The Outsider

1

Jack awoke at four in the morning.

The wind was blowing outside, blowing hard, and he hurt all over. Not just his neck, but his arms, his legs, his belly, his butt. It felt like a sunburn. He threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed, and turned on the bedside lamp, which cast a sallow sixty-watt glow. He looked down at himself and saw nothing on his skin, but the pain was there. It was inside.

“I’ll do what you want,” he told the visitor. “I’ll stop them. I promise.”

There was no answer. The visitor either wasn’t replying or wasn’t there. Not now, at least. But he had been. Out at that goddam barn. Just one light ticklish touch, almost a caress, but it had been enough. Now he was full of poison. Cancer poison. And sitting here in this shitty motel room, long before dawn, he was no longer sure the visitor could take back what he had given him, but what choice did he have? He had to try. If that didn’t work…

“I’ll shoot myself?” The idea made him feel a little better. It was an option his mother hadn’t had. He said it again, more decisively. “I’ll shoot myself.”

No more hangovers. No more driving home at exactly the speed limit, stopping at every light, not wanting to get pulled over when he knew he’d blow at least a 1, maybe even a 1.2. No more calls from his ex, reminding him that he was once more late with her monthly check. As if he didn’t know. What would she do if those checks stopped coming? She’d have to go to work, see how the other half lived, oh boo-hoo. No more sitting home all day, watching Ellen and Judge Judy. What a shame.

He dressed and went out. The wind wasn’t exactly cold, but it was chilly, and seemed to go right through him. It had been hot when he left Flint City, and he’d never thought of bringing a jacket. Or a change of clothes. Or even a toothbrush.

That’s you, honey, he could hear the old ball and chain saying. That’s you all over. A day late and a buck short.

Cars, pickup trucks, and a few campers were drawn up to the motel building like nursing puppies. Jack went down the covered walkway far enough to make sure the blue SUV belonging to the meddlers was still there. It was. They were all tucked up in their rooms, no doubt dreaming pleasant pain-free dreams. He entertained a brief fantasy of going room to room and shooting them all. The idea was attractive but ridiculous. He didn’t know which rooms they were in, and eventually someone—not necessarily the Chief Meddler—would start shooting back. This was Texas, after all, where people liked to believe they were still living in the days of cattle drives and gunfighters.

Better to wait for them where the visitor said they might come. He could shoot them there and be pretty sure of getting away with it; no one around for miles. If the visitor could take away the poison once the job was done, all would end well. If he couldn’t, Jack would suck the end of his service Glock and pull the trigger. Fantasies of his ex waitressing or working in the glove factory for the next twenty years were entertaining, but not the most important consideration. He wasn’t going the way his mother had gone, with her skin splitting open every time she tried to move. That was the important consideration.

He got in his truck, shivering, and headed for the Marysville Hole. The moon sat near the horizon, looking like a cold stone. The shivering became shaking, so bad that he swerved across the broken white line a couple of times. That was okay; all the big rigs either used Highway 190 or the interstate. There was no one on the Rural Star at this ungodly hour except for him.

Once the Ram’s engine was warm, he turned the heater on high and that was better. The pain in his lower body began to subside. The back of his neck still throbbed like a very bitch, though, and when he rubbed it, his palm came away covered with snowflakes of dead skin. The idea occurred to him that maybe the pain in his neck was just a real, ordinary sunburn, and everything else was in his mind. Psychosomatic, like the old ball and chain’s bullshit migraines. Could psychosomatic pain actually wake you up out of a sound sleep? He didn’t know, but he knew that the visitor who’d been hiding behind the shower curtain in his bedroom had been real, and you didn’t want to screw around with someone like that. What you wanted to do with someone like that was exactly what he said.

Plus there was Ralph Fucking Anderson, who had always been on his case. Mr. No Opinion, who got him hauled back from his fishing vacation by getting suspended… which is what Ralphie-boy was, and fuck that administrative leave shit. Ralph Fucking Anderson was the reason that he, Jack Hoskins, had been out in Canning Township instead of sitting in his little cabin, watching DVDs and drinking vodka-tonics.

As he turned in at the billboard (CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE), a sudden insight electrified him: Ralph Fucking Anderson might have sent him out there on purpose! He could have known the visitor would be waiting, and what the visitor would do. Ralphie-boy had wanted to get rid of him for years, and once you factored that in, all the pieces fell into place. The logic was undeniable. The only thing Ralphie-boy hadn’t counted on was being double-crossed by the man with the tattoos.

As to how this fuckaree would turn out, Jack saw three possibilities. Maybe the visitor could get rid of the poison now coursing through Jack’s system. That was number one. If it was psychosomatic, it would eventually go away on its own. That was number two. Or maybe it was real and the visitor couldn’t take it away. That was number three.

Mr. No Fucking Opinion was going to be history no matter which possibility turned out to be the right one. That was a promise Jack made not to the visitor but to himself. Anderson was going down, and the others would go with him. Clean sweep. Jack Hoskins, American Sniper.

He came to the abandoned ticket booth and detoured around the chain. The wind would probably die away once the sun was up and the temperature really started to climb again, but it was still blowing now, sending sheets of dusty grit flying, and that was good. He wouldn’t have to worry about the meddlers seeing his tracks. If they came at all, that was.

“If they don’t, can you still fix me up?” he asked. Not expecting an answer, but one came.

Oh yes, you’ll be good to go.

Was that a real voice or only his own?

What did it matter?

2

Jack drove past the falling-down tourist cabins, wondering why anyone would want to spend good money to stay near what was essentially just a hole in the ground (at least the name of the place was truthful). Did no one have any better places to go? Yosemite? The Grand Canyon? Even the World’s Largest Ball of String would be better than a hole in the ground out here in Dry ’n Dusty Asshole, Texas.

He parked beside the service shed as he had on his previous trip, grabbed his flashlight from the glove compartment, then got the Winchester and a box of ammo out of the lockbox. He stuffed his pockets with shells, started for the path, then turned back and shone his light through one of the dusty windows of the shed’s garage-type roll-up door, thinking there might be something he could use inside. There wasn’t, but what he saw still made him smile: a dust-covered compact car, probably a Honda or a Toyota. On the back window was a decal reading MY SON IS A FLINT CITY HIGH SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT! Poisoned or not, Jack’s rudimentary detective skills were intact. His visitor was here, all right; he had driven down from FC in this stolen car.

Feeling better—and actually hungry for the first time since the tattooed hand had come creeping around the shower curtain—Jack returned to the truck and rummaged in the glove compartment some more. He eventually unearthed a package of peanut butter crackers and half a roll of Tums. Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but better than nothing. He started up the trail, munching one of the Nabs and carrying the Winnie in his left hand. There was a strap, but if he slung it over his shoulder, it would chafe his neck. Maybe make it bleed. His pockets, heavy with cartridges, swung and bumped against his legs.

He halted at the faded Indian sign (old Chief Wahoo testifying that Carolyn Allen sucked his redskin cock), struck by a sudden thought. Anyone coming down the byroad leading to the tourist cabins would see his Ram parked beside the service shed and wonder what was up with that. He considered going back to move it, then decided he was worrying needlessly. If the meddlers came, they’d park near the main entrance. As soon as they got out to look around, he would open fire from his shooter’s perch on top of the bluff, knocking two or maybe even three of them down before they realized what was happening. The others would go scurrying around like chickens in a thunderstorm. He’d get them before they could find cover. There was no need to worry about what they might see from the tourist cabins, because Mr. No Opinion and his friends were never going to get out of the parking lot.

3

The path up the bluff was treacherous in the dark, even with the help of the flashlight, and Jack took his time. He had enough problems without falling and breaking something. By the time he got to his lookout point, the first hesitant light was starting to seep into the sky. He shone his flash on the pitchfork he’d left behind the day before, started to reach for it, then recoiled. He hoped this wasn’t an omen of how the rest of his day was going to go, but the situation had its irony, and even in his current situation, Jack could appreciate it.

He had brought the pitchfork to guard against snakes, and now one was lying beside and partly on top of it. It was a rattlesnake, and not a little one; this was a real monster. He couldn’t shoot it, a bullet might only wound the goddam thing, in which case it would probably strike at him, and he was wearing sneakers, having neglected to buy boots in Tippit. Also, there was the potential for a ricochet that might do him serious damage.

He held his rifle by the end of its stock, slowly extending the barrel as far as he could. He got it under the dozing rattler and flipped it high over his shoulder before it could slither away. The ugly bastard landed on the path twenty feet behind him, coiled, and began sounding off, a noise like beads being shaken in a dry gourd. Jack snatched up the pitchfork, took a step forward, and jabbed at it. That rattler slithered into a crack between two leaning boulders and was gone.

“That’s right,” Jack said. “And don’t come back. This is my place.”

He lay down and peered through the scope. There was the parking lot with its ghostly yellow lines; there was the decaying gift shop; there was the boarded-up cave entrance, the sign over it faded but still legible: WELCOME TO THE MARYSVILLE HOLE.

Nothing to do now but wait. Jack settled in to do it.

4

Nothing before nine o’clock, Ralph had said, but they were all in the Indian Motel’s café by quarter past eight. Ralph, Howie, and Alec ordered steak and eggs. Holly passed on the steak but ordered a three-egg omelet with ranch fries, and Ralph was gratified to see she ate every bite. She was once more wearing the jacket of her suit over her tee-shirt and jeans.

“That’s going to be hot later on,” Ralph said.

“Yes, and it’s very wrinkled, but it’s got nice big pockets for my stuff. I’m also taking my shoulder-bag, although I’ll leave it in the car if we have to hike.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice. “Sometimes the maids steal in places like this.”

Howie covered his mouth, perhaps to stifle a belch, perhaps to hide a smile.

5

They drove to the Bolton place, where they found Yune and Claude sitting on the front porch steps and drinking coffee. Lovie was in her little side garden, weeding from her wheelchair with her oxygen bottle in her lap, a cigarette in her mouth, and a big straw sunhat clapped on her head.

“All good last night?” Ralph asked.

“Fine,” Yune said. “Wind was a little noisy out back, but once I went to sleep, I slept like a baby.”

“What about you, Claude? Everything okay?”

“If you mean did I feel like there was someone creeping around again, I didn’t. Ma, either.”

“Well, there might be a reason for that,” Alec said. “Cops in Tippit had a home invasion last night. Man of the house heard breaking glass, grabbed his shotgun, scared the guy off. Told the police the intruder had black hair, a goatee, and plenty of tattoos.”

Claude was outraged. “I never budged out of my bedroom last night!”

“We don’t doubt that,” Ralph said. “It could be the guy we’ve been looking for. We’re going to Tippit to check it out. If he’s gone—and he probably is—we’ll fly back to Flint City and try to figure out what to do next.”

“Although I don’t know what more we can do,” Howie added. “If he’s not hanging around here and if he’s not in Tippit, he could be anywhere.”

“No other leads?” Claude asked.

“Not a one,” Alec said.

Lovie rolled over to them. “If you-all decide to go home, stop in and see us on your way to the airport. I’ll make up some sammitches from the leftover chicken. Long as you don’t mind eatin it twice, that is.”

“We’ll do that,” Howie said. “Thank you both.”

“It’s me should be thanking you,” Claude said.

He shook hands with them all around, and Lovie opened her arms to give Holly a hug. Holly looked startled, but allowed it. “You come back, now,” Lovie whispered in her ear.

“I will,” Holly replied, hoping it was a promise she would be able to keep.

6

Howie drove with Ralph riding shotgun and the other three in the backseat. The sun was up, and it was going to be another hot one.

“Just wondering how the cops in Tippit got in touch with you,” Yune said. “I didn’t think anyone in authority knew we were down here.”

“They don’t,” Alec replied. “If this outsider actually exists, we didn’t want to raise any suspicions with the Boltons about why we’re going in the wrong direction.”

Ralph didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what Holly was thinking at this moment: Every time you and the others talk about the outsider, it’s conditional.

Ralph turned around in his seat. “Listen to me now. No more ifs or maybes. For today, the outsider does exist. For today, he can read Claude Bolton’s mind any time he wants to, and unless we know differently, he’s in the Marysville Hole. No more assumptions, just belief. Can you do that?”

For a moment, no one replied. Then Howie said, “I’m a defense lawyer, son. I can believe anything.”

7

They came to the billboard showing the awestruck family holding up their gas lanterns. Howie drove slowly up the cracked asphalt entry road, avoiding the potholes as best he could. The temperature, which had been in the mid-fifties when they set out, was now edging into the seventies. It would go higher.

“See that knoll up there?” Holly pointed. “The main cave entrance is in the base of it. Or was, until they plugged it. We should check there first. If he tried to get in that way, there might be some sign.”

“Fine with me,” Yune said, looking around. “Jesus, this is desolate country.”

“The loss of those boys and the rescue party that went after them was terrible for their families,” Holly said, “but it was also a disaster for Marysville. The Hole was the town’s only job provider. A lot of locals left after it closed down.”

Howie braked. “That must have been the ticket booth, and I spy a chain across the road.”

“Go around it,” Yune said. “Give this baby’s suspension a workout.”

Howie drove around the chain, his seatbelted passengers bouncing up and down. “Okay, folks, we are now officially trespassing on private property.”

A coyote broke from cover at their approach and sprinted away, his lean shadow racing beside him. Ralph spotted the remains of wind-eroded tire tracks and assumed that local kids—there had to be at least a few of them left in Marysville—brought their ATVs out here. He was mostly focused on the rocky bluff ahead, site of what had been Marysville’s one and only tourist attraction. Its raison d’etre, if you wanted to be fancy about it.

“We’re all carrying,” Yune said. He was sitting upright in his seat, eyes fixed straight ahead, on alert. “Is that correct?”

The men answered in the affirmative. Holly Gibney said nothing.

8

From his perch atop the bluff, Jack saw them coming long before they reached the acre of parking lot. He checked his weapon—fully loaded, with one in the pipe. He had placed a flat stone at the edge of the drop. Now he lay at full length with the barrel resting on it. He sighted through the scope, putting the crosshairs on the driver’s side of the windshield. A sunflash momentarily blinded him. He winced, drew back, rubbed his eye until the floating spot was gone, then peered into the scope again.

Come on, he thought. Stop in the middle of the parking lot. That would be perfect. Stop there and get out.

The SUV instead trundled diagonally across the parking lot and stopped in front of the cave’s boarded-over entrance. All the doors opened and five people got out, four men and one woman. Five little meddlers, all in a row, lovely. Unfortunately, it was a shit shot. The sun in its current position cast the cave’s entrance in shadow. Jack might have chanced that—the Leupold scope was damned good—but there was the problem of the SUV, now blocking at least three of the five, including Mr. No Opinion.

Jack lay with his cheek against the rifle stock and his pulse beating slow and steady in his chest and throat. He was no longer aware of his throbbing neck; the only thing he cared about was the cluster of meddlers standing below the sign reading WELCOME TO THE MARYSVILLE HOLE.

“Come on out of there,” he whispered. “Come out and look around a little. You know you want to.”

He waited for them to do it.

9

The Hole’s arched entryway was blocked by two dozen wooden planks, attached by huge rusty bolts to the cement plug beyond. With such double coverage against unauthorized explorers, there was hardly any need of No Trespassing signs, but there were a couple, anyway. Plus a few fading spraypaint tags—left, Ralph presumed, by the same kids who brought their ATVs out here.

“Anyone think this looks tampered with?” Yune asked.

“Nope,” Alec said. “Why they even bothered with the boards is beyond me. You’d need a good charge of dynamite to put a hole in that cement plug.”

“Which would probably finish the job the quake started,” Howie added.

Holly turned around and pointed over the hood of the SUV. “See that road on the other side of the gift shop? That goes to the Ahiga entrance. Tourists weren’t allowed to go into the cave that way, but there are many interesting pictographs.”

“And you know this how?” Yune asked.

“The map they gave out to tourists is still online. Everything is online these days.”

“It’s called research, amigo,” Ralph said. “You should try it some time.”

They got back into the SUV, Howie once more behind the wheel with Ralph riding shotgun. Howie started slowly across the parking lot. “That road looks pretty crappy,” he said.

“You should be okay,” Holly said. “There are tourist cabins on the other side of the rise. According to the newspaper stories, the second rescue party used them as a staging area. Plus there would have been lots of media people and worried relatives once the news got out.”

“Not to mention your ordinary garden variety rubberneckers,” Yune said. “They probably—”

“Stop, Howie,” Alec said. “Whoa.” They were a little more than halfway across the parking lot now, the SUV’s stubby nose pointing toward the road that went to the cabins. And, presumably, to the Hole’s back door.

Howie braked. “What?”

“Maybe we’re making this tougher than it has to be. The outsider doesn’t necessarily have to be in the cave—he was hiding in a barn out there in Canning Township.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we should check the gift shop. See if there’s signs of a break-in.”

“I’ll do it,” Yune said.

Howie opened the driver’s door. “Why don’t we all go?”

10

The meddlers left the boarded-up entrance and returned to the SUV, the stocky balding guy walking around the hood to get back to the wheel. That gave Jack a clear shot. He laid the crosshairs on the guy’s face, took a breath, held it, and tightened down on the trigger. It didn’t move. There was a nightmarish moment when he thought something was wrong with the Winchester, then he realized he’d forgotten to release the safety. How stupid could you get? He tried to push it without taking his eye from the scope. His thumb, greasy with sweat, slid off, and by the time he released the safety, the stocky man was in the driver’s seat and slamming the door. The others were back in, as well.

“Shit!” Jack whispered. “Shit, shit, shit!”

He watched with increasing panic as the SUV started across the parking lot and toward the service road that would take it out of his line of fire. They would crest the first hill, they would see the cabins, they would see the service shed, and they would see his truck parked beside it. Would Ralph Anderson know to whom that truck belonged? Of course he would. If not from the leaping fish decals on the side, then from the bumper sticker—MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM—on the back.

You can’t let them get up that road.

He didn’t know if that was the visitor’s voice or his own, and didn’t care, because it was right either way. He had to stop the SUV, and two or three high-powered slugs in the engine block would do the job. Then he could start shooting through the windows. He probably wouldn’t get them all, not with the sun glaring on the glass, but the ones who were left would come spilling out into the empty parking lot, maybe wounded, dazed for sure.

His finger curled on the trigger, but before he could fire the first shot, the SUV stopped on its own near the abandoned gift shop with its fallen sign. The doors opened.

“Thank you, God,” Jack murmured. He applied his eye to the scope again, waiting for Mr. No Opinion to emerge. They all had to go, but the chief meddler was going first.

11

The diamondback emerged from the crack where it had taken refuge. It slithered toward Jack’s splayed feet, stopped, tasted the warming air with its flickering tongue, then slithered forward again. It had no intention of attacking, its purpose was only investigatory, but when Jack fired the first shot, it raised its tail and began to rattle. Jack—who had forgotten shooter’s plugs or cotton for his ears as well as his toothbrush—never heard it.

12

Howie was the first out of the SUV. He stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the fallen sign reading SOUVENIRS AND AUTHENTIC INDIAN CRAFTS. Alec and Yune exited the backseat on the driver’s side. Ralph got out of the shotgun seat to open the rear door for Holly, who was having trouble with the handle. As he did this, something lying on the cracked pavement caught his eye.

“Damn,” he said. “Look at that.”

“What is it?” Holly asked as he bent down. “What, what?”

“I think it’s an arrowhe—”

A gunshot rang out, the almost liquid whipcrack of a high-powered rifle. Ralph felt the passage of the slug, which meant it had missed the top of his head by no more than an inch or two. The SUV’s passenger side mirror shattered and flew away, hitting the cracked asphalt and tumbling across it in a series of brilliant flashes.

“Gun!” Ralph shouted, grabbing Holly around the shoulders and dragging her to her knees. “Gun, gun, gun!”

Howie looked around at him. His expression was both startled and bemused. “Say what? Did you—”

The second shot came, and the top of Howie Gold’s head disappeared. For a moment he stood where he was, blood coursing down his cheeks and brow. Then he toppled. Alec ran toward him and the third shot came, throwing Alec back against the hood of the SUV. Blood burst through his shirt above the belt line. Yune started toward him. There was a fourth shot. Ralph saw it tear away the side of Alec’s neck, and then Howie’s investigator dropped out of sight behind the car.

“Get down!” Ralph shouted at Yune. “Get down, he’s up on that bluff!”

Yune dropped to his knees and scrambled. Three more shots came in rapid succession. One of the SUV’s tires began to hiss. The windshield cracked into a milk-glaze and sagged in around a hole above the steering wheel. The third shot punched through the rear quarter-panel on the driver’s side and blew an exit hole as big as a tennis ball on the passenger side, close to where Ralph and Yune now crouched, flanking Holly. There was a pause, then another fusillade: four shots this time. The rear windows broke, spraying nuggets of safety glass. Another of those ragged holes appeared in the rear deck.

“We can’t stay here,” Holly said. She sounded perfectly calm. “Even if he doesn’t hit us, he’ll hit the gas tank.”

“She’s right,” Yune said. “Alec and Gold, what do you think? Any chance?”

“No,” Ralph said. “They’re—”

Another of those liquid whipcracks. They all flinched, and another tire began to hiss.

“They’re gone,” Ralph finished. “We have to run for that souvenir shop. You two go first. I’ll cover you.”

“I’ll do the covering,” Yune said. “You and Holly do the running.”

A scream came from the shooter’s position. Of pain or rage, Ralph couldn’t tell.

Yune stood up, legs spread, pistol held in both hands, and began to fire spaced shots at the top of the knoll. “Go!” he shouted. “Right now! Go, go, go!”

Ralph stood up. Holly stood up beside him. As on the day when Terry Maitland was shot, it seemed to Ralph that he could see everything. His arm was around Holly’s waist. There was a bird circling in the sky, wings outstretched. The tires were hissing. The SUV was settling on the driver’s side. At the top of the knoll he could see a stuttery, moving flash that had to be the scope of the bastard’s rifle. Ralph had no idea why it was moving around like that and didn’t care. There was a second scream, then a third, the last one almost a shriek. Holly grabbed Yune’s arm and jerked him. He gave her an amazed look, like a man rudely yanked out of a dream, and Ralph knew he had been ready to die. Expected to die. The three of them sprinted for the shelter of the gift shop, and although it had to be less than two hundred feet from the mortally wounded SUV, they seemed to be running in slow motion, like a trio of best friends at the end of some stupid romantic comedy. Only in those movies, no one ran past the mangled bodies of two men who had been alive and healthy only ninety seconds before. In those movies, no one stepped in a puddle of fresh blood and left bright red tracks behind. Another shot rang out, and Yune shouted.

“I’m hit! Fucker hit me!” He went down.

13

Jack was reloading, his ears ringing, when the rattlesnake decided it had had enough of this bothersome intruder in its territory. It struck him high on the right calf. Its fangs penetrated Jack’s chino pants with no trouble at all, and its poison sacs were full. Jack rolled over, holding his rifle high in his right hand, screaming—not at the pain, which was just beginning, but at the sight of the rattler slithering up his leg, its forked tongue flicking, its beady black eyes intent. The slippery weight of it was hideous. It struck him again, this time in the thigh, and continued its sinuous upward trek, still rattling away. The next strike might be into his balls.

“Get off! GET THE FUCK OFF ME!”

Trying to get rid of it with the rifle would do no good, it could evade that, so Jack dropped the gun and seized it in both hands. It struck at his right wrist, missing the first time but hitting on its second try, leaving holes the size of colons in a newspaper headline, but its poison sacs were exhausted. Jack neither knew nor cared. He twisted it in his hands like a man wringing out a washcloth, and saw its skin split. Down below, someone was firing repeatedly—a pistol, by the sound—but the range was long and nothing came close. Jack flung the rattlesnake, saw it thump to the rocky scree, and slither away once more.

Get rid of them, Jack.

“Yes, okay, right.”

Was he speaking, or only thinking? He couldn’t tell. The ringing in his ears had become a high hum, like a steel wire being stroked until it vibrated.

He grabbed the rifle, rolled onto his belly, placed the barrel back on the flat rock, peered into the scope. The remaining three were running for the shelter of the gift shop, the woman in the middle. He tried to put the crosshairs on Anderson, but his hands—one of them repeatedly snakebitten—were trembling, and he got the olive-skinned guy on the end instead. It took two tries, but he got him. The guy’s arm flew back over his head like a pitcher getting ready to throw his best fastball, and he fell on his side. The other two stopped to help him. This was his best chance, and maybe the last. If he didn’t take them now, they’d get behind the building.

Pain was flowing up his leg from the initial bite, and he could feel the flesh of his calf swelling, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the heat that was now spreading like a flash fever. Or the sunburn from hell. He fired again and thought at first he’d hit the woman, but it was only a flinch. She grabbed the olive-skinned man by his unwounded arm. Anderson got him around the waist and yanked him to his feet. Jack pulled the trigger again, and got nothing but a dry click. He fumbled in his pocket for more shells, loaded two, dropped the rest. His hands were going numb. The leg that had been bitten was going numb. His tongue seemed to be swelling in his mouth. He screamed again, this time in frustration. By the time he applied his eye to the scope again, they were gone. He could see their shadows for a moment, then those were gone, too.

14

With Holly on one side and Ralph on the other, Yune was able to make it to the splintered side of the gift shop, where he collapsed with his back against the building, panting. His face was ashy, his forehead dotted with pearls of sweat. The left sleeve of his shirt was bloody down to the wrist.

He groaned. “Fuck, doesn’t that fucking smart.” From the knoll, the shooter fired again. The bullet whined off the asphalt.

“How bad?” Ralph said. “Let me see.”

He unbuttoned Yune’s cuff, and although he pulled the sleeve up gently, Yune yelped and bared his teeth. Holly was on her cell phone.

When the wound was revealed, it didn’t look as bad as Ralph had feared; the bullet had probably done little more than crease him. In a movie, that would have left Yune ready to rejoin the fray, but this was real life, and real life was different. The high-powered slug had gotten enough of him to do a job on his elbow. The flesh around it was already swelling, turning purple, as if it had been smashed with a club.

“Tell me the elbow’s only dislocated,” Yune said.

“That would be good, but I think it’s broken,” Ralph said. “You still lucked out, man. If it had gotten any more of you, I think it would have torn your lower arm right off. I don’t know what he’s shooting, but it’s big.”

“My shoulder’s dislocated for sure,” Yune said. “Happened when my arm whipped back. Fuck! What are we going to do, amigo? We’re pinned.”

“Holly?” Ralph asked. “Anything?”

She shook her head. “I had four bars at the Boltons’, but not even one here. ‘Get off me,’ is that what he shouted? Did either of you h—”

The rifleman fired again. Alec Pelley’s body jumped, then lay still. “I’ll get you, Anderson!” came floating down from the top of the knoll. “I’ll get you, Ralphie-boy! I’ll get all of you!”

Yune looked at Ralph, startled.

“We messed up,” Holly said. “The outsider had a Renfield after all. And whoever he is, he knows you, Ralph. Do you know him?”

Ralph shook his head. The shooter had been yelling at the top of his voice, almost howling, and there were echoes. It could have been anyone.

Yune studied his wounded arm. The bleeding had slowed, but the swelling hadn’t. Soon he would have no appreciable elbow joint at all. “This hurts worse than when my wisdom teeth went to hell. Tell me you have an idea, Ralph.”

Ralph scooted to the far end of the building, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted. “The police are on their way, asshole! The Highway Patrol! Those guys won’t bother asking you to surrender, they’ll shoot you like a rabid dog! If you want to live, you better run for it!”

There was a pause, then another scream. It might have been pain, laughter, or both. It was followed by two more shots. One thumped into the building above Ralph’s head, knocking a board loose and sending up a flurry of splinters.

Ralph pulled back and looked at the other two ambush survivors. “I think that was a no.”

“He sounds hysterical,” Holly said.

“Out of his mind,” Yune agreed. He put his head back against the wall. “Christ, it’s hot on this asphalt. And it’ll be a lot hotter by noon. Muy caliente. If we’re still here, we’ll bake.”

Holly said, “Do you shoot with your right hand, Lieutenant Sablo?”

“Yes. And since we’re pinned down by a lunatic with a rifle, why don’t you just go on and call me Yune, like el jefe here?”

“You need to get over to the end of the building, where Ralph is. And Ralph, you need to get over here with me. When Lieutenant Sablo starts shooting, we’ll run for the road that goes to the tourist cabins and the Ahiga entrance. I estimate we’ll be in the open for no more than fifty yards. We can cover that in fifteen seconds. Maybe twelve.”

“Twelve seconds could be enough for him to get one of us, Holly.”

“I think we can make it.” Still as cool as the breeze from a fan blowing over a bowl of ice cubes. It was amazing. When she’d come into Howie’s conference room two nights ago, she’d been so tightly wrapped that a loud cough might have had her leaping for the ceiling.

She’s been in situations like this before, Ralph thought. And maybe it’s in situations like this where the real Holly Gibney comes out.

Another gunshot, followed by a spang of metal. Then another.

“He’s shooting for the SUV’s gas tank,” Yune said. “The rental people won’t like that.”

“We have to go, Ralph.” Holly was staring directly into his eyes—another thing she’d had trouble with before, but not now. No, not now. “Think of all the Frank Petersons he’ll murder if we let him get away. They’ll go with him because they think they know him. Or because he seems friendly, the way he must have seemed friendly to the Howard girls. Not the one up there, I mean the one he’s protecting.”

Three more shots in rapid succession. Ralph saw holes appear low on the SUV’s rear quarter-panel. Yes, he was aiming for the gas tank.

“And what are we supposed to do if Mr. Renfield comes down to meet us?” Ralph asked.

“Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll stay where he is, on the high ground. We only have to go as far as the path that leads to the Ahiga entrance. If he comes down before we can get there, you can shoot him.”

“Happy to, if he doesn’t shoot me first.”

“I think there might be something wrong with him,” Holly said. “Those screams.”

Yune nodded. “ ‘Get off me.’ I heard it, too.”

The next gunshot ruptured the SUV’s tank, and gasoline began to pour onto the asphalt. There was no immediate explosion, but if the guy on the knoll hit the tank again, the SUV would almost certainly blow.

“Okay,” Ralph said. The only alternative he could see was crouching here and waiting for the outsider’s accomplice to start pumping high-velocity slugs directly through the gift shop, trying to take out one or more of them that way. “Yune? Give us as much cover as you can.”

Yune edged to the corner of the building, hissing with pain at each sliding movement. He held his Glock against his chest with his right hand. Holly and Ralph moved to the other end. Ralph could see the service road leading up the hill and to the tourist cabins. It was flanked by a pair of large boulders. An American flag was painted on one, the Texas Lone Star flag on the other.

Once we get behind the one with the American flag on it, we should be safe.

Almost certainly true, but fifty yards had never looked so much like five hundred. He thought of Jeannie at home doing her yoga, or downtown running errands. He thought of Derek at camp, maybe in the craft room with his new buds, talking about TV shows, video games, or girls. He even had time to wonder who Holly was thinking about.

Him, apparently. “Are you ready?”

Before he could reply, the shooter fired again and the SUV’s gas tank exploded in a ball of orange fire. Yune leaned out from his corner and began shooting at the top of the knoll.

Holly sprinted. Ralph followed.

15

Jack saw the SUV burst into flame and screamed in triumph, although it made no sense to do so; it wasn’t as though there was anyone in it. Then movement caught his eye and he saw two of the meddlers running for the service road. The woman was in the lead, Anderson right behind her. Jack swung his rifle toward them and sighted through the scope. Before he could pull the trigger, there was the zzzz of an incoming round. Rock chips struck his shoulder. The one they’d left behind was shooting, and although the range was far too long for accuracy with whatever handgun the guy was using, that last one had been too close for comfort. Jack ducked, and as his chin pressed down on his neck, he felt the glands there bulge and throb, as if they were loaded with pus. His head was aching, his skin was sizzling, and his eyes seemed too big for their sockets.

He peered through the scope just in time to glimpse Anderson disappearing behind one of those big boulders. He had lost them. Nor was that all. Black smoke was rising from the burning SUV, and now that it was full day, there was no wind to disperse it. What if someone saw that and called whatever excuse for a volunteer fire department they had in this poor-ass town?

Go down.

No need to question whose voice it was this time.

You need to get to them before they can get to the Ahiga path.

Jack had no idea what an Ahiga was, but he had no doubt what the visitor inside his head was talking about: the path marked by the sign showing Chief Wahoo. He cringed as another bullet from the asshole down there spanked rock chips from a nearby outcropping, took the first step back the way he had come, and fell down. For a moment pain obliterated all thought. Then he grabbed at a bush sticking out between two rocks and pulled himself up. He looked down at himself, at first unable to believe what had become of him. The leg the snake had bitten now looked two times as big as the other one. The cloth of his pants was pulled tight. Worse, his crotch was bulging. It was as if he had stuffed a small pillow in there.

Go down, Jack. Get them and I’ll take the cancer away.

Oh, but right now he had more immediate concerns, didn’t he? He was swelling up like a waterlogged sponge.

The snakebite poison, too. I can make you well.

Jack wasn’t sure he could believe Tat-Man, but he understood he had no choice. Also, there was Anderson. Mr. No Opinion didn’t get to walk away from this. It was all his fault, and he didn’t get to walk away.

He started down the path at a shambling trot, clutching the barrel of the Winchester and using the stock as a cane. His second fall came when the rocky scree slid away under his left foot and his swollen, throbbing right leg wasn’t able to compensate. The leg of his pants split open the next time he went down, disclosing flesh that was turning purplish-black and necrotic. He clawed at the rocks and got to his feet again, his face puffing and running with sweat. He was pretty sure he was going to die on this godforsaken chunk of rock and weeds, but he was goddamned if he was going to do it alone.

16

Ralph and Holly ran up the spur road bent double, heads tucked. At the top of the first hill, they stopped to catch their breath. Below and to the left, they could see the circle of decaying tourist cabins. To the right was a long building, probably storage for equipment and supplies back when the Marysville Hole had been a going concern. A truck was parked beside it. Ralph looked at it, looked away, then snapped back.

“Oh my Christ.”

“What? What?”

“No wonder he knew me. That’s Jack Hoskins’s truck.”

“Hoskins? The other detective from Flint City?”

“Yes, him.”

“Why would he—” Then she shook her head hard enough to make her bangs fly. “It doesn’t matter. He’s stopped shooting and that means he’s probably coming. We need to go.”

“Maybe Yune hit him,” Ralph said, and when she gave him a disbelieving look: “Yeah, okay.”

They hurried past the equipment building. There was another path on the far side, leading up the back side of the knoll. “I go first,” Ralph said. “I’m the one with the gun.”

Holly didn’t argue.

They trotted up the incline, the narrow path twisting and turning. Loose scree slid and grated under their shoes, threatening to spill them. Two or three minutes into the climb, Ralph began to hear the clatter and bounce of rocks somewhere higher up. Hoskins was indeed coming to meet them.

They rounded an outcropping, Ralph with his Glock leveled, Holly behind him and on his right. The next stretch of the path ran straight for fifty feet or so. The sound of Hoskins’s descent was louder now, but the maze of rocks made it impossible to tell just how close he was.

“Where’s the goddam spur path that goes to the back entrance?” Ralph asked. “He’s getting closer. This is too much like playing chicken in that James Dean movie.”

“Yes, Rebel Without a Cause. I don’t know, but it can’t be far.”

“If we run into him before we get off Main Street here, there’s going to be shooting. And ricochets. The minute you see him, I want you to drop—”

She thumped him on the back. “If we beat him to the path, there won’t be any shooting and I won’t have to. Go!”

Ralph ran up the straight stretch, telling himself he’d caught his second wind. It wasn’t true, but it was good to stay positive. Holly was behind him and whapping him on the shoulder, either to hurry him along or to assure him that she was still there. They reached the next turning in the path. Ralph peered around it, expecting to look into the muzzle of Hoskins’s rifle. He didn’t see that, but he did see a wooden sign with Chief Ahiga’s fading portrait on it.

“Come on,” he said. “Fast.”

They ran for the sign, and now Ralph could hear the oncoming shooter gasping for breath. Almost sobbing for it. There was a rattle of stones and a cry of pain. It sounded like Hoskins had fallen down.

Good! Stay down!

But then the clattery, slip-sliding footsteps resumed. Very near. Closing in. Ralph grabbed Holly and pushed her onto the Ahiga path. Her small pale face was running with sweat. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her hands were buried in the pockets of her suit coat, which was now powdered with rock dust and splattered with blood.

Ralph raised a finger to his lips. She nodded. He stepped behind the sign. The dry Texas heat had caused the boards to shrink a bit, and he was able to peer through one of the cracks. He saw Hoskins as he staggered into view. His first thought was that Yune had gotten lucky and put a bullet in him after all, but that didn’t explain Hoskins’s split pants and grotesquely swollen right leg. No wonder he fell, Ralph thought. It was amazing that he’d gotten this far down the steep path on that leg. He still had the rifle he’d used to kill Gold and Pelley, but was using it as a cane, and his fingers were nowhere near the trigger. Ralph didn’t know if he would be able to hit anything anyway, even at close range. Not the way his hands were trembling. His bloodshot eyes were deep in their sockets. Rock dust had turned his face into a kabuki mask, but where perspiration had cut trails through it, the skin was red, as if with a terrible rash.

Ralph stepped out from behind the sign, Glock held in both hands. “Stop right there, Jack, and let go of the rifle.”

Jack skidded and stumbled to a halt thirty feet away, but he continued to hold the rifle by the barrel. That wasn’t okay, but Ralph could live with it. If Hoskins started to raise it, however, his life was going to end.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Jack said. “Like my old granddad used to say, was you born dumb or did you just grow that way?”

“I have no appetite for your bullshit. You killed two men and wounded another one. Shot them from ambush.”

“They never should have come here,” Jack said, “but since they did, they got what they deserved for messing in with what didn’t concern them.”

“And what would that be, Mr. Hoskins?” Holly asked.

Hoskins’s lips cracked and oozed tiny beads of blood when he smiled. “Tat-Man. As I think you know. Meddling bitch.”

“Okay, now that you’ve got that out of your system,” Ralph said, “put the rifle down. You’ve done enough damage with it. Just drop it. If you bend over, you’ll fall on your face. Was it a snake that got you?”

“The snake was just a little extra. You need to leave, Ralph. Both of you need to leave. Or else he’ll poison you like he poisoned me. A word to the wise.”

Holly took a step closer to Jack. “How did he poison you?” Ralph put a warning hand on her arm.

“Just touched me. Back of the neck. That was all it took.” He shook his head in tired wonder. “Out at that barn in Canning Township.” His voice rose, trembling with outrage. “Where you sent me!”

Ralph shook his head. “It must have been the chief, Jack. I didn’t know anything about it. I’m not going to tell you again to put the gun down. You’re done with this.”

Jack considered… or seemed to. Then he lifted the rifle very slowly, going hand over hand down the barrel toward the trigger housing. “I’m not going the way my mother did. Nosir, I am not. I’ll shoot your friend there first, Ralph, then you. Unless you stop me.”

“Jack, don’t. Last warning.”

“Stick your warning up your—”

He was trying to point the gun at Holly. She didn’t move. Ralph stepped in front of her and fired three times, the reports deafening in the tight space. One for Howie, one for Alec, one for Yune. The distance was a trifle long for a pistol, but the Glock was a good gun and he’d never had any trouble qualifying on the range. Jack Hoskins went down, and to Ralph, the expression on his dying face looked like relief.

17

Ralph sat down on a jutting lip of rock across from the sign, breathing hard. Holly went to Hoskins, knelt, and rolled him over. She had a look, then came back. “He was bitten more than once.”

“Must have been a rattler, and a big one.”

“Something else poisoned him first. Something worse than any snake. He called it Tat-Man, we call it the outsider. El Cuco. We need to finish this.”

Ralph thought of Howie and Alec, lying dead on the other side of this godforsaken chunk of rock. They had families. And Yune—still alive but wounded, suffering, probably in shock by now—also had a family.

“I suppose you’re right. Want this pistol? I can take his rifle, if you do.”

Holly shook her head.

“All right. Let’s do this.”

18

Past the first turning, the Ahiga path widened and began to descend. There were pictographs on both sides. Some of the ancient images had been embellished or entirely covered with spraypaint tags.

“He’ll know we’re coming,” Holly said.

“I know. We should have brought one of those flashes.”

She reached into one of her voluminous side pockets—the one that had been sagging—and pulled out one of the stubby Home Depot UV flashlights.

“You’re sort of amazing,” Ralph said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a couple of hardhats in there, do you?”

“No offense, but your sense of humor is a little weak, Ralph. You should work on that.”

Around the next turning of the path, they came to a natural hollow in the rock about four feet off the ground. Above it, fading letters in black paint read WE WILL NEVER FORGET. Inside the niche was a dusty vase with thin branches jutting from it like skeletal fingers. The petals that had once adorned those branches were long gone, but something else remained. Scattered around the bottom of the vase were half a dozen toy versions of Chief Ahiga, like the one that had been left behind when the Jamieson twins had crawled into the bowels of the earth, never to be found. The toys were yellow with age, and the sun had cracked the plastic.

“People have been here,” Holly said. “Kids I’d say, based on the spraypaint tags. But they never vandalized this.”

“Never even touched it, from the look,” Ralph said. “Come on. Yune’s on the other side with a bullet wound and a busted elbow.”

“Yes, and I’m sure he’s in great pain. But we need to be careful. That means moving slowly.”

Ralph took her by the elbow. “If this guy gets both of us, that leaves Yune on his own. Maybe you should go back.”

She pointed to the sky, where black smoke from the burning SUV was rising. “Someone will see that, and they’ll come. And if something happens to us, Yune’s the only one who will know why.”

She shook his hand loose and began walking up the path. Ralph spared one more look for the little shrine, undisturbed all these years, and then followed her.

19

Just when Ralph thought the Ahiga path was going to lead them to nowhere but the back of the gift shop, it took an acute lefthand turn, almost doubling back on itself, and ended at what looked for all the world like the entrance to some suburbanite’s toolshed. Only the green paint was flaked and fading, and the windowless door in the center of it stood ajar. The door was flanked by warning signs. The plastic that encased them had bleared over time, but they were still readable: ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING on the left, and THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF MARYSVILLE TOWN COUNCIL on the right.

Ralph went to the door, Glock ready. He motioned Holly to stand against the path’s rocky side, then swung the door open, bending at the knees and bringing his gun to bear as he did so. Inside was a small entryway, empty except for the litter of boards that had been torn away from a six-foot fissure leading into darkness. The splintered ends were still attached to the rock by more of those huge, time-rusted bolts.

“Ralph, look at this. It’s interesting.”

She was holding the door and bending to examine the lock, which had been pretty well destroyed. It didn’t look like the work of a crowbar or tire iron to Ralph; he thought someone had hammered it with a rock until it finally gave.

“What, Holly?”

“It’s a one-way, do you see? Only locked if you’re on the outside. Somebody was hoping the Jamieson twins, or some of the first rescue party, were still alive. If they found their way here, they wanted to make sure they weren’t locked in.”

“But no one ever did.”

“No.” She crossed the entryway to the fissure in the rock. “Can you smell that?”

Ralph could, and knew they were standing at the entrance to a different world. He could smell stale dampness, and something else—the high, sweet aroma of rotting flesh. It was faint, but it was there. He thought of that long-ago cantaloupe, and the insects that had been squirming around inside it.

They stepped into the dark. Ralph was tall, but the fissure was taller, and he didn’t have to duck his head. Holly turned on the flashlight, at first shining it straight ahead into a rocky corridor leading downward, then at their feet. They both saw a series of glowing droplets leading into the dark. Holly did him the courtesy of not pointing out that it was the same stuff her makeshift black light had picked up in his living room.

They were only able to walk side by side for the first sixty feet or so. After that the passage narrowed and Holly handed him the flashlight. He held it in his left hand, the pistol in his right. The walls sparkled with eerie streaks of mineral, some red, some lavender, some a greenish-yellow. He occasionally shone the light upward, just to make sure El Cuco wasn’t up there, crawling along the ragged ceiling among the stubs of stalactites. The air wasn’t cold—he had read somewhere that caves maintained a temperature roughly equal to the average temperature of the region in which they were located—but it felt cold after being outside, and of course both of them were still coated in fear-sweat. A draft was coming from deeper in, blowing in their faces and bringing that faint rotten smell.

He stopped, and Holly ran into him, making him jump. “What?” she whispered.

Instead of answering, he shone the light on a rift in the rock to their left. Spray-painted beside it were two words: CHECKED and NOTHING.

They moved on, slowly, slowly. Ralph didn’t know about Holly, but he felt an increasing sense of dread, a growing certainty that he was never going to see his wife and son again. Or daylight. It was amazing how fast a person could miss the daylight. He felt that if they did get out of here, he could drink daylight like water.

Holly whispered, “This is a horrible place, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You should go back.”

Her only answer was a slight push in the center of his back.

They passed several more breaks in the downward passage, each one marked with those same two words. How long ago had they been sprayed there? If Claude Bolton had been a teenager, it had to be at least fifteen years, maybe twenty. And who had been in here since then—other than their outsider, that was? Anyone? Why would they come? Holly was right, it was horrible. With each step he felt more like a man being buried alive. He forced himself to remember the clearing in Figgis Park. And Frank Peterson. And a jutting branch marked with bloody fingerprints where the bark had been stripped from it by repeated plunging blows. And Terry Maitland, asking how Ralph was going to clear his own conscience. Asking that as he lay dying.

He kept going.

The passage abruptly narrowed even further, not because the walls were closer but because there was rubble on both sides. Ralph shone the flashlight upward and saw a deep cavity in the rock roof. It made him think of an empty socket after a tooth has been pulled.

“Holly—this is where the roof caved in. The second rescue party probably carted the biggest pieces out. This stuff…” He swept the light across the heaps of rubble, picking out another couple of those spectrally glowing spots.

“This is the stuff they didn’t bother with,” Holly finished. “Just pushed it out of the way.”

“Yes.”

They started moving again, at first only edging along. Ralph, something of a widebody, had to turn sideways. He handed Holly the flashlight and raised his gun hand to the side of his face. “Shine the light under my arm. Keep it pointed straight ahead. No surprises.”

“O-Okay.”

“You sound cold.”

“I am cold. You should be quiet. He could hear us.”

“So what? He knows we’re coming. You do think a bullet will kill him, right? You—”

“Stop, Ralph, stop! You’ll step in it!”

He stopped at once, heart hammering. She shone the light a bit past his feet. Draped over the last pile of rubble before the passage widened again was the body of a dog or a coyote. A coyote seemed more likely, but it was impossible to tell for sure, because the animal’s head was gone. Its belly had been opened and the viscera had been scooped out.

“That’s what we were smelling,” she said.

Ralph stepped over it carefully. Ten feet further on, he halted again. It had been a coyote, all right; here was the head. It seemed to be staring at them with exaggerated surprise, and at first he couldn’t understand just why.

Holly was a little quicker on the uptake. “Its eyes are gone,” she said. “Eating the insides wasn’t enough. It ate the eyes right out of that poor creature’s head. Oough.”

“So the outsider doesn’t just eat human flesh and blood.” He paused. “Or sadness.”

Holly spoke quietly. “Thanks to us—mostly thanks to you and Lieutenant Sablo—it’s been very active in what’s usually its time of hibernation. And it’s been denied the food it likes. It must be very hungry.”

“And weak. You said it must be weak.”

“Let us hope so,” Holly said. “This is extremely frightening. I hate closed-in places.”

“You can always—”

She gave him another of those light thumps. “Keep going. And watch your step.”

20

The trail of faintly luminous droplets continued. Ralph had come to think of them as the thing’s sweat. Fear-sweat, like theirs? He hoped so. He hoped the fucker had been terrified, and still was.

There were more fissures, but no more spraypaint; these were little more than cracks, too small even for a child to fit into. Or escape from. Holly was able to walk beside him again, although it was a tight fit. They could hear water dripping somewhere far away, and once Ralph felt a new breeze, this one against his left cheek. It was like being caressed with ghost fingers. It was coming from one of those cracks, producing a hollow, almost glassy moan, like the sound of breath blown over the top of a beer bottle. A horrible place, all right. He found it all but impossible to believe people had paid money to explore this stone crypt, but of course they didn’t know what he knew, and now believed. It was sort of amazing how being in the guts of the ground helped a person to believe what had previously seemed not just impossible but downright laughable.

“Careful,” Holly said. “There’s more.”

This time it was a couple of gophers that had been torn to pieces. Beyond them was the remains of another rattler, all of it gone except for tatters of its diamondback skin.

A little further on, they came to the top of a steep downward slope, its surface polished as smooth as a dancefloor. Ralph thought it had probably been created by some ancient underground river that had flowed during the age of the dinosaurs and dried up before Jesus walked the earth. To one side was a steel railing, now spotted with florets of rust. Holly ran the light along it, and they saw not just scattered droplets of luminescence, but palm prints and fingerprints. Prints that would match Claude Bolton’s, Ralph had no doubt.

“Sonofabitch was careful, wasn’t he? Didn’t want to take a spill.”

Holly nodded. “I think this is the passageway Lovie called the Devil’s Slide. Watch your ste—”

From somewhere behind and below them came a brief squall of rock, followed by a barely perceptible thud that went through their feet. It reminded Ralph of how even solid ice could sometimes shift. Holly looked at him, wide-eyed.

“I think we’re okay. This old cave’s been talking to itself for a long time.”

“Yes, but I bet the conversation’s been livelier since the ground-shaker Lovie told us about. The one that happened in ’07.”

“You can always—”

“Don’t ask me again. I have to see this through.”

He supposed she did.

They went down the incline, holding the railing but being careful to avoid the handprints left by the one who had gone before them. At the bottom there was a sign:

Beyond the Slide, the passage widened still more. There was another of those arched entryways, but part of the wooden facing had fallen away, disclosing what nature had left here: nothing but a ragged maw.

Holly cupped her hands around her mouth and called softly, “Hello?”

Her voice came back to them perfectly, in a series of overlapping echoes: Hello… ello… ello…

“I thought so,” she said. “It’s the Chamber of Sound. It’s the big one that Lovie—”

“Hello.”

Ello… lo… lo…

Spoken quietly, but stopping Ralph in the middle of drawing a breath. He felt Holly seize his forearm with a hand that felt like a claw.

“Now that you’re here…”

You’re… you… here… ere…

“…and gone to so much trouble to find me, why don’t you come in?”

21

They stepped through the arch side by side, Holly holding onto Ralph’s arm like a bride with stage fright. She had the light; Ralph had his Glock, and intended to use it as soon as he had a target. One shot. Only there was no target, not at first.

Beyond the arch was a jutting lip of stone that made a sort of balcony seventy feet above the main cave’s floor. A metal stairway spiraled down. Holly glanced up and felt dizzy. The stairs rose another two hundred feet or more, past an opening that had probably been the main entrance, all the way to the stalactite-hung roof. She realized the entire bluff was hollow, like a fake bakery shop cake. Going down, the stairway looked okay. Above them, part of it had come loose from the fist-sized bolts that held it, and hung drunkenly over the drop.

Waiting for them at the bottom, in the light of an ordinary standing lamp—the kind you might see in any reasonably well-appointed living room—was the outsider. The lamp’s cord snaked away to a softly humming red box with HONDA printed on the side. At the extreme outer edge of the circle of radiance was a cot with a blanket bunched at the bottom.

Ralph had caught up with many fugitives in his time, and the thing they had come looking for could have been any of them: hollow-eyed, too thin, used hard. He was wearing jeans, a rawhide vest over a dirty white shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. He appeared unarmed. He was looking up at them with Claude Bolton’s face: the black hair, the high cheekbones suggesting some Native American blood a few generations back, the goatee. Ralph couldn’t see the ink on his fingers from where he was, but he knew it was there.

Tat-Man, Hoskins had called him.

“If you really mean to talk to me, you’ll have to chance the stairs. They held me, but I have to tell you the truth—they’re not all that steady.” His words, although spoken in a conversational voice, overlapped each other, doubling and tripling, as if there were not just one outsider but many, a cabal of them hiding in the shadows and the fissures where the light of that single floor lamp could not reach.

Holly started for the stairs. Ralph stopped her. “I’ll go first.”

“I should. I’m lighter.”

“I’ll go first,” he repeated. “When I get down—if I get down—you come.” He spoke quietly, but guessed that, given the acoustics, the outsider could hear every word. At least I hope so, Ralph thought. “But stop at least a dozen steps up. I have to talk to him.”

He was looking at her as he said this, and looking hard. She glanced at the Glock, and he gave the barest nod. No, there would be no talking, no long-winded Q-and-A. All that was over. One shot to the head, and then they were out of here. Assuming the roof didn’t fall in on them, that was.

“All right,” she said. “Be careful.”

There was no way to do that—either the old spiral staircase would hold or it wouldn’t—but he tried to think himself lighter as he went down. The stairs groaned and squalled and shuddered.

“Doing well so far,” the outsider said. “Walk close to the wall, that might be safest.”

Afest… est… est…

Ralph reached the bottom. The outsider stood motionless near his strangely domestic lamp. Had he bought it—and the generator, and the cot—at the Home Depot in Tippit? Ralph thought it likely. It seemed to be the go-to place in this godforsaken part of the Lone Star State. Not that it mattered. Behind him, the stairs began to squall and groan again as Holly descended.

Now that Ralph was on the same level, he stared at the outsider with what was almost scientific curiosity. He looked human, but was oddly hard to grasp, even so. It was like looking at a picture with your eyes slightly crossed. You knew what it was you were seeing, but everything was skewed and slightly out of true. It was Claude Bolton’s face, but the chin was wrong, not rounded but square, and slightly cleft. The jawline on the right was longer than the one on the left, giving the face as a whole a slanted aspect that stopped just short of grotesque. The hair was Claude’s, as black and shiny as a crow’s wing, but there were streaks of a lighter reddish-brown shade. Most striking of all were the eyes. One was brown, as Claude’s were brown, but the other was blue.

Ralph knew the cleft chin, the long jaw, the reddish-brown hair. And the blue eye, that most of all. He had seen the light go out of it as Terry Maitland died in the street on a hot July morning not long ago.

“You’re still changing, aren’t you? The projection my wife saw may have looked exactly like Claude, but the real you hasn’t caught up yet. Has it? You’re not quite there.”

He meant these to be the last words the outsider would hear. The protesting groans from the stairs had stopped, which meant Holly was standing high up enough to be safe. He raised the Glock, gripping his right wrist in his left hand.

The outsider lifted his arms to either side, presenting himself. “Kill me if you want, Detective, but you’ll be killing yourself and your lady friend, too. I don’t have access to your thoughts, as I do Claude’s, but I have a good idea of what’s in your mind, just the same: you’re thinking that one shot is an acceptable risk. Am I right?”

Ralph said nothing.

“I’m sure I am, and I must tell you it would be a great risk.” He raised his voice and shouted, “CLAUDE BOLTON IS MY NAME!”

The echoes seemed even louder than the shout. Holly gave a cry of surprise as a piece of stalactite high above, perhaps cracked almost through already, detached from the ceiling and fell like a rock dagger. It posed no danger to any of them, hitting bottom well outside the feeble circle of lamplight, but Ralph took the point.

“Since you knew enough to find me here, you may already know this,” the outsider said, lowering his arms, “but in case you don’t, two boys were lost in the caves and passages below this one, and when a rescue party tried to find them—”

“Someone fired a gun and brought down a piece of the roof,” Holly said from the stairs. “Yes, we know.”

“That happened in the Devil’s Slide passage, where the sound of the gunshot would have been dampened.” Smiling. “Who knows what will happen if Detective Anderson fires his gun in here? Surely a few of the bigger stalactites will come raining down. Even so, you might avoid them. Of course if you don’t, you’ll be crushed. Then there’s the possibility you might cause the entire top of the bluff to collapse, burying us all in a landslide. Want to risk it, Detective? I’m sure you meant to when you came down the stairs, but I have to tell you that the odds would not be in your favor.”

Those stairs creaked briefly as Holly came down another step. Maybe two.

Keep your distance, Ralph thought, but there was no way he could make her do that. This lady had a mind of her own.

“We also know why you’re here,” she said. “Claude’s uncle and cousins are here. In the ground.”

“Indeed they are.” He—it—was smiling more widely now. The gold tooth in that smile was Claude’s, like the letters on his fingers. “Along with many others, including the two children they hoped to save. I feel them in the earth. Some are close. Roger Bolton and his sons are over there, not twenty feet below Snake’s Belly.” He pointed. “I feel them the most strongly, not just because they’re close, but because they are the blood I’m becoming.”

“Not good to eat, though, I guess,” Ralph said. He was looking at the cot. Barely visible on the stone floor beside it, next to a Styrofoam cooler, was another untidy litter of bones and skin.

“No, of course not.” The outsider looked at him impatiently. “But their remains give off a glow. A kind of… I don’t know, these are not things I ordinarily talk about… a kind of emanation. Even those foolish boys give off that glow, although it’s faint. They’re very far down. You might say they died exploring uncharted regions of the Marysville Hole.” At this, his smile reappeared, showing not just the gold tooth but almost all of them. Ralph wondered if he had been smiling like that as he murdered Frank Peterson, eating his flesh and drinking the child’s dying agony along with his blood.

“A glow like a nightlight?” Holly asked. She sounded genuinely curious. The stairs squalled as she descended another step or two. Ralph wished mightily that she was going the other way: up and out, back into the hot Texas sunshine.

The outsider only shrugged.

Go back, he thought at Holly. Turn around and go back. When I’m sure you’ve had time enough to make it out the Ahiga back door, I’ll take the shot. Even if it makes my wife a widow and my son fatherless, I’ll take the shot. I owe it to Terry and all the others who came before him.

“A nightlight,” she repeated, coming down another step. “You know, for comfort. I had one when I was a girl.”

The outsider was looking up at her over Ralph’s shoulder. With his back to the standing lamp and his face in the shadows, Ralph could see a strange shine in those mismatched eyes. Except that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t in them but coming from them, and now Ralph understood what Grace Maitland had meant when she said the thing she’d seen had straws for eyes.

“Comfort?” The outsider seemed to consider the word. “Yes, I suppose so, although I’ve never thought of it that way. But also information. Even dead, they’re full of Bolton-ness.”

“Do you mean memories?” Another step closer. Ralph took his left hand off his wrist and motioned her back, knowing she wouldn’t go.

“No, not those.” He looked impatient with her again, but there was something else there, too. A certain eagerness Ralph knew from many interrogation rooms. Not every suspect wanted to talk, but most of them did, because they had been alone in the closed room of their thoughts. And this thing must have been alone with its thoughts for a very long time. Alone, period. You only had to look at him to know it.

“Then what is it?” She was still in the same place, and thank God for small blessings, Ralph thought.

“Bloodline. There’s something in bloodline that goes beyond memory or the physical similarities that are carried down through the generations. It’s a way of being. A way of seeing. It’s not food, but it is strength. Their souls are gone, their ka, but something is left, even in their dead brains and bodies.”

“A kind of DNA,” she said. “Maybe tribal, maybe racial.”

“I suppose. If you like.” He took a step toward Ralph, holding out the hand with MUST written on the fingers. “It’s like these tattoos. They aren’t alive, but they hold certain infor—”

“Stop!” she shouted, and Ralph thought, Christ, she’s even closer. How could she do that without me hearing?

The echoes rose, seeming to expand, and something else fell. Not a stalactite this time, but a chunk of rock from one of the rough walls.

“Don’t do that,” the outsider said. “Unless you want to risk bringing the whole thing down on our heads, don’t raise your voice like that.”

When Holly spoke again, her voice was lower but still urgent. “Remember what he did to Detective Hoskins, Ralph. His touch is poisonous.”

“Only when I’m in this transformative state,” the outsider said mildly. “It’s a form of natural protection, and rarely fatal. More like poison ivy than some sort of radiation. Of course, Detective Hoskins was… susceptible, shall we say. And once I’ve touched someone, I can often—not always, but often—get into their minds. Or the minds of their loved ones. I did that with Frank Peterson’s family. Only a little, enough to push them in directions they were already going.”

“You should stay where you are,” Ralph said.

The outsider raised his tattooed hands. “Certainly. As I’ve said, you’re the man with the gun. But I can’t let you leave. I’m too tired to relocate, you see. I had to make the drive down here far too soon, and I had to buy a few supplies, which drained me even more. It seems we’re at a standoff.”

“You put yourself in this position,” Ralph said. “I mean, you know that, right?”

The outsider looked at him out of a face that still held the fading remains of Terry Maitland and said nothing.

“Heath Holmes, okay. The others before Holmes, also okay. But Maitland was a mistake.”

“I suppose that’s so.” The outsider looked puzzled, but still complacent. “Yet I’ve taken others who had strong alibis and immaculate reputations. With evidence and eyewitness testimony, the alibis and reputations make no difference. People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality. You should never have come looking for me. You never should have even sensed me, no matter how strong his alibi was. Yet you did. Was it because I came to the courthouse?”

Ralph said nothing. Holly had come down the last step and was now standing beside him.

The outsider sighed. “That was a mistake, I should have thought more seriously about the presence of TV cameras, but I was still hungry. Yet I could have stayed away. I was gluttonous.”

“Add overconfident, while you’re at it,” Ralph said. “And overconfidence breeds carelessness. Cops see a lot of that.”

“Well, perhaps I was all three. But I think I might have gotten away even with that.” He was looking speculatively at the pale, gray-haired woman next to Ralph. “It’s you I have to thank for being in this current situation, isn’t it? Holly. Claude says your name is Holly. What made you able to believe? How were you able to convince a party of modern men who probably don’t believe in anything beyond the range of their five senses to come down here? Have you seen another one like me somewhere?” The eagerness in his voice was unmistakable.

“We didn’t come here to answer your questions,” Holly said. One of her hands was stuffed into the pocket of her wrinkled suit jacket. In the other, she held the UV flashlight, which was not turned on at the moment; the only light came from the standing lamp. “We came here to kill you.”

“I’m not sure how you hope to do that… Holly. Your friend might chance firing his gun if it was just the two of us, but I don’t think he wants to risk your life, as well. And while one or both of you might try to attack me physically, I think you’d find me surprisingly strong as well as a bit poisonous. Yes, even in my current depleted state.”

“It’s a standoff for now,” Ralph said, “but not for long. Hoskins wounded State Police Lieutenant Yunel Sablo but didn’t kill him. By now he will have called this in.”

“A good try, but not out here,” the outsider said. “There is no cell reception for six miles going east and a dozen going west. Did you think I wouldn’t check?”

Ralph had been hoping for just that, but it had been a thin hope. As it happened, however, he had another card in his hand. “Hoskins also blew up the vehicle we came in. There’s smoke. Plenty of it.”

For the first time he saw real alarm in the outsider’s face.

“That changes things. I’ll have to run. In my current state, that will be difficult and painful. If you wanted to make me angry, Detective, you’ve succeed—”

“You asked me if I’d seen one of your kind before,” Holly interrupted. “I haven’t—well, not exactly—but I’m sure Ralph has. Strip away the shape-changing, the memory-sucking, and the glowing eyes, and you’re just a sexual sadist and common pedophile.”

The outsider recoiled as if she had struck him. For a moment he seemed to forget all about the burning SUV sending up smoke signals from the abandoned parking lot. “That’s offensive, ridiculous, and untrue. I eat to live, that’s all. Your kind does the same thing when you slaughter pigs and cows. That’s all you are to me—cattle.”

“You’re lying.” Holly took a step forward, and when Ralph tried to take her by the arm, she shook him off. Red roses had begun to bloom in her pale cheeks. “Your ability to look like someone you’re not—something you’re not—guarantees trust. You could have taken any of Mr. Maitland’s friends. You could have taken his wife. But instead of that, you took a child. You always take children.”

“They’re the strongest, sweetest food! Have you never eaten veal? Or calves’ liver?”

“You don’t just eat them, you ejaculate on them.” Her mouth twisted in disgust. “You splooge on them. Oough!”

“To leave DNA!” he shouted.

“You could leave it other ways!” she shouted back, and something else fell from the eggshell ceiling above them. “But you don’t put your thing in, do you? Is it because you’re impotent?” She raised a finger, then let it curl. “Is it is it is it?”

“Shut up!”

“You take children because you’re a child rapist who can’t even do it with his penis, you have to use a—”

He ran at her, his face twisting into an expression of hate that had nothing of Claude Bolton or Terry Maitland in it; this was its own thing, as black and awful as the lower depths where the Jamieson twins had finally surrendered their lives. Ralph raised his gun, but Holly stepped into his line of fire before he could get off a round.

“Don’t shoot, Ralph, don’t shoot!”

Something else fell, this time something big, smashing the outsider’s cot and cooler and sending shards of mineral-sparkling stones spinning across the polished floor.

Holly pulled something from a pocket of her suit coat on the side that always sagged. The thing was long and white and stretched, as if it contained something heavy. At the same time, she turned on the UV flashlight and shined it full in the outsider’s face. He winced, made a snarling sound, and turned his head, still reaching for her with Claude Bolton’s tattooed hands. She drew the white thing cross-body above her small breasts, all the way to her shoulder, and swung it with all her strength. The loaded end connected with the outsider’s head just below the hairline, at the temple.

What Ralph saw then would haunt his dreams for years to come. The left half of the outsider’s head caved in as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone. The brown eye jumped in its socket. The thing went to its knees, and its face seemed to liquefy. Ralph saw a hundred features slide across it in mere seconds, there and gone: high foreheads followed low ones, bushy eyebrows and ones so blond they were hardly there, deepset eyes and ones that bulged, lips both wide and thin. Buck teeth protruded, then disappeared; chins jutted and sank. Yet the last face, the one that lingered longest, almost certainly the outsider’s true face, was utterly nondescript. It was the face of anyone you might pass on the street, seen at one moment and forgotten the next.

Holly swung again, striking the cheekbone this time and driving the forgettable face into a hideous crescent. It looked like something out of an insane children’s book.

In the end, it’s nothing, Ralph thought. Nobody. What looked like Claude, what looked like Terry, what looked like Heath Holmes… nothing. Only false fronts. Only stage dressing.

Reddish wormlike things began to pour from the hole in the outsider’s head, from its nose, from the cramped teardrop which was all that remained of its unsteady mouth. The worms fell to the stone floor of the Chamber of Sound in a squirming flood. Claude Bolton’s body first began to tremble, then to buck, then to shrivel inside its clothes.

Holly dropped the flashlight and raised the white thing over her head (it was a sock, Ralph saw, a man’s long white athletic sock), now holding it in both hands. She brought it down one final time, crashing it into the top of the thing’s head. Its face split down the middle like a rotted gourd. There was no brain in the cavity thus revealed, only a writhing nest of those worms, inescapably reminding Ralph of the maggots he had discovered in that long-ago cantaloupe. Those already released were squirming across the floor toward Holly’s feet.

She backed away from them, ran into Ralph, then buckled at the knees. He grabbed her and held her up. All the color had left her face. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

“Drop the sock,” he said in her ear.

She looked at him, dazed.

“Some of those things are on it.”

When she still did nothing but look at him with a kind of dazed wonder, Ralph attempted to pull it from her fist. At first he couldn’t. She had it in a death grip. He pried at her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t have to break them to make her let go, but he would if he had to. If that was what it took. Those things would be a lot worse than poison ivy if they touched her. And if they got under her skin…

She seemed to come back to herself—a little, anyway—and opened her hand. The sock dropped, the toe making a clunking sound when it hit the stone floor. He backed away from the worms, which were still blindly seeking (or maybe not blind at all; they were coming right for the two of them), pulling Holly by the hand, which was still curled from the fierce grip she’d had on the sock. She looked down, saw the danger, and drew in a breath.

“Don’t scream,” he told her. “Can’t risk anything else falling down. Just climb.”

He began to pull her up the stairs. After the first four or five she was able to climb on her own, but they were going backward in order to keep an eye on the worms, which were still spilling from the outsider’s cloven head. Also from the teardrop mouth.

“Stop,” she whispered. “Stop, look at them, they’re just milling around. They can’t get up the steps. And they’re starting to die.”

She was right. They were slowing down, and a great heap of them near the outsider wasn’t moving at all. But the body was; somewhere inside it, the animating force was still trying to live. The Bolton-thing humped and jerked, arms waving in a kind of semaphore. As they watched, the neck shortened. The remains of the head began to draw into the collar of the shirt. Claude Bolton’s black hair at first stuck up, then was gone.

“What is it?” Holly whispered. “What are they?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Ralph said. “I only know that you’ll never have to buy a drink for the rest of your life, at least when you’re with me.”

“I rarely drink alcohol,” she said. “It goes badly with my medicine. I think I told you tha—”

She abruptly leaned over the rail and vomited. He held her while she did it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. Let’s—”

“Get the frack out of here,” she finished for him.

22

Sunlight had never felt so good.

They got as far as the Chief Ahiga sign before Holly said she felt lightheaded and had to sit down. Ralph found a flat rock that was big enough for both of them, and sat beside her. She glanced at the sprawled body of Jack Hoskins, made a desolate squeaking sound, and began to cry. At first it came out in a series of choked, reluctant sobs, as if someone had told her it was terribly wrong to weep in front of another person. Ralph put an arm around her shoulders, which felt sadly thin. She buried her face against the front of his shirt and began to sob in earnest. They had to get back to Yune, who might have been more badly hurt than it had seemed—they had been under fire, after all, hardly the time to make an accurate diagnosis. Even at best, the man had a broken elbow and a dislocated shoulder. But she needed at least a little time, and she had earned it by doing what he, the big detective, had been unable to do.

Within forty-five seconds, the storm had begun to lessen. In a minute, it was over. She was good. Strong. Holly looked up at him, eyes red and swimming, but Ralph wasn’t entirely sure she knew at first where she was. Or who he was, for that matter.

“I can’t do it again, Bill. Not ever. Ever ever ever! And if this one comes back the way Brady did, I’ll kill myself. Do you hear me?”

He shook her gently. “He’s not coming back, Holly. I promise you.”

She blinked. “Ralph. I meant to say Ralph. Did you see what came out of his… did you see those worms?”

“Yes.”

“Oough! Oough!” She made a retching noise, and covered her mouth.

“Who told you how to make a blackjack out of a sock? And how hard it can hit if the sock is one of the long ones? Was it Bill Hodges?”

Holly nodded.

“What was it loaded with?”

“Ball bearings, just like Bill’s. I bought them in the Walmart automotive department, back in Flint City. Because I can’t use guns. I didn’t think I’d have to use the Happy Slapper, either, it was only an impulse.”

“Or an intuition.” He smiled, although he was hardly aware of it; he still felt numb all over, and kept looking around to make sure none of those worms were squirming after them, desperate to survive in a new host. “Is that what you call it? The Happy Slapper?”

“It’s what Bill called it. Ralph, we have to go. Yune—”

“I know. But I have to do something first. Sit where you are.”

He went to Hoskins’s body and made himself hunt through the dead man’s pockets. He found the keys to the pickup truck and returned to Holly. “Okay.”

They started down the path. Holly stumbled once and he grabbed her. Then it was his turn to almost go down, and it was she grabbing him.

Like a couple of damn cripples, he thought. But after what we saw—

“There’s so much we don’t know,” she said. “Where he came from. If those bugs were a disease or maybe even some kind of alien life-form. Who his victims were—not just the children he killed, but the ones who got blamed for the killings. There must have been a lot of them. A lot. Did you see his face at the end? How it changed?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. He would never forget it.

“We don’t know how long he lived. How he could project himself. What he was.”

“That much we do know,” Ralph said. “He—it—was El Cuco. Oh, and something else: the sonofabitch is dead.”

23

They were most of the way down the path when a horn began to beep in short blasts. Holly stopped, biting at lips which had already taken a lot of abuse.

“Relax,” Ralph said. “I think that’s Yune.”

The path was wider now, and less steep, so they were able to move faster. When they came around the storage shed, they saw it was indeed Yune, sitting half in and half out of Hoskins’s pickup, beeping the horn with his right hand. His swollen and bloody left arm lay in his lap like a log.

“You can quit that now,” Ralph said. “Mother and Father are here. How are you?”

“My arm hurts like blue fuck, but otherwise I’m okay. Did you get him? El Cuco?”

“We got him,” Ralph said. “Holly got him. He wasn’t human, but he died, just the same. His days of killing children are over.”

“Holly got him?” He looked at her. “How?”

“We can talk about that later,” she said. “Right now I’m more concerned about you. Have you passed out? Are you lightheaded?”

“I got a little dizzy walking over here. Seemed to take forever, and I had to rest a couple of times. I was hoping I’d meet you coming out. Praying, more like it. Then I saw this truck. Must belong to the shooter. John P. Hoskins, according to the registration. Is he who I think he is?”

Ralph nodded. “Of the Flint City police. And it’s was. He’s dead, too. I shot him.”

Yune’s eyes widened. “What the hell was he doing here?”

“The outsider sent him. How he managed that I have no idea.”

“I thought he might have left the keys, but no joy on that. And nothing for pain relief in the glove compartment, either. Just the registration, his insurance card, and a bunch of crap.”

“I’ve got the keys,” Ralph said. “They were in his pocket.”

“And I’ve got something for pain,” Holly said. She reached into one of the voluminous side pockets of her beat-up suit coat and brought out a large brown prescription bottle. It was unlabeled.

“What else have you got in there?” Ralph asked. “A camp stove? Coffee pot? Shortwave radio?”

“Work on that sense of humor, Ralph.”

“That’s not me being funny, that’s true admiration.”

“I concur most heartily,” Yune said.

She opened her traveling pharmacy, dumped an assortment of pills into her palm, and put the bottle carefully down on the truck’s dashboard. “These are Zoloft… Paxil… Valium, which I rarely take anymore… and these.” She carefully slid the rest of the pills back into the bottle, saving out two orange ones. “Motrin. I take it for tension headaches. Also for TMJ pain, although that’s better since I started using a night guard. I have the hybrid model. It’s expensive but it’s the best one on the…” She saw them looking at her. “What?”

Yune said, “Just more admiration, querida. I love a woman who comes prepared for all eventualities.” He took the pills, swallowed them dry, and closed his eyes. “Thank you. So much. May your night guard never fail you.”

She looked at him doubtfully as she stored the bottle back in her pocket. “I have two more when you need them. Have you heard any fire sirens?”

“No,” Yune said. “I’m starting to think they’re not coming.”

“They will,” Ralph said, “but you won’t be here when they arrive. You need to go to the hospital. Plainville’s a little closer than Tippit, plus the Bolton place is on the way. You’ll need to stop there. Holly, will you be okay driving if I stay here?”

“Yes, but why…” Then she hit her forehead lightly with the palm of her hand. “Mr. Gold and Mr. Pelley.”

“Yes. I have no intention of leaving them where they fell.”

“Messing up a crime scene is generally frowned on,” Yune said. “As I think you know.”

“I do, but won’t allow two good men to cook in the hot sun and next to a burning vehicle. Do you have a problem with that?”

Yune shook his head. Droplets of sweat shone in the bristles of his Marine-style haircut. “Por supuesto no.”

“I’ll drive us around to the parking lot, and then Holly can take over. Are you getting any relief from that Motrin, amigo?”

“I am, actually. It ain’t great, but it’s better.”

“Good. Because before we get rolling, we have to talk.”

“About?”

“About how we’re going to explain this,” Holly said.

24

Once they were in the parking lot, Ralph got out. He met Holly coming around the hood of the truck, and this time it was she who hugged him. It was brief but strong. The rental SUV had mostly burned itself out, and the smoke was thinning.

Yune moved—carefully, with several winces and hisses of pain—into the passenger seat. When Ralph leaned in, he said, “You’re sure he’s dead?” Ralph knew it wasn’t Hoskins he was asking about. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. He didn’t exactly melt like the Wicked Witch of the West, but close. When the shit hits the fan out here, they’re going to find nothing but his clothes and maybe a bunch of dead worms.”

“Worms?” Yune frowned.

“Based on how fast they were dying,” Holly said, “I think the worms will decay very rapidly. But there will be DNA on the clothes, and if they should happen to run it against Claude’s, they could get a match.”

“Or a mix of Claude’s and Terry’s, because his change-over wasn’t complete. You saw that, right?”

Holly nodded.

“Which would make it worthless. I think Claude is going to be all right.” Ralph took his cell phone from his pocket and put it in Yune’s good hand. “You’ll be okay to make the calls as soon as you start getting some bars?”

“Claro.”

“And you know the order of the calls?”

As Yune ticked them off, they heard faint sirens coming from the direction of Tippit. Someone had noticed the smoke after all, it seemed, but the person who saw it hadn’t bothered to come and investigate himself. Which was probably good. “DA Bill Samuels. Then your wife. Chief Geller after that. Finishing up with Captain Horace Kinney of the Texas Highway Patrol. All the numbers are in your contacts. The Boltons we talk to in person.”

“I’ll talk to them,” Holly said. “You’re going to sit still and rest your arm.”

“Very important Claude and Lovie get on board with the story,” Ralph said. “Now go on. If you’re still here when the fire trucks arrive, you’ll be stuck.”

With the seat and the mirror adjusted to her satisfaction, Holly turned to Yune and to Ralph, still leaning in the passenger door. She looked tired but not exhausted. Her tears had passed. He saw nothing on her face but concentration and purpose.

“We need to keep this simple,” she said. “As simple and as close to the truth as we can get.”

“You’ve been through this before,” Yune said. “Or something like it. Haven’t you?”

“Yes. And they will believe us, even if they’re left with questions that can never be answered. You both know why. Ralph, those sirens are getting closer and we have to go.”

Ralph closed the passenger door and watched them drive away in the dead Flint City detective’s pickup. He considered the hardpan Holly would have to cross in order to avoid the chain, and thought she’d manage it just fine, skirting the worst of the holes and washes in order to spare Yune’s arm. Just when he thought he couldn’t admire her more… he did.

He went to Alec’s body first, because it was the harder one to retrieve. The vehicle fire was almost out, but the heat radiating from it was fierce. Alec’s face and arms had blackened, his head had been burned bald, and as Ralph grabbed him by the belt and began hauling him toward the gift shop, he tried not to think of the crispy bits and melted gobbets that were being left behind. And of how much Alec now looked like the man who had been at the courthouse that day. All he needs is the yellow shirt over his head, Ralph thought, and that was too much. He let go of the belt and managed to stagger twenty paces before bending over, grasping his knees, and throwing up everything in his stomach. When that part was done, he went back and finished what he had started, dragging first Alec and then Howie Gold into the shade of the gift shop.

He rested, getting his breath back, then examined the shop’s door. It was padlocked, but the door itself looked weather-worn and flimsy. The second time he hit it, the hinges gave way. The interior was shadowy and explosively hot. The shelves were not entirely empty; a few souvenir tee-shirts emblazoned with I EXPLORED THE MARYSVILLE HOLE still remained. He took two and shook off the dust as best he could. Outside, the sirens were very close. Ralph thought they wouldn’t want to drive their expensive equipment across the hardpan; they’d stop to cut the chain, instead. He still had a little time.

He knelt and covered the faces of the two men. Good men who had fully expected to have years of life left in front of them. Men with families who would grieve. The only good thing (if there was anything good about it) was that their grief would not become a monster’s meal.

He sat beside them, forearms resting on his knees, chin on his chest. Was he responsible for these deaths, too? Partly, perhaps, because the chain always led back to that catastrophically unwise public arrest of Terry Maitland. But even in his exhaustion, he felt he did not need to own all of what had happened.

They will believe us, Holly had said. And you both know why.

Ralph did. They would believe even a shaky story, because footsteps didn’t just end and there was no way maggots could hatch inside a ripe cantaloupe with its tough skin intact. They would believe because to admit any other possibility was to call reality itself into question. The irony was inescapable: the very thing that had protected the outsider during its long life of murder would now protect them.

No end to the universe, Ralph thought, and waited in the shade of the gift shop for the fire trucks to arrive.

25

Holly drove to the Boltons’ sitting upright, hands on the wheel at ten and two, listening as Yune made the calls. Bill Samuels was horrified to learn that Howie Gold and Alec Pelley were dead, but Yune cut off his questions. There would be time for questions and answers later, but that time was not now. Samuels was to re-interview all the witnesses who had been previously questioned, beginning with Willow Rainwater. He was to tell her straight out that serious questions had been raised about the identity of the man she had taken from the strip club to the train station in Dubrow. Was she still sure that person had been Terry Maitland?

“Try to question her in a way that plants doubts,” Yune said. “Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Samuels said. “I’ve been doing it in front of juries for the last five years. And based on her statement, Ms. Rainwater already has a few. So do the other witnesses, especially since that tape of Terry at the convention in Cap City went public. It’s got half a million hits just on YouTube. Now tell me about Howie and Alec.”

“Later. Time is tight, Mr. Samuels. Talk to the wits, starting with Rainwater. And something else: the meeting we had two nights ago. This is muy importante, so listen up.”

Samuels listened, Samuels agreed, and Yune moved on to Jeannie Anderson. That call was longer, because she both needed and deserved a fuller explanation. When he finished, there were tears, but perhaps mostly of relief. It was awful that men had died, that Yune himself had been injured, but her man—and her son’s father—was okay. Yune told her what she needed to do, and Jeannie agreed to do it immediately.

He was preparing to make the third call, to FC Chief of Police Rodney Geller, when they heard more sirens, this time approaching. Two Texas Highway Patrol cars blasted by them, headed for the Marysville Hole.

“If we’re lucky,” Yune said, “maybe one of those troops is the guy who talked to the Boltons. Stape, I think his name was.”

“Sipe,” Holly corrected. “Owen Sipe. How’s your arm?”

“Still hurts like blue fuck. I’m gonna take those other two Motrin.”

“No. Too much all at once can damage your liver. Make the other calls. But first go to Recents and delete the ones you made to Mr. Samuels and Mrs. Anderson.”

“You would have made a hell of a crook, señorita.”

“Just being careful. Prudente.” She didn’t look away from the road. It was empty, but she was that kind of driver. “Do it, then make the rest of your calls.”

26

It turned out that Lovie Bolton had some old Percocets for back pain. Yune took two of them instead of the Motrin, and Claude—who had taken a first aid course during his third and last stretch in prison—bandaged his wound while Holly talked. She did so rapidly, and not just because she wanted to get Lieutenant Sablo some real care. She needed the Boltons to understand their part in this before anyone official showed up. That would be soon, because the officers from the Highway Patrol would have questions for Ralph, and he would have to answer them. At least there was no disbelief here; Lovie and Claude had felt the presence of the outsider two nights ago, and Claude had been feeling him even before that: a sense of disquiet, dislocation, and being watched.

“Of course you felt him,” Holly said grimly. “He was plundering your mind.”

“You saw him,” Claude said. “He was hiding in that cave, and you saw him.”

“Yes.”

“And he looked like me.”

“Almost exactly.”

Lovie spoke up, sounding timid. “Would I have known the difference?”

Holly smiled. “At a glance. I’m sure of it. Lieutenant Sablo—Yune—are you ready to go?”

“Yes.” He stood up. “One great thing about hard drugs—everything still hurts, but you don’t give a shit.”

Claude burst out laughing and pointed a finger-gun at him. “You got that right, brother.” He saw Lovie frowning at him and added, “Sorry, Ma.”

“You understand the story you have to tell?” Holly asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Claude said. “Too simple to screw up. The Flint City DA is thinking of re-opening the Maitland case, and you-all came down here to question me.”

“And you said what?” Holly asked.

“That the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it wasn’t Coach Terry I saw that night, just someone who looked like him.”

“What else?” Yune asked. “Very important.”

Lovie answered this time. “The bunch of you stopped by this morning to say goodbye, and to ask if there was anything we might have forgotten. While you were getting ready to leave, there was a phone call.”

“On your landline,” Holly added, thinking, Thank God they still have one.

“That’s right, on the landline. The man said he worked with Detective Anderson.”

“Who spoke to him,” Holly said.

“That’s right. The man told Detective Anderson the fellow you-all were looking for, the real killer, was hiding out in the Marysville Hole.”

“Stick to that,” Holly said. “And thank you both.”

“We are the ones who should be thanking you,” Lovie said, and held out her arms. “You come here, Miss Holly Gibney, and give old Lovie a hug.”

Holly went to the wheelchair and bent down. After the Marysville Hole, Lovie Bolton’s arms felt good. Necessary, even. She stayed in their embrace as long as she could.

27

Marcy Maitland had grown exceedingly wary of callers since her husband’s public arrest, not to mention his public execution, so when the knock came at her door, she first went to the window, twitched aside the drapes, and peeped out. It was Detective Anderson’s wife on the stoop, and it looked like she had been crying. Marcy hurried to the door and opened it. Yes, those were tears, and as soon as Jeannie saw Marcy’s concerned face, they started again.

“What is it? What’s happened? Are they all right?”

Jeannie stepped in. “Where are your girls?”

“Out back under the big tree, playing cribbage with Terry’s board. They played all last night and started again early this morning. What’s wrong?”

Jeannie took her by the arm and led her into the living room. “You might want to sit down.”

Marcy stood where she was. “Just tell me!”

“There’s good news, but there’s also terrible news. Ralph and the Gibney woman are all right. Lieutenant Sablo was shot, but they don’t believe it’s life-threatening. Howie Gold and Mr. Pelley, though… they’re dead. Shot from ambush by a man my husband works with. A detective. Jack Hoskins is his name.”

“Dead? Dead? How can they be—” Marcy sat heavily in what had been Terry’s easy chair. It was either that or fall down. She stared up at Jeannie uncomprehendingly. “What do you mean, good news? How can there be… Jesus, it just keeps getting worse.”

She put her hands over her face. Jeannie dropped to her knees beside the chair and pulled them away, gently but firmly. “You need to get yourself together, Marcy.”

“I can’t. My husband’s dead, and now this. I don’t think I’ll ever be together again. Not even for Grace and Sarah.”

“Stop it.” Jeannie’s voice was low, but Marcy blinked as if she had been slapped. “Nothing can bring Terry back, but two good men died to redeem his name and give your girls a chance in this town. They have families, too, and I’ll have to talk to Elaine Gold after I leave here. That’s going to be awful. Yune has been hurt, and my husband risked his life. I know you’re in pain, but this part is not about you. Ralph needs your help. So do the others. So pull yourself together and listen.”

“All right. Yes.”

Jeannie lifted one of Marcy’s hands and held it. The fingers were cold, and Jeannie supposed her own weren’t much warmer.

“Everything Holly Gibney told us was true. There was an outsider, and he wasn’t a man. He was… something else. Call him El Cuco, call him Dracula, call him the Son of Sam or of Satan, it doesn’t matter. He was there, in a cave. They found him and killed him. Ralph told me he looked like Claude Bolton, although the real Claude Bolton was miles away. I talked to Bill Samuels before I came over here. He thinks that if we all tell the same story, everything will be okay. It’s likely we can clear Terry’s name. If we all tell the same story. Can you do that?”

Jeannie could see hope filling Marcy Maitland’s eyes like water filling a well.

“Yes. Yes, I can do that. But what is the story?”

“The meeting we had was only about trying to clear Terry’s name. Nothing else.”

“Just about clearing his name.”

“At that meeting, Bill Samuels agreed to re-interview all the witnesses Ralph and the other officers questioned, starting with Willow Rainwater and working backward. Right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“The reason he couldn’t start with Claude Bolton is that Mr. Bolton is in Texas, helping out with his mother, who’s not well. Howie suggested that he, Alec, Holly, and my husband should go down there and question Claude. Yune said he would join them if possible. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” Marcy said, nodding rapidly. “We all thought that was an excellent idea. But I don’t remember why Ms. Gibney was at the meeting.”

“She was the investigator Alec Pelley hired to check on Terry’s movements in Ohio. She got interested in the case, so she came down to see if she could give further assistance. Remember now?”

“Yes.”

Holding Marcy’s hand, looking into Marcy’s eyes, Jeannie gave her the last and most important part. “We never discussed shape-changers, or el cucos, or ghostly projections, or anything that might be called supernatural.”

“No, absolutely not, it never crossed our minds, why would it?”

“We thought that someone who looked like Terry killed the Peterson boy and tried to frame him for it. We called this person the outsider.”

“Yes,” Marcy said, squeezing Jeannie’s hand. “That’s what we called him. The outsider.”