a little voice, looking up at him from the little bit of fuel nacelle she had uncovered, "you're probably going to think this is primo stupid, the sort of thing dumb broads are always saying in lousy movies, but I feel like we're being watched."

"I don't think you're being stupid," he said, and scooped a little more sand away from the nacelle. No blood. Thank God for that. Which wasn't to say that there wasn't blood on the damned thing somewhere. Or a body buried beneath it. "I feel that way, too."

"Can we get out of here?" she asked - almost pleaded. She wiped sweat off her brow with one arm. "Please?"

He stood up and they started back. When she stuck her hand out, he was glad to take it.

"God, the feeling's strong." she said. "Is it strong for you?"

"Yeah. I don't think it means anything but being really scared, but yeah - it's strong. Like - "

A howl rose in the distance, wavering. Cynthia's grip on his hand tightened enough for Steve to be grateful that she bit her nails.

"What's that?" she whimpered. "Oh my God, what is it?"

"Coyote," he said. "Just like in the Western movies. They won't hurt us. Let up a little, Cynthia, you're kuhn me."

She started to, then clamped down again when a second howl came, wrapping itself lazily around the first like a good barbershop tenor doing harmony.

"They're nowhere close," he said, now having to work in order to keep himself from pulling his hand out of hers She was a lot stronger than she looked, and she was hurting. "Really, kiddo, they're probably in the next county - relax."

She eased up on his hand, but when she turned her shiny face to him, it was almost pitifully frightened "Okay, they're nowhere close, they're probably in the next county, they're probably phonin it in from across the California state line, in fact, but I don't like things that bite. I'm scared of things that bite. Can we get back to your truck ?"

She walked with her hip brushing his, but when the next howl came, she didn't squeeze his hand quite so hard - that one clearly was at some distance, and it wasn't immediately repeated. They reached the truck. Cynthia got in on the passenger side, giving him one quick, nervous smile over her shoulder as she hauled herself up Steve walked around the truck's hood, realizing as he went that the sensation of being watched had slipped away. He was still scared, but now it was primarily for the boss again - if John Edward Marinville was dead, the headlines would be worldwide, and Steven Ames would undoubtedly be part of the story. Not a good part. Steven Ames would be the fail-safe that failed, the safety net that hadn't been there when Big Daddy finally fell off the trapeze.

"That feeling of being watched. . . probably it was the coyotes," she said. "You think?"

"Maybe."

"What now?" Cynthia asked.

He took a deep breath and reached for the cellular phone. "Time for the cops," he said, and dialled 911.

What he heard in his ear was what he had pretty much expected: one of those cell-net recorded voices telling him it was sorry, but his call could not be completed at this time. The boss had gotten through - briefly, anyway - but that had been a fluke. Steve snapped the mouthpiece closed with a savage flick of his wrist, threw the phone back onto the dash, and started the Ryder's engine. He was dismayed to see that the desert floor had taken on a distinctly purplish cast. Shit. They'd spent more time in the deserted RV and kneeling in front of the boss's half-buried scoot than he had thought.

"No, huh?" She was looking at him sympathetically.

"No. Let's find this town you mentioned. What was it?"

"Desperation. It's east of here."

He dropped the gearshift lever into Drive. "Navigate for me, will you?"

"Sure," she said, and then touched his arm. "We'll get help. Even in a town that small, there's got to be at least one cop."

He drove up to the abandoned RV before turning east again, and saw the door was still flapping. Neither of them had thought to hatch it. He stopped the truck, ran the transmission up into Park, and opened his own door.

Cynthia grabbed his shoulder before he could swing more than one leg out. "Hey, where you going?" Not panicked, but not exactly serene, either.

"Easy, girl. Just give me a see."

He got out and latched the door of the RV, which was something called a Wayfarer, according to the chrome on its flank. Then he came back to the idling Ryder truck.

"What are you, one of those type-A guys?" she asked.

"Not usually. I just didn't like that thing bangin in the breeze." He paused, one foot on the running board, looking up at her, thinking. Then he shrugged. "It was like looking at a shutter on a haunted house.

"Okay," she said, and then more howls rose in the dis-tance - maybe south of them, maybe east, with the wind it was hard to tell, but this time it sounded like at least half a dozen voices. This time it sounded like a pack. Steve got up in the cab and slammed the door.

"Come on," he said, pulling the transmission lever down into Drive again. "Let's turn this rig around and find us some law."