I scrambled backward in crablike haste. He weighed the crystal absently; his eyes had never left mine, even when he caught it. Without any change of expression whatsoever he tossed the crystal against the far wall of the morgue. It struck the white tiles and exploded into tiny fragments. If he’d thrown it at me at that speed, it wouldn’t have cracked bone, it would have just tunneled in one side of my skull and out through the other like a hollowpoint bullet.

  “Don’t screw around with me, Michael. You’re making me angry.”

  I stopped, panting for breath, my back against his cubicle wall. He sat and looked at me apparently trying to decide what to do with me and not finding much of an answer. He finally stood up. I didn’t see him walk toward m; he simply crossed the distance in between one instant and the next.

  “What are you going to do?” I whispered. He cocked his head a little to the side, and at this distance I could see the gradations in his eyes, the flecks of crimson mixing with chocolate brown like sparks flying up a dark chimney. His expression was distant.

  “Kill you, I guess,” he said slowly, as if he were a little surprised I didn’t know. “Messy, but I see you can’t be reasoned with. Damn you, Michael, why did this have to happen? I like you, you know. I really do.”

  “Maybe we can work something out. Look, you said yourself, kill m and all hell breaks loose—” I was babbling. I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Long walk through the park, Michael.” Adam observed with chilling calm. “Lots of things could happen on the way home. It wouldn’t be any-body’s fault at all, just one of those stupid things. A mugging. Some drugged-out freak who just decides to kill you for fun. And it’s neater than the alternatives.”

  “I don’t want to die,” I said, quite reasonably. Adam smiled slightly, still watching m with a kind of remote interest.

  “No, none of us do.” He nodded “Now get up.”

  “No.”

  “Get up, Michael.” There was a shade more menace in his voice, and to my horror I felt myself obey him. “You won’t remember any of this in a moment. You’ll just go home, and on your way—”

  “No!” I screamed, and grabbed up the chair next to me. I swung it at him. Adam caught it in one hand; as he did, the sparks in his eyes caught hold and flamed. Bright crimson.

  Adam bared his teeth in a snarl. I saw his canines come down from their retractive position; even, extended, they weren’t much longer than a normal human’s. Just sharper. I felt terror rob me of whatever strength I had left, and then his hands were around my neck.

  I clawed at them as he started to press, but it was like trying to remove riveted steel. He never bent his head to touch me with those teeth, but I could feel the hunger shooting through him, hot as lust and mixed with his anger in a deadly combination.

  But, in the next instant, Adam mastered himself and let me drop. He turned his back on me. I could see his fists clench as he struggled to force his rage back.

  “I’m not going to let you kill me, Adam.” I whispered through a suddenly sore throat. “I’ll fight you.”

  “Yes, I know.” he answered me, and turned to look at me again. He booked normal again, and a little sad. “Listen to me. You’re going to forget, now. You’re going to go home, and forget what has happened here. You looked at the bodies and you felt faint. you feel faint now.”

  His command ripped through my mind like a non, crushing everything in its path. I wanted to scream, to protest this incredible violation, but nothing came out of my open mouth but a sigh. Even as he spoke, I could feel myself reeling, feel my mind clouding and becoming confused. I pitched forward to my hands and knees. I was trembling all over.

  “In fact,” Adam’s voice whispered, from a very cold distance, “you’re about to pass out, Michael. And you’ve forgotten everything I’ve told you to forget.”

  I pitched forward face-first to the tiled floor. It was cold.

  Darkness.

  I opened my eyes and saw the muted sunset-colored bedroom swim back into focus. Hallucinations. Jesus. I needed to get to the hospital and get a CAT scan, fast, before I started to really come unglued.

  That was the logical explanation. The one I believed was this: that Adam Radburn, whatever the fuck he was, had altered my memory of the events in the morgue and then sent me out to be killed on my way home. It wasn’t just that I thought it might be possible. I believed it with every fiber of my being, every terrified illogical cell. And nobody was going to tell me different.

  The bastard had sent his friends to kill me in the park. No wonder I’d been running as if my life depended on it when I left the hospital; it had. A faked mugging, only I’d been a little more desperate and a little luckier than either Adam or his friends had expected.

  I’d known someone was following me—I’d known.

  Maggie was calling my name, in an exasperated, half-worried tone that meant she’d been calling it for some time. I blinked the world back in focus again and stood up, bracing myself against the bedpost as reality rocked around me. Some part of that was the bump on the head, I knew.

  But not all.

  I lay beside Maggie, listening to her even slow breathing, and slid carefully out of bed. It was about nine P.M., early for either of us, but her painkilling drugs had kicked in and she wasn’t likely to wake for hours. I bent over and kissed her very lightly. She didn’t move, didn’t stir even when I bumped into the open closet door again and cursed softly. I dressed in the closet, pulling on a pair of jeans and a plain black T-shirt.

  Good skulking clothes.

  I drove the Volvo to the hospital and parked it in the far end of the lot. It was hidden outside the glow of the sodium arc lights, but close enough that I could see the car I wanted to keep an eye on. It was a faded blue Mustang convertible, deceptively disreputable; I’d noticed that Adam kept it up where it counted, under the hood and on the wheels. If I was right, he was on short shift tonight, so he’d be out before midnight.

  I waited quietly and passed the time watching the passage of cars in the parking lot. I was amused to see the emergency-room nurse Leland leave arm-in-arm with Sam Fikowski. A match made in heaven, surely. I couldn’t picture them in the throes of passion, but the effort killed a lot of time.

  I almost missed Adam when he came out. Under the glow of the yellow sodium lights he looked oddly frail, washed in the light of an ugly man-made imitation of the sun. He got in the Mustang and pulled it smoothly out of the parking lot; I hung back and gave him plenty of room. I didn’t know just how good his senses were, but I suspected they were sharper than mine, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard.

  Adam never glanced back that I could see. He turned the Mustang downtown and negotiated the busy night traffic with elegant ease. It was harder than I’d expected, following him without being spotted. I compromised for following fairly close in another lane and trusting the traffic to cover me.

  Adam turned onto Cedar Springs. We were heading for—where? The airport? His apartment? I’d never visited his home, though he’d been to mine several times. We cruised down to a short stretch of bars, and Adam’s brake lights came on as he turned. I went past and found a street parking place. As I finished the parallel parking, he appeared around the corner on foot and disappeared into the second bar on the block. I darted across the street and followed him inside.

  The loud pulse of music assaulted me as the doors slid open—they were large solid smoked-glass doors on electronic eyes—and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I realized that I was facing a blank dark wall. Tb my left a bored-looking bouncer sat checking ID; I dug mine out and was waved inside.

  I turned the corner into a jammed room that trembled from the force of the speakers on the walls and vibrated in the reflected colors of big-screen videos. I turned to the bar and ordered a beer. As I turned back to the room in search of Adam, I realized that I was in a gay bar.

  Not just a gay bar. A gay strip bar. I took a swallow of my beer as a new dancer mounted the stage and began gyrating in a tiny leaf-shaped G string, to the cheers and claps of a row of young preppily dressed men, half of them still in their suits. One of them with his Ferry Ellis tie knocked askew got up and waved a dollar bill at the dancer, who favored him with a professionally appreciative smile and knelt so that his crotch was at eye level. I took another drink of my beer, a long one, and wondered how in the hell the dancer could manage to keep smiling while the suit felt around considerably more than was necessary to get the dollar under the elastic strap of the G-string.

  “You like it?” someone shouted in my ear. I turned to see a pleasant-faced young man standing next to me, taking a swig of his drink. He indicated the dancers. I shrugged. “Yeah, takes some getting used to. Trust me, though. You’ve got to stay for the contest.”

  “Contest?” I repeated vaguely while I kept looking for Adam. The place was a madhouse, and the flickering colors made everybody anonymous. My new friend smiled.

  “Strip-off. They take volunteers.” His smile widened and became positively admiring. “You’d do pretty well. You ought to try it.”

  “Sorry, I don’t think so. I’m looking for a friend.”

  “I’m a friend,” he objected forlornly as I slipped away through the crowd. The booze and hormones had obviously been flowing pretty strong most of the night, because I got groped as I struggled through the press of bodies. I suppose that was a compliment. I didn’t feel particularly complimented.

  I wanted to find Adam badly. Adam, even with all his newfound inhuman menace, would be a rock to cling to here. I took another drink of my beer and realized that I’d guzzled the entire bottle. Somebody offered to buy me a new one, and I took the offer more out of desperation than flirtation. It took another ten minutes to convince him that I wasn’t willing to take a walk with him, and even then I only escaped in the hopes of gaining some privacy in the bathroom.

  No such luck. There weren’t any doors on the stalls. I used the urinal and ducked back out again. I collided with a woman in the dark crowded hallway.

  “Excuse you!” she laughed, and pushed me back. If the throaty purr hadn’t given her away, the next flash of light would have; they might be wearing the clothes, but she hadn’t been born with the plumbing. For a transvestite, though, she was surprisingly shapely in the tight-fitting tube dress and fishnet stockings. “Sorry, honey, I’m taken. Hmm, then again—you look new. Are you new? You want to join the contest?”

  I managed to get away without volunteering. She mounted the stage, teased the dancers, and began emceeing the amateur contest. I used the diversion to scan the room again, and this time I spotted the one I was looking for.

  He shone in the blue neon flicker of the TV like a glass sculpture. He was stooping slightly to listen to a lean young man in a leather jacket; as I watched, Adam nodded and made a lazy gesture toward the back. I ducked out of the way as the leather-clad kid and Adam slid by, then followed in their wake. They went out a side door that opened into a little courtyard. A few people stood around in the cooling air, mostly men but a few women scattered around. Adam and his friend walked through them and out a wooden gate to the parking lot beyond. I hesitated, then plunged back inside and through the bar again. I came out the front and edged carefully around the side of the building.

  There were a few people lingering outside, selling something or nothing or everything, and at the far end I saw Adam and the other man disappearing into a little dark alleyway. No one noticed, too used to the sight to comment on it.

  I walked past the alley, then flattened myself against one wall and took a careful glance into the darkness.

  For a long moment, I couldn’t see anything, and then the moon slid out from behind the clouds and bathed the night in cold clear radiance. The alley revealed itself in sharp gray lines. Adam and the younger man stood there, Adam with his back to the wall. He took the other man’s shoulders in his pale, strong hands and pulled him close, then carefully tipped the man’s head to the side to expose his neck.

  There wasn’t anything sexual about it, oddly enough. I’d expected—I didn’t know what I’d expected, but not this quiet surrender. Adam opened his mouth, and the glint of his teeth was pale in the moonlight just before he touched them to the exposed skin of his victim’s throat. The man didn’t flinch, didn’t move. As Adam drank, he slid his hands down to a position where he could support the man’s weight, but that didn’t seem necessary; after a time—how long? seconds? minutes? It seemed impossible to know—after a time Adam raised his head and clamped his fingers over the dark patch on the man’s throat.

  “Thank you,” Adam whispered, barely loud enough to carry to my ears. “You won’t remember anything but what you expect to remember. Go back on home now and lie down.”

  The man looked at him for a moment, then turned and walked past me out of the alley. I pulled my head back and rested it against the rough brick. I was breathing too fast. It was one thing to know something, it was something else again to see it in goddamn unliving black and white.

  Adam stood there in the alley for a while longer, head tilted back so that the moon’s reflection filled his glasses. He seemed—peaceful. Not at all the predator I’d expected and feared. There hadn’t been violence in what I’d witnessed, or urgency. To draw a comparison, I’d expected to witness rape but instead I’d watched a seduction that was almost sacramental in its intensity.

  Adam lowered his head and looked directly at me. I froze.

  “Don’t run, Michael. It won’t make any difference.” His words this time didn’t have the force of command. Maybe it was his distance from me, maybe it was my own terror. I back-stepped and then turned and ran, shoving aside two handholding lovers and one male whore who grabbed at my arm. I heard nothing behind me, but then I wouldn’t.

  I made it to my car and squealed out into traffic. As I sped past, I caught a glimpse of Adam’s composed white face as he stood on the curb and watched me. His hands were in the pockets of his jacket, and he looked like he had all the time in the world. I supposed that was true. I sped down the street toward Love Field Airport, and after the first blush of fear faded I slowed the car to a more reasonable speed. By the time I reached Mockingbird, I was almost calm. I rolled the window down to catch the breeze and cool the sweat beading my skin, and waited for the light to change.

  A blue convertible rolled up next to me. Adam Radburn turned his head and looked at me with a strange half-smile on his ice-white face. I stared at him in transfixed shock, then whipped the wheel to the right and burned rubber onto Mockingbird. Far too fast, again, speeding past the sex clubs and x-rated video lounges as if Dallas didn’t own a police force, and in my rearview mirror I saw the Mustang take the corner at a leisurely pace and swing in behind me.

  Home. If I went home I’d put Maggie in danger too, and I couldn’t do that, I had to go somewhere with people. Lots of people. I hit a freeway and shot downtown. Nothing crowded enough, and the Mustang was very close.

  The lights of the Texas State Fair glittered in the distance like paradise. I could lose him in the late-night traffic, if I was quick and lucky. I pulled off the freeway and into the tangle of cars and pedestrians. The Mustang exited with me, but couldn’t keep the pace in the traffic. I turned off and shut my lights down, then stowed the car in a lot with a few others and watched while the Mustang cruised past. Adam didn’t look my way, just scanned the traffic ahead. I breathed a shaky sigh of relief and jumped as somebody leaned down outside my window. A big man, mean-looking.

  “Three dollars,” he demanded. I looked blankly at him. “Three dollars for the lot, man, or move your car.”

  “I’ll move it,” I promised. “I’m just waiting for somebody.”

  “Yeah, I heard that before. Three bucks.”

  I passed it over and sat there listening to the engine click as it cooled. Adam’s Mustang had passed out of sight. I sighed and turned the key.

  Nothing happened. I tried it again, panic touching me again, and heard absolutely nothing. Not even a dick. I prayed to the automotive gods and tried one last time, but it must have been deity’s night off, because the car remained steadfastly dead.

  Adam’s Mustang didn’t make a reappearance. I’d have to call for a tow, which meant getting to a phone—which meant crossing the street to the fair. I got out and locked the car, then darted through the traffic to the gates.

  As I counted out the money for the fair ticket, Adam Radburn stepped into the arc lights about fifty feet away, hands still in his pockets. I dropped the bills and bent to pick them up again. When I straightened, he was gone. As soon as the clerk gave me the ticket, I raced through the turnstile and took the promenade at a run. The midway was where most people were, and that was where I intended to stay until I could call for help. Someplace where I wouldn’t be alone.

  And then I saw him in the shadow of a darkened ride. I slowed, stared, and then ran on. He set out after me at a slow walk as I passed under the brilliant glittering bulbs of the midway and was swallowed up in the crowd.

  The smell of the fair always hits me first: com dogs struggling with pretzels, cotton candy, and nachos for supremacy. The smell of a few thousand people rubbing shoulders on a humid night. The smell of exhaust from the freeways. The noise hits next, screams and shouts and distant throbbing music. That night, though, none of that registered at all. The fair might as well have been a two-dimensional projection around me, because only one thing was real and immediate: Adam. He followed me at a careful distance, but he did follow. I bought a string of tickets and headed for the attractions.