Still more thoughts came, weird, disconnected, impossible thoughts.

  The flash back on, he pointed its piercing beam ahead into the mine. From somewhere beyond, water dripped ticking clocklike; dust floated finely across the light. The shaft passage descended deeper and deeper, an endless bore into the earth. Abruptly he turned and began to walk out, the walk becoming a trot, and by the time he’d made it back outside, he actually had been running, because during that last second before breaking away, a final thought had come—the macabre notion that something within the depths of the shaft had been watching him the whole time.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER TWO

  The corpse lay at her feet.

  Vicky Stokes was leaning forward on the couch, knees touching, her head in her hands. She had been crying for an hour.

  It was only a dog, a pet, yet in secret she confessed that this current sense of loss affected her harder than any she had known. She remembered the grief she’d felt, several years back, when learning that her parents’ house had burned down with them in it—nothing compared to this. They’d never cared about her, they’d thrown her out of the house at eighteen; still they were her parents, but she mourned the loss of her dog more.

  You know you’re a loser when the only friend you have left is a dog.

  And she was beginning to realize now that that’s what she was—a loser, who waitressed at a carnal, seedy tavern in a nowhere town with a degenerate tyrant for a husband.

  She’d been married to Stokes for a year and a half. The biggest mistake of her life, but she couldn’t blame herself completely because she’d learned of Lenny’s true character only after they’d been married. It was a hard consolation to swallow, though, and she would always hate a small part of herself for ever having gotten involved with him. It might be different if he loved her, as she’d once thought, but Lenny Stokes was not capable of anything close to love. Vicky had learned this the hard way, the painful way. As far as Lenny was concerned, a wife was a commodity, someone to cook his food, clean his house, and earn money. All Lenny had was this house his father had left him; he didn’t have a real job, though he did make a lot of money selling pot and PCP to all the hippie kids in Bowie, and burglarizing homes in Crofton and some of the other wealthier area communities. The weekly check Vicky brought home from the Anvil was used for groceries and bills.

  So this was her lot, the rewards of wedlock—to cook, to clean, and to work forty hours a week.

  And one other thing, too. The worst part of all. The sex.

  She knew Lenny had been cheating on her since their first week as husband and wife, but there was nothing she could do about it, and by now their relationship had corroded to the point that she no longer cared. She was grateful for Lenny’s extramarital affairs. It was that much easier on her when Lenny came home spent; otherwise, he would vent his sexual quirks on Vicky that much more. To Lenny, the ultimate sexual experience had to revolve around pain; that was the turn-on for him, the pain, the hurting, the force. She could get sick just thinking about some of the thing’s he’d done to her. And Lenny did not limit his brutality to the bedroom. Sometimes he would slap her around for no reason at all. Other times it was more than just slapping around—it was beating. She could more easily measure the last eighteen months in bruises and the metal taste of blood in her mouth. Twice he had sent her to the hospital with concussions. She remembered the time last summer when Lenny and his friends had barreled into the Anvil, drunker than usual, and stoned. It had been a Wednesday night, amateur night. Lenny had ordered her to get up on the stage and remove her shirt. “My buddies all wanna see your tits,” he’d said. “I told them what a fine set you had. So get up there, girl. Off with it. Let’s see ’em.” Of course, Vicky had refused, and not in the lexicon of kings. Being a waitress at the Anvil was humiliating enough; one thing she would never do was exhibit her body like the dancers. Lenny had beaten the daylights out of her in the parking lot later. “Don’t you evah make a fool of me in front of my friends, girl!” he’d raged, popping her in the head and abdomen with his hard, knuckly fist. “Don’t you evah! When I tell you to do somethin’, you do it!” He’d left her lying broken on the gravel, bruised ribs, a few loose teeth. Kurt Morris had driven her to South County General, where she’d had to have X-rays, an EEG, and a spinal tap. She could still hear that mammoth silver needle slipping between two vertebrae. Kurt had pleaded with her, begged her to press charges, but she didn’t dare. Instead she’d told the doctors that she’d stumbled and hit her head.

  She couldn’t divorce Lenny, not now. She was convinced of the logic of her reasons.

  The house was very quiet now. All she could hear was the steady tick of the glass and gold carriage clock on the mantelpiece. Nine o’clock and all’s well. At least until my dearest hubby gets home. Just then it dawned on her that she was sitting in the dark. Night had bloomed fully without her ever realizing it. It was nice like that, dark and quiet and nice, and she hoped to God that Lenny didn’t come home all boned up and drunk, and destroy it all for her.

  Just as the tears were beginning to dry, she inched her foot forward and touched something furry with her toe.

  Brutus. Oh, Brutus, why can’t you just be sleeping?

  She stood up, stepped over the dead animal, and felt her way across the room to the kitchen. She flinched at the sudden, disrupting whiteness when she opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of soda. She went back to the couch and sat staring. The still carcass on the floor reminded her that she’d soon have to take care of things. She supposed there was some county office she could call, but she couldn’t bear the thought. They would probably incinerate the collie and use him for bone meal or something. No, she would tend to it herself.

  Her whole body jerked when the kitchen door to the garage opened. The lights flicked on, an intruding block of glare. Lenny set his big Eveready spotlight down on the counter, and didn’t even notice Vicky sitting there until he was three steps into the living room. He stopped, squinting, and said, “How come you ain’t at work?”

  “It’s my day off.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s right, I forgot.” He fixed his eyes on her and threw his head back to get the hair off his brow. “You got something going with Morris?”

  “Who?”

  “Morris, that pencilneck cop.”

  Vicky frowned and reached for her cigarettes. “No.”

  “Tell me the truth, girl.”

  “I haven’t seen Kurt in weeks. What makes you think I ‘got something going’ with him?”

  “I ran into him today, and he was givin’ me a hard time, as usual, the weed. He’s always askin’ shit about you.”

  Vicky smiled within herself. “Well, I told you. I haven’t seen him.” She lit a cigarette, leaned back on the couch, and drew. “Where have you been all day?”

  “Huntin’, with Jory and Mac.” This, of course, was a lie. He’d only been hunting for the last hour or so. Lenny did all his hunting at night.

  “One day you’ll go too far, Lenny,” she said. “Deer season ended in December. And besides, there’s a difference between hunting and poaching.”

  ”Aw, it’s a dipshit law, anyway. This way, we save a bundle on food expenses. Wait’ll you see the ten-point buck I got. I’ll bet that sucker weighs close to two hundred. We just got done dressing it.”

  Lenny smirked. It was obvious that Vicky didn’t share in his delight over bringing home a deer. He stood still, and was squinting at her again in the white, cold light from the kitchen. He noticed, finally, the dried tears that streaked her cheeks. “What you been cryin’ about?”

  She looked away from him and swallowed. “Brutus died.”

  She expected a fake response from him at least. Lenny had always been indifferent about the collie; he’d never gone out of his way to be nice to Brutus, but then he’d never been mean to the animal, either. He said nothing. He looked at the shape of the animal’s corpse at Vicky’s feet, then reached down to pick the dog up.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Gotta get him outa here,” he said. “I’ll take him behind the bowling alley and leave him in the dumpster.”

  “You will not. That dog’s been with me for fifteen years, and if you think you’re going to toss him into some damn garbage dumpster, then you better think again.” More tears began to fill her eyes, and she felt a rare kind of rage that was dangerous in that house. “Sometimes I just can’t believe you, Lenny. You’re a miserable, insensitive bastard.”

  “You better watch that mouth, girl,” he said, and pointed a finger at her. “I got a mind to clout you upside the head.”

  “Well, do it then, I don’t give a shit!” she shouted at him, and the tears were flowing freely now, her words hollow and stilted. She knew he would hit her under any other circumstance but wouldn’t now because her defiance and grief had reduced the threat to something feeble. “I’ll get rid of him myself,” she heard herself say a few seconds later.

  He remained there a while longer, perhaps puzzled that anyone could harbor such feelings for a dog. “Now I’m sorry your dog died, but you gotta be re-listic about all this. You take care of it soon; we don’t want the house full up with flies. You hear?”

  Her head between her knees, Vicky nodded.

  “Okay, then,” he said. He disappeared up the stairs.

  Vicky continued to sob faintly. Her face was swollen and red around the eyes, and she realized she was crying not only for the loss of her pet, but also for the graceless plummet her life had taken. She picked the dog up heavily in her arms and pushed through the screen door to the backyard. The night air was cool and crisp, the darkness, again, comforting. The grass underfoot felt strangely moist, like cool oil. She took the animal to the limits of the yard and continued a few steps into the woods itself, where she laid the dog down on the forest ground. She took a moment to breathe in the night scents of the woods. Then she plodded back toward the toolshed to search for the shovel.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER THREE

  One good thing about the four-to-midnight shift was the luxury of sleeping late. Generally, Kurt turned in at one in the morning and got up at eight or nine, so the luxury was more or less false; but he enjoyed the principle. He simply got up when he’d had sufficient rest, eliminating any need for alarm clocks—things he’d been known to demolish back in his college days. Once he’d winged a Baby Ben out of his dorm window, a six-story trip onto cement. A week later his roommate had retrieved it, and it still worked.

  Kurt got out of bed and stood up, stretching, wearing only briefs. At the height of his stretch, the door opened, and his twelve-year-old cousin, Melissa, leaned in, grinning like an evil kewpie doll. “Brad Pitt you ain’t,” she said.

  “Roachface! Get out of here!” he yelled. “Can’t a guy even stand around in his underwear without being eyeballed by little stinkbugs like you? Next time knock…and then don’t come in. I could’ve been nude.”

  “Too bad you weren’t. Then I could take pictures with Daddy’s camera and blackmail you.”

  “Blackmail, hell. With my terrific body, you’d be able to sell them for a hundred bucks apiece.”

  “Yeah, in Monopoly money.”

  Kurt wished for a can of whipped cream. That would teach her. “Now that you’ve successfully invaded my privacy, what do you want?”

  “I just came to tell you that breakfast is ready. Pardon me.”

  Kurt brightened; never before had Melissa cooked him breakfast. “Oh, okay,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

  After a shower and shave, he put on his traditional off-duty garb—bleach-spotted jeans, jogging shoes (though he never jogged), and a golf shirt from Crofton Country Club (though he’d quit golf years ago when it became apparent he’d never break 110; he broke a lot of clubs, at any rate).

  He rented the north bedroom of his uncle Roy’s house, an old, big ramshackle place with gables and ivy trellises, situated down on the south end of the Route. Right now, Uncle Roy was away for two weeks, bear hunting in Canada. Uncle Roy went bear hunting in Canada every spring, for as long as Kurt could recall, and not once had he ever shot or even seen a bear. Kurt wondered if they even had bears in Canada, and was by now seriously doubting that they did.

  The room cost him $350 a month, which he paid more out of charity than obligation. The floor creaked wherever he stepped, like a witch’s laugh; and the plumbing made very rude noises at night that reminded him of someone with gastrointestinal problems. It wasn’t exactly the London Metropol, but at least he didn’t have to listen to the orgies and baby wails of the south end apartments. He’d arranged the room with a stamp-metal desk (fifteen big ones at a garage sale in Bowie), an eternally unmade bed (why go to the trouble of making your bed just to mess it up again a few hours later? was Kurt’s philosophy), and a large exhaust-blue dresser Uncle Roy had given him after being turned away with it at Goodwill Industries. Kurt had no stereo; music today seemed chic, sexist ripoffs of older music that sounded better. Nor did he own a television set, which dumbfounded everyone he knew; but he was certain he could live quite nicely without The World’s Biggest Losers and Cupcake Wars.

  Goading aromas of fried eggs and bacon lured him downstairs. Melissa sat up at the kitchen counter, seemingly entranced by a picture of Brad Pitt in People. Melissa was Uncle Roy’s only offspring, a fact Kurt thanked God for on a regular basis. She’d been raised by Roy himself (her mother had run off with a tall, blond meter man from the gas company over a decade ago. This Uncle Roy had reacted to as no great loss. (“Some knockers,” he’d often commented to Kurt, “but less smarts than your average ten-pound bag of fertilizer.”) which caused a few to wonder. Roy was the kind of guy who put pine bark mulch in the coffeepot for laughs. Melissa was worse. She was a catty, tomboyish little horror with an infuriating sense of humor and who managed to keep out of mischief only when she was asleep. A genuine million laughs. Once she’d been sent home from school for putting frogs’ eggs on the homeroom teacher’s chair. The teacher had had the viscid misfortune of discovering this after he sat down. Another time she had actually been suspended for throwing a Dolly Madison blueberry pie clear across the cafeteria. Quite an arm for a little girl. The pie had splattered spectacularly over the vice principal’s right breast.

  Kurt stopped halfway into the kitchen. Were his eyes deceiving him? It must be a joke. Melissa was smoking a cigarette as she read her magazine. Without looking up, she reached forward and tapped an ash. In a flash of rage, he snatched it from her and crushed it out.

  “Hey, you pud!” she protested.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Reading about Brad,” she replied.

  “I mean this,” Kurt growled. He held the stubbed butt up to her face.

  “It’s a cigarette. So what.”

  This was too much. “So what? Did I hear you right? Did you say so what? Don’t you know that cigarettes kill people?” Unconsciously, Kurt lit a cigarette of his own and continued to scold her. “Only fools smoke, Melissa. Only people out of their minds.”

  “That much I can believe.”

  “Now, if you were an adult, that’d be different. Adults can smoke if they want; it’s their choice. Men and women can smoke. But not kids, not twelve-year-olds.”

  “How old were you when you first started smoking?”

  Kurt didn’t answer. He’d been twelve. Eventually he said, “Until you’re old enough, you’ll do as you’re told. That’s just the way it is. When I was a kid, I had to do as I was told, whether I liked it or not. The same goes for you. My God, Melissa Morris smoking… Uncle Roy would go through the roof. Young lady, if I ever catch you smoking again, I’ll push your face in a cow cake, a nice, big ripe one. Green inside.”

  “Aw, go shove off,” she said, turning back to the magazine.

  “I’ll shove you off, smart mouth. Right off the Eastport water tower.” He stopped again, tilting his head, suddenly aware of something not right. He leered at her suspiciously, his voice thick as clay. “Hey, wait a minute. Why aren’t you in school?”

  “It’s spring break, Einstein. I’d look pretty stupid sitting in class all by myself.”

  Oh, no. It couldn’t be. A solid week with this public threat, and Uncle Roy away, too. This was the worst news since the Redskins lost the Super Bowl.

  Melissa smiled.

  “Okay,” he said. He guessed he could live with it. Maybe. He stepped around the corner and for the third time was stopped in his tracks. Dirty dishes lay stacked in the sink, the frying pan full of suds. The stove was empty. “I thought you said breakfast was ready.”

  “I do remember saying that, yes.”

  Kurt looked around, temper raging. “Then where’s the goddamned food?”

  Melissa calmly turned the page, a second shot of Stallone pretending not to be flexing his pectorals. “I didn’t say your breakfast was ready. I just said breakfast was ready, and it was. And it was very good. Happy trails, sucker.”

  Kurt stormed out, awash in mental images of murder. He wondered how Uncle Roy had stayed sane this long, saddled for twelve years with that little Beelzebub incarnate. She should be locked in an outhouse for life.

  As always before leaving the house off duty, he strapped on his De-Santis speed scabbard, one of the lesser known ”pancake’’-type holsters, stuffed full by a Smith & Wesson model 65. Over this he wore an old blue Peters jacket, which sufficiently concealed the Smith and De-Santis. In summertime, when jackets weren’t feasible, he sacrificed firepower for comfort and carried a small Beretta .22. He didn’t argue with what they all referred to as “The Nix”; he always carried off duty, knowing that he would never need to. He also knew that the day he didn’t carry would be the day they’d knock over Bank of America with him in it.