The cellular phone was lying all the way across the holding area, at the foot of a file-cabinet with a PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT sticker on it. The gadget didn't look broken, but Johnny pulled up the antenna and flipped it open. The phone beeped and the S appeared, good, but there were no transmission-bars, bad. Very bad. Still, he had to try. He pushed the NAME/MENU button until STEVE appeared, then squeezed the SEND button.

"Mr. Marinville." It was Mary, standing in the door-way. "We have to go. The cop - "

"I know, I know, just a second."

Nothing. No ring, no robot, no reception. Just a very faint hollow roaring sound, the sort of thing you heard in a conch shell.

"Fucked," he said, and closed the phone's speaker-pad. "But that was Steve, I know it was. If we'd only gotten outside thirty seconds sooner. . . thirty cocksucking little seconds. .

"Johnny, please."

"Coming." He followed her back downstairs.

Mary had the Rossi shotgun in her hand, and when they were back outside, Johnny saw that David Carver had taken back the pistol and was holding it beside his leg. Ralph now held one of the rifles. He had it in the crook of his arm, like he thought he was Dan'l Boone. Oh, Johnny, a mocking voice spoke up from inside his head-it was Terry, the never-say-die bitch who had gotten him into this fuckarow in the first place. Don't tell me you're jealous of Mr. Suburban Ohio - you?

Well, maybe. Just a little. Mostly because Mr. Suburban Ohio's rifle was loaded, unlike the Mossberg shot-gun which Johnny now picked up.

"That's a Ruger .44," the old man was telling Ralph. "Four rounds. I left the chamber empty. If you have to shoot, remember that."

"I will," Ralph said.

"She'll kick you hard. Remember that, too."

Billingsley lifted the last gun, the .30.-.06. For a moment Johnny thought the old fart was going to offer to trade him, but he didn't. "All right," he said, "I guess we're ready. Don't shoot at any varmints unless they come at us. You'd just miss, use up ammunition, and probably draw more. Do you understand that, Carver?"

"Yes," Ralph said.

"Son?"

"Yes."

"Ma' am?"

"Yes," Mary said. She sounded resigned to being a ma'am, at least until she got back to civilization.

"And I won't swing unless they get close, I promise," Johnny said. It was supposed to be a joke, a little mood- brightener, but all it earned him from Billingsley was a look of cool contempt. It wasn't a look Johnny thought he deserved.

"Do you have a problem with me, Mr. Billingsley?" he asked.

"I don't care for your looks much," Billingsley shot back. "We don't have much respect out in these parts for older folks who wear their hair long. As to whether or not I have a problem with you, that I couldn't say just yet."

"So far as I can see, what you do to folks out in these parts is gutshoot them and then hang them on hooks like deer, so maybe you'll pardon me if I don't take your opinions too deeply to heart."

"Now listen here - "

"And if that hair's laying across your ass because you missed your daily quart of sour mash, don't take it out on me." He was ashamed at the way the old man's eyes flickered when he said that, and at the same time he was bitterly gratified. You knew your own, by God. There were a lot of know-it-all buttheads in Alcoholics Anonymous, but they were right about that. You knew your own even when you couldn't smell the booze on their breath or wafting out of their pores. You could almost hear them pinging in your head like sonar.

"Stop it!" Mary snapped at him. "If you want to be an asshole, do it on your own time!"

Johnny looked at her, wounded by her tone of voice, wanting to say something childish like. Hey, he started it.

"Where should we go?" David asked. He shone his light across the street, at the Desperation Coffee Shop and Video Stop. "Over there? The coyotes and the buzzard I saw are gone.

"Too close, I think," Ralph said. "What about we get out of here completely? Did you find any car-keys?"

Johnny rummaged and came up with the keyring David had taken from the dead cop. "Only one set on here. I imagine they go to the cruiser Entragian was driving."

"Is driving," David said. "It's gone. It's what he took my mom away in." His face as he said this was unread able. His father put a hand on the back of the boy's neck

"It might be safer not to be driving just now, anyway, Ralph said. "A car's pretty conspicuous when it's the only one on the road."

"Anyplace will do, at least to start with," Mary said.

"Anyplace, yeah, but the farther from the cop's home base, the better," Johnny said. "That's the asshole's opin-ion, anyhow."

Mary gave him an angry look. Johnny bore it, not looking away. After a moment she did, flustered.

Ralph said, "We might do well to hide up, at least for a little while."

"Where?" Mary asked.

"Where do you think, Mr. Billingsley?" David asked.

"The American West," he said after a moment's thought. "Reckon that'd do to start with."

"What is it?" Johnny asked. "A bar?"

"Movie theater," Mary said. "I saw it when he drove us into town. It looked closed up."

Billingsley nodded. Would have been torn down ten year ago, if there was anything to put up in its place. It's locked, but I know a way in. Come on. And remember what I said about the varmints. Don't shoot unless you have to."

"And stay close together," Ralph added. "Lead the way, Mr. Billingsley."

Once again Johnny brought up the rear as they set off north along Main Street, their shoulders hunched against the scouring drive of the west wind. Johnny looked ahead at Billingsley, who just happened to know a way into the town's old deserted movie theater. Billingsley, who turned out to have all sorts of opinions on all sorts of issues, once you got him wound up a little. You're a late-stage alcoholic, aren't you, my friend? Johnny thought. You've got all the bells and whistles.

If so, the man was operating well for one who hadn't had a shot in awhile. Johnny wanted something to reduce the throb in his nose, and he suspected that getting a drink into old Tommy at the same time might be an investment in their future.

They were passing beneath the battered awning of Desperation's Owl's Club.

"Hold it," Johnny said. "Going in here for a minute."

"Are you nuts?" Mary asked. "We have to get off the street!"

"There's nobody on the street but us," Johnny said, "didn't you notice?" He moderated his voice, tried to sound reasonable. "Look, I just want to get some aspirin. My nose is killing me. Thirty seconds-a minute, max."

He tried the door before she could answer. It was locked. He hit the glass with the rifle butt, actually looking forward to the bray of the burglar alarm, but the only sound was the tinkle of glass falling onto the floor inside and the relentless howl of the wind. Johnny knocked out the few jagged bits of glass sticking up from the side of the doorframe, then reached through and felt for the lock.

"Look," Ralph murmured. He pointed across the street. Four coyotes stood on the sidewalk in front of a squat brick building with the word UTILITY printed on one window and WATER on the other. They didn't move, but their eyes were trained on the little cluster of people across the street. A fifth came trotting down the sidewalk from the south and joined them.

Mary raised the Rossi and pointed it toward the coyotes. David Carver pushed it down again. His face was distant, abstracted. "No, it's all right," he said. "They're just watching."

Johnny found the lock, turned it, and opened the door The light-switches were to the left. They turned on a bank of old-fashioned fluoreseents, the kind that look like inverted ice-cube trays. These illuminated a little restaurant area (deserted), a cluster of slot machines (dark), and a pair of blackjack tables. Hanging from one of the light fixtures was a parrot. Johnny at first thought it must be stuffed, but when he got a little closer, he observed the bulging eyes and the splatter of mixed blood and guano on the wood below it. It was real enough. Someone had strung it up.

Entragian must not have liked the way it said "Polly want a cracker," Johnny thought.

The Owl's smelled of old hamburgers and beer. At the far end of the room was a little shopping area. Johnny took a large bottle of generic aspirin, then went behind the bar.

"Hurry up!" Mary cried at him. "Hurry up, can't you."

"Right there," he said. A man in dark pants and a shirt that had once been white was lying on the dirty linoleum floor, staring up at Johnny with eyes as glassy as those of the hanged parrot. The bartender, from the look of his clothes. His throat had been cut. Johnny pulled a quart of Jim Beam off the shelf.

He held it up to the light for a moment, checking the level, then hurried out. A thought - not a nice one - tried to surface and he shoved it back down. Hard. He wanted to lubricate the old horse-doctor, that was all, keep him loose. When you got right down to it, it was an act of Christian charity.

You're more than a sweetheart, Terry said inside his head. You're really a saint, aren't you? St. John the Lubricator. And then her cynical laughter.

Shut up, bitch, he thought. . . but as always, Terry was reluctant to go.

2

Be coot, Steven, he told himself. It's the only way you'll get out of this. If you panic, I think there's a good chance both of you are going to die in this goddam rented truck.

He put the transmission in reverse, and, steering by the outside mirror (he didn't dare open his door and lean out; it would be too easy for a dive-bombing buzzard to break his neck), began to move backward. The wind had picked up again, but he could still hear the crunching from under the truck as they rolled over the scorpions. It reminded him of how cereal sounded when you were chewing it.

Don't drive off the side, for Christ's sake don't do that.

"They're not following," Cynthia said. The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

He took a look, saw that she was right, and stopped. He had backed up about fifty feet, far enough so that the lead trailer across the road was just a vague shape in the blowing sand again. He could see brown blotches against the whitish-gray sand in the road. Squashed scorpions. From here they looked like pats of cowdung. And the others were retreating. In another moment he would find it hard to believe they had been there at all.

Oh, they were, he thought. If you start doubting that, old buddy, all you have to do is take a look at the dead bird currently blocking the air-vents at the bottom of the windshield.

"What do we do now?" she asked.

"I don't know." He looked out his window and saw the Desert Rose Cafe. Half of its pink awning had come down in the wind. He looked out the other window, past Cyn-thia, and saw a vacant lot with three boards nailed across the entrance. KEEP OUT OF HERE had been painted across the center board in sloppy white capitals, presumably by someone who didn't believe in Western hospitality.

"Something wants to keep us in town," she said. "You know that, don't you?"

He backed the Ryder truck into the parking lot of the Desert Rose, trying to think of a plan. What came instead was a series of disjointed images and words. The doll lying face-down at the bottom of the RV's steps. The Tractors, saying her name was Emergency and her telephone number was 911. Johnny Cash, saying he built it one piece at a time. Bodies on hooks, a tigerfish swimming between the fingers of the hand at the bottom of the aquarium, the baby's bib, the snake on the kitchen counter under the microwave.

He realized he was on the edge of panic, maybe on the edge of doing something really stupid, and groped for anything that would pull him back from the edge, get him thinking straight again. What came to his mind, unbidden, was something he never would have expected. It was an image - clearer than any of the preceding ones - of the piece of stone sculpture they had seen on the computer table in the mining corporation's Quonset. The coyote with the strange, twisted head and the starting eyeballs, the coyote whose tongue had been a snake.

There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary, Cynthia had said, and she was right about that, oh yes, no question, but Steve was suddenly overwhelmed by the idea that anything that ugly also had to be powerful.

Are you kidding? he thought distractedly. The radio turned on and off when you touched it, the lights flickered, the aquarium fucking exploded. Of course it's powerful.

"What was that little piece of statuary we found back there?" he asked. "What was up with that?"

"I don't know. I only know that when I touched it. .

"What? When you touched it, what?"

"It seemed like I remembered every rotten thing that ever happened to me in my life," she said. "Sylvia Marcucci spitting on me in the eighth grade, out in the play-ground-she said I stole her boyfriend, and I didn't even know who the hell she was talking about. The time my dad got drunk at my Aunt Wanda's second wedding and felt my ass while we were dancing and pretended it was a mistake. Like his hardon was a mistake, too." Her hand crept to the side of her head. "Gettin yelled at. Gettin dumped on. Richie Judkins, almost ripping my fuckin ear off. I thought of all those things."

"Yeah, but what did you really think of?"

She looked for a moment as if she were going to tell him not to be a wise-ass, then didn't. "Sex," she said, and let out a shaky sigh. "Not just fucking, either. All of it. The dirtier the better."

Yes, he thought, the dirtier the better. Things you might like to try but would never talk about. Experimental stuff

"What are you thinking about?" Her voice was oddly sharp, at the same time oddly pungent, like a smell. Steve looked over at her and suddenly wondered if her pussy was tight. An insane thought to be having at a time like this, but it was what came into his head.

"Steve?" Sharper than ever. "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," he said. His voice was thick, the voice of a man struggling out of a deep sleep. "Nothing, never mind."

"Does it start with "C" and end with "E"?"

Actually, my dear, "cunt" ends with a "T", but you're in the ballpark.

What was wrong with him? What in God's name? It was as if that funny piece of rock had turned on another radio, this one in his head, and it was broadcasting a voice that was almost his own.

"What are you talking about?" he asked her.

"Coyote, coyote," she said, lilting the words like a child. No, she wasn't accusing him of anything, although he supposed that briefly thinking so had been a natural enough mistake; she was just falling all over herself with excitement. "The thing we saw back in the lab! If we had it, we could get out of here! I know we could, Steve! And don't waste my time - our time - by telling me I'm crazy!"

Considering the stuff they had seen and the stuff that had happened to them in the last ninety minutes or so, he had no intention of doing that. If she was crazy, they both were. But -

"You told me not to touch it." He was still struggling to talk; it was as if there were mud packed into his thinking equipment. "You said it felt. Felt what? What had she said?

Nice. That was it. "Touch it, Steve. It feels nice."

No. Wrong.

"You said it felt nasty."

She smiled at him. In the green glow of the dashlights, the smile looked cruel. "You want to feel something nasty? Feel this."

She took his hand, put it between her legs, and twitched her hips upward twice. Steve closed his hand on her down there - hard enough to hurt, maybe - but her smile stayed on. Widened, even.

What are we doing? And why in God's name are we doing it now?

He heard the voice, but it was almost lost - like a voice screaming fire in a ballroom full of yelling people and jagged music. The cleft between her legs was closer, more urgent. He could feel it right through her jeans, and it was burning. Burning.

She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, Steve thought. You're going to see it, all right, honey, thirty-eight pistol on a forty-five frame, shoots tombstone bullets with a ball and chain.

He made a tremendous effort to catch hold of himself, grabbing for anything that would shut the pile down before the containment rods melted. What he got hold of was an image - the curious, wary expression on her face as she looked at him through the truck's open passenger door, not getting in right away, wide blue eyes checking him out first, trying to decide if he was the kind of guy who might bite or maybe try to yank something off her. An ear, for instance. Are you a nice person? she'd asked him, and he had said Yeah, I guess so, and then, nice person that he was, he had brought her to this town of the dead, and his hand was in her crotch, and he was thinking he'd like to fuck her and hurt her at the same time, kind of an experiment, you could say, one having to do with plea-sure and pain, the sweet and the salty. Because that was the way it was done in the place of the wolf, that was how it was done in the house of the scorpion, it was what passed for love in Desperation.

Are you a nice person? Not a crazy serial killer or anything? Are you nice, are you nice, are you a nice person?

He pulled his hand away from her, shuddering. He turned to the window and looked out into the blowing blackness where sand danced like snow. He could feel sweat on his chest and arms and in his armpits, and although it was a little better now, he still felt like a sick man between fits of delirium. Now that he had thought of the stone wolf, he couldn't unthink it, it seemed; he kept seeing its crazy corkscrewed head and bulging eyes. It hung in his head like an unsatisfied habit.

"What's wrong?" she moaned from beside him. "Oh, Jesus, Steve, I didn't mean to do that, what's wrong with us?"

"I don't know," he said hoarsely, "but I'll tell you something I do know - we just got us a little taste of what happened in this town, and I don't like it much. I can't get that fucking stone thing out of my mind."

He finally found enough courage to look at her. She was all the way over against the passenger door, like a scared teenager on a first date that had gone too far, and although she looked calm enough, her cheeks were fiery red and she was wiping away tears with the side of her hand.

"Me, either," she said. "I remember once I got a little piece of glass in my eye. That's what this feels like. I keep thinking I'd like to take that stone and rub it against my. . . you know. Except it's not much like thinking. It's not like thinking at all."

"I know," he said, wishing savagely that she hadn't said that. Because now the idea was in his mind, too. He saw himself rubbing that ugly damned thing - ugly but powerful - against his erect penis. And from there he saw the two of them fucking on the floor beneath that row of hooks, beneath those dangling corpses, with that crumbling gray piece of stone held between them, in their teeth.

Steve swept the images away . . . although how long he would be able to keep them away he didn't know. He looked at her again and managed a smile. "Don't call me cookie," he said. "Don't call me cookie and I won't call you cake."

She let out a long, trembling, half-vocalized breath that fell just a little short of laughter. "Yeah. Something like that, anyway. I think it might be getting a little better."

He nodded cautiously. Yes. He still had a world-class hardon, and he could badly use a reprieve from that, but now his thoughts seemed a little more his own. If he could keep them diverted from that piece of stone a little while longer, he thought he'd be okay. But for a few seconds there it had been bad, maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to him. In those seconds he had known how guys like Ted Bundy must feel. He could have killed her. Maybe would have killed her, if he hadn't broken his physical contact with her when he had. Or, he supposed, she might have killed him. It was as if sex and murder had somehow changed places in this horrible little town. Except even sex wasn't what it was about, not really. He remembered how, when she had touched the wolf, the lights had flickered and the radio had come back on.

"Not sex," he said. "Not murder, either. Power."

"Huh?"

"Nothing. I'm going to drive us right back through the middle of town. Out toward the mine."

"That big wall off to the south?"

He nodded. "It's an open pit. There'll have to be at least one equipment road out there that cuts back to 50. We're going to find it and take it. I'm actually glad this one is blocked off. I don't want to go anywhere near that Quonset, or that - "

She reached out and grabbed his arm. Steve followed her gaze and saw something come slinking into the arc of the truck's headlights. The dust was now so thick that at first the animal looked like a ghost, some Indian - conjured spirit from a hundred years ago. It was a timberwolf, easily the length and height of a German Shepherd, but leaner. Its eyes were sockets of crimson in the headlights. Following it like attendants in some malign fairy-tale were two files of desert scorpions with their stingers furled over their backs. Flanking the scorpions were coyotes, two on each side. They appeared to be grinning nervously.

The wind gusted. The truck rocked on its springs. To their left, the fallen piece of awning flapped like a torn sail.

"The wolf's carrying something," she said hoarsely.

"You're nuts," he said, but as it drew closer, he saw that she wasn't nuts. The wolf stopped about twenty feet from the truck, as bald and real as something in a high resolution crime-scene photograph. Then it lowered its head and dropped the thing it had been holding in its mouth. It looked at it attentively for a moment, then backed off three steps. It sat down and began to pant.

It was the statue-fragment, lying there on its side at the entrance to the cafe parking lot, lying there in the blowing dust, mouth snarling, head twisted, eyes starting from their sockets. Fury, rage, sex, power - it seemed to broad-cast these things at the truck in a tight cone, like some sort of magnetic field.

The image of fucking Cynthia recurred, of being buried in her like a sword jammed hilt-deep in hot, packed mud, the two of them face-to-face, lips drawn back in identical snarls as they gripped the snarling stone coyote between them like a thong.

"Should I get it?" she asked, and now she was the one who sounded as if she were sleeping.

"Are you kidding?" he asked. His voice, his Texas accent, but not his words, not now. These words were coming from the radio in his head, the one the piece of stone statue had turned on.

Its eyes, glaring at him from where it lay in the dust.

"What, then?"

He looked at her and grinned. The expression felt ghastly on his face. It also felt wonderful. "We'll get it together, of course. Okay by you?"

His mind was the storm now, filled with roaring wind from side to side and top to bottom, driving before it the images of what he would do to her, what she would do to him, and what they would do to anyone who got in their way.

She grinned back, her thin cheeks stretching upward until it was like looking at a skull grin. Greenish-white light from the dashboard painted her brow and lips, filled in her eyesockets. She stuck her tongue out through that grin and flicked it at him, like the snake-tongue of the statue. He stuck his own tongue out and wriggled it back at her. Then he groped for the doorhandle. He would race her to the fragment, and they would make love among the scorpions with it held in their mouths between them, and whatever happened after that wouldn't matter.

Because in a very real sense, they would be gone.

3

Johnny came back out onto the sidewalk and handed the bottle of Jim Beam to Billingsley, who looked at it with the unbelieving eyes of a man who has just been told he's won the Powerball lottery. "There you go, Tom," he said. "Have yourself a tonk - just the one, mind you - and then pass it on. None for me, I've taken the pledge." He looked across the street, expecting to see more coyotes, but there were still just the five of them. I'll take the fifth, Johnny thought, watching as the veterinarian spun the cap off the bottle of whiskey. You'd go along with that, wouldn't you, Tom? Of course you would.

"What is wrong with you?" Mary asked him. "Just what in the hell is wrong with you?"

"Nothing," Johnny said. "Well, a broken nose, but I guess that isn't what you meant, is it?"

Billingsley tilted the bottle back with a short, sharp flick of the wrist that looked as practiced as a nurse's injection technique, and then coughed. Tears welled in his eyes. He put the mouth of the bottle to his lips again, and Johnny snatched it away. "Nope, I don't think so, oldtimer."

He offered the bottle to Ralph, who took it, looked at it, then bit off a quick swallow. Ralph then offered it to Mary.

"Go on," Ralph said. His voice was quiet, almost humble. "Better if you do."

She looked at Johnny with hateful, perplexed eyes, then took a nip from the bottle. She coughed, holding it away from her and looking at it as if it were toxic. Ralph took it back, plucked the cap from Billingsley's left hand, and put it back on. During this, Johnny opened the bottle of aspirin, shook out half a dozen, bounced them in his hand for a moment, then tossed them into his mouth.

"Come on, Doe," he said to Billingsley. "Lead the way."

They started down the street, Johnny telling them as they went why he had all but broken his neck to get his cellular phone back. The coyotes on the other side of the street got up and paced them. Johnny didn't care for that much, but what were they supposed to do about it? Try shooting at them? Pretty noisy. At least there was no sign of the cop. And if they saw him before they made it down to the movie theater, they could always duck into one of these other places. Any old port in a storm.

He swallowed, grimacing at the burn as the half-liquefied aspirin slid down his throat, and tried to put the bottle into his breast pocket. It bumped the top of the phone. He took it out, put the bottle of pills in its place, started to shove the cellular into his pants pocket, then decided it couldn't hurt to try again. He pulled the antenna and flipped the phone open. Still no transmission-bars. Zilch

"You really think that was your friend?" David asked.

"I think so, yes."

David held out his hand. "Could I try it?"

Something in his voice. His father heard it, too. Johnny could see it in the way the man was looking at him.

"David? Son? Is something wr - "

"Could I try it please?"

"Sure, if you want." He held the useless phone out to the boy, and as David took it, Johnny saw three transmission-bars appear beside the S. Not one or two but three.

"Son of a bitch!" he breathed, and grabbed the phone back. David, who had been studying the keypad functions, saw him reaching a moment too late to stop him.

The moment the cellular phone was back in Johnny's hand, the transmission-bars disappeared again, leaving only the S.

They were never there in the first place, you know that, don't you? You hallucinated them. You -

"Give it back!" David shouted. Johnny was stunned by the anger in his voice. The phone was snatched away again, but not too fast for him to see the transmission-bars reappear, glowing gold in the dark.

"This is so damned dumb," Mary said, looking first back over her shoulder, then at the coyotes across the street. They had stopped when the people had. "But if it's the way you want to play it, why don't we just drag a table out and get drunk in the middle of the fucking street?"

No one paid any attention. Billingsley was still looking at the bottle of Beam. Johnny and Ralph were staring at the kid, who was stuttering his finger on the NAME/MENU button with the speed of a veteran video-game player, hurrying past Johnny's agent and ex-wife and editor, finally getting to STEVE.

"David, what is it?" Ralph asked.

David ignored him and turned urgently to Johnny. "Is this him, Mr. Marinville? Is the guy with the truck Steve?"

"Yes."

David pushed SEND.

4

Steve had heard of being saved by the bell, but this was ridiculous.

Just as his fingers found the doorhandle - and he could hear Cynthia grabbing for hers on the other end of the seat - the cellular telephone gave out its nasal, demanding cry: Hmeep! Hmeep!

Steve froze. Looked at the phone. Looked across the seat at Cynthia, whose door was actually open a little. She was staring back at him, the grin on her lips fading.

Hmeep! Hmeep!

"Well?" she asked. "Aren't you going to answer that?" And there was something in her tone, something so wifely, that he laughed.

Outside, the wolf pointed its nose into the darkness and howled, as if it had heard Steve's laughter and disapproved. The coyotes seemed to take that howl as a signal. They got up and disappeared back the way they bad come, walking into the blowing dust with their heads lowered. The, scorpions were already gone. If, that was, they had been there at all. They might not have been; his bead felt like a haunted house, one filled with hallucinations and false memories instead of ghosts.

Hmeep! Hmeep!

He grabbed the phone off the dashboard, pushed the SEND button, and put it to his ear. He stared out at the wolf as he did it. And the wolf stared back. "Boss? Boss, that you?"

Of course it was, who else would be calling him? Only it wasn't. It was a kid.

"Is your name Steve?" the kid asked.

"Yes. How'd you get the boss's phone? Where - "

"Never mind that," the kid said. "Are you in trouble? You are, aren't you?"

Steve opened his mouth. "I don't - "

Closed it again. Outside, the wind screamed around the cab of the Ryder truck. He held the little phone to the side of his face and looked over an oozing lump of buzzard at the wolf. He saw the chunk of statue lying in front of it as well. The crude images of intermingled sex and violence which had filled his mind were fading, but he could remember the power they had exercised over him the way he could remember certain vivid nightmares.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess you could say that."

"Are you in the truck we saw?"

"If you saw a truck, likely that was us, yeah. Is my boss with you?"

"Mr. Marinville's here. He's okay. Are you all right?"

"I don't know," Steve said. "There's a wolf, and he brought this thing . . . it's like a statue, only - "

Cynthia's hand darted into the lower part of his vision and honked the horn. Steve jumped. At the entrance to the cafe parking lot, the wolf jumped, too. Steve could see its muzzle draw back in a snarl. Its ears flattened against its skull.

Doesn't like the horn, he thought. Then another thought came, one of those simple ones that made you want to slam your hand against your own forehead, as if to punish your laggard brains. If it won't get out of the way, I can run the fucker over, can't I?

Yes. Yes, he could. After all, he was the one with the truck.

"What was that?" the kid asked sharply. Then, as if realizing that was the wrong question: "Why are you doing that?"

"We've got company. We're trying to get rid of it."

Cynthia honked the horn again. The wolf got to its feet. Its ears were still laid back. It looked pissed, but it also looked confused. When Cynthia honked the horn a third time, Steve put both of his hands over hers and helped. The wolf looked at them a moment longer, its head cocked and its eyes a nasty yellow-green in the glare of the headlights. Then it bent, seized the piece of statuary in its teeth, and disappeared back the way it had come.

Steve looked at Cynthia, and she looked back at him. She still looked scared, but she was smiling a little just the same.

"Steve?" The voice was faint, dodging in and out of static-bursts. "Steve, are you there?"

"Yes."

"Your company?"

"Gone. For the time being, at least. The question is, what do we do next? Any suggestions?"

"I might have." Damned if it didn't sound as if maybe he was smiling, too.

"What's your name, kid?" Steve asked.

5

Behind them, back in the direction of the Municipal Building, something gave in to the wind and fell over with a huge loose crash. The sound made Mary wheel around in that direction, but she saw nothing. She was grateful for the mouthful of whiskey Carver had talked her into taking. Without it, that sound-she guessed it might have been some building's false front tumbling into the street-would have had her halfway out of her skin.

The boy was still on the phone. The three men were gathered around him. Mary could see how badly Mar-inville wanted to take the phone back again; she could also see he didn't quite dare. It'll do you good not to be able to have what you want, Johnny, she thought. Do you a world of good.

"I might have," David said, smiling a little. He listened, gave his first name, then turned around so he was facing the Owl's Club. He ducked his head, and when he spoke again, Mary could hardly hear him. A kind of dark wonder passed over her like a dizzy spell.

He doesn't want the coyotes across the street to hear what he's saying. I know how crazy that sounds, but it's what he's doing. And you know something even crazier? I think he's right.

"There's an old movie theater," David said in a low voice. "It's called The American West." He glanced at Billingsley for confirmation.

Billingsley nodded. "Tell him to go around to the back," he said, and Mary decided that if she was crazy, at least she wasn't the only one; Billingsley also spoke in a low voice, and glanced over his shoulder, once, quickly, as if to make sure the coyotes weren't creeping closer, trying to eavesdrop. After he had made sure they were still on the sidewalk in front of the Water and Utility Building, he turned back to David. "Tell him there's an alley."

David did. As he finished, something apparently occurred to Marinville. He started to grab for the phone, then restrained himself. "Tell him to park the truck away from the theater," he said. The great American novelist also spoke in low tones, and he had one hand up to his mouth, as if he thought there might be a lipreader or two among the coyotes. "If he leaves it in front and Entragian comes back..

David nodded and passed this on, as well. Listened as Steve said something else, nodding, the smile resurfacing. Mary's eyes drifted, to the coyotes. As she looked at them, she realized an exceedingly perverse thing: if they managed to hide from Entragian long enough to regroup and get out of town, part of her would be sorry. Because once this was over, she would have to confront the fact of Peter's death; she would have to grieve for him and for the destruction of the life they had made together. And that was maybe not the worst of it. She would also have to think about all this, try and make some sense of it, and she wasn't sure she could do it. She wasn't sure any of them would be able to do it. Except maybe for David.

"Come as fast as you can," he said. There was a faint bleep as he pushed the END button. He collapsed the antenna and handed the phone back to Marinville, who immediately pulled the antenna out again, studied the LED readout, shook his head, and closed the phone up.

"How'd you do it, David? Magic?"

The kid looked at him as if Marinville were crazy. "God," he said.

"God, you dope," Mary said, smiling in a way that did not feel familiar to her at all. This wasn't the time to be pulling Marinville's chain, but she simply couldn't resist.

"Maybe you should have just told Mr. Marinville's friend to come and pick us up," Ralph said dubiously. "That probably would have been the simplest, David."

"It's not simple," David replied. "Steve'll tell you that when they get here."

"They?" Marinville asked.

David ignored him. He was looking at his father. "Also, there's Mom," he said. "We're not leaving without her."

"What are we going to do about them?" Mary asked, and pointed across the Street at the coyotes. She could have sworn that they not only saw the gesture but understood it.

Marinville stepped off the sidewalk and into the street, his long gray hair blowing out and making him look like an Old Testament prophet. The coyotes got to their feet, and the wind brought her the sound of their growls. Marinville had to be hearing them, too, but he went on another step or two nevertheless. He half-closed his eyes for a moment, not as if the sand was bothering them but as if he was trying to remember something. Then he clapped his hands together once, sharply. "Tak!" One of the coyotes lifted its snout and howled. The sound made Mary shudder. "Tak, ah lah! Tak!"

The coyotes appeared to move a little closer together, but that was all.

Marinville clapped his hands again. "Tak!. . . Ah lah. . . Tak!. . . oh, shit on this, I was never any good at foreign languages, anyhow." He stood looking disgusted and uncertain. That they might attack him-him and his unloaded Mossberg .22-seemed the furthest thing from his mind.

David stepped down from the sidewalk. His father grabbed at his collar. "It's okay, Dad," David said.

Ralph let go, but followed as David went to Marinville. And then the boy said something Mary thought she might remember even if her mind succeeded in blocking the rest of this out-it was the sort of thing that came back to you in dreams, if nowhere else.

"Don't speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville."

David took another step forward. Now he was alone in the middle of the street, with Ralph and Marinville standing behind him. Mary and Billingsley were behind them, up on the sidewalk. The wind had reached a single high shriek. Mary could feel the dust stinging her cheeks and forehead, but for the time being, that seemed far away, unimportant.

David put his hands together in front of his mouth, finger to finger, in that child's gesture of prayer. Then he held them out again, palms up, in the direction of the coyotes. "May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and lift you up, and give you peace," he said. "Now get out of here. Take a hike."

It was as if a swarm of bees had settled on them. They whirled in a clumsy, jostling mass of snouts and ears and teeth and tails, nipping at one another's flanks and at their own. Then they raced off, yapping and yowling in what sounded like some painful argument. She could hear them, even with the contending shriek of the wind, for a long time.

David turned back, surveyed their dumbfounded faces expressions too large to miss, even in the gloom - and smiled a little. He shrugged, as if to say Well, what are you gonna do? Mary observed that his face was still tinted Irish Spring green. He looked like the victim of an inept Halloween makeup job.

"Come on," David said. "Let's go."

They clustered in the street. "And a little child shall lead them," Marinville said. "So come on, child-lead."

The five of them began trudging north along Main Street toward The American West.