"Why bother calling? I"ll just yell up through the heating duct."

"Don"t forget," she warned him. "You ever heard the line "h.e.l.l hath no fury like a woman scorned"?"

Forget? Phil nearly laughed. Yeah, like I"m gonna forget I have a date with you."You needn"t worry, Ms. Ryder. In fact I"ll have my itinerary director mark it down on my calendar, posthaste."

"Posthaste, my a.s.s," she came back. "Don"t stand me up."

Jesus, she"s serious, Phil realized.

"And speaking of getting stood up, I think we"ve both been," Susan said.

"What?"

"The chief. He"s really late."

"You"re right," Phil agreed when he noted the clock again. Chief Mullins was a lot of things-arrogant, biased, stubborn, crotchety. But there was one thing he wasn"t: late.

"He"s got a radio in that big land yacht of his, right?" Phil asked. "Try giving him a call."

"Good idea." Susan keyed her base station mike. "Two-zero-one, relay Signal 3 immediately."

The only reply was static.

"Two-zero-one, do you copy?"

Nothing.

"Chief Mullins? Do you copy?"

Still, no reply.

"To h.e.l.l with this," Phil said and got up, grabbing the cruiser keys. "I"m gonna go look for him. Something"s not right here." But before he made it to the back door, Susan called out, "Wait! He just came on line."

Phil stepped quickly into the commo cove. Mullins" voice, even more gravelly through the airwaves, was grumbling, "...yeah, Susan, I"m 10-20"d north on 154, just past Hockley"s Swamp..."

"We were getting a little worried. Are you all right? Do you need a.s.sistance?"

"You might say that-Christ. Is Phil still at the station?"

"Yeah, Chief, he"s right here."

"Good. I want you to lock the place up and get out here," Mullins directed. "But first, Susan, I want you to get several pairs of plastic gloves, some forceps, and a handful of evidence bags." Static crackled through his next pause. "And tell Phil to bring a Signal 64 report."

Holy s.h.i.t, Phil thought.

Susan turned off the base station. Her face looked grim. "You heard him," she said as she opened the small drawer they kept their evidence collection materials in.

Yeah, I heard him, all right. Phil then, just as grimly, went to the file cabinet and retrieved a Signal 64 form, otherwise known as a Uniform Jurisdictional Standard Report for Homicide.

"What in the name of..."

Phil didn"t go to the trouble of finishing. In the name of what, exactly? What, he wondered in fragments. Could possibly. Describe. This?

Susan, standing right beside him, gaped down into the ragged ravine, while Mullins lingered several yards off, facing away. He looked on the verge of displacing his last meal into the woods.

If he hadn"t already.

The corpse glistened, scarlet hands locked in rigor. A few flies peppered the gore-sheened head; it took Phil a few solid moments of staring before he could even discern it as human. The chief, his bulbous face going pallid, was pointing to the flat front-right tire on his Caddy and explaining "...so just when I come around the bend, I get a blowout. Brand-new friggin" tire, too. And anyway, I"m lugging the jack out of the trunk, I turn to take a spit in the ravine, and the first thing I see is that."

h.e.l.l of a way to start the day, Phil thought. His stomach felt as though it were shrinking to something the size of a prune as he looked more closely. It was still early; the sun hadn"t yet cleared the ridge, which left them in dappled shade. This lent a strange purplish hue to the corpse"s glittery scarlet. At first Phil surmised that the body was merely nude and covered in blood, but when he stooped over, hands on knees, he realized it was something far worse than that.

"My G.o.d," Susan croaked. "It looks like it"s been-"

"Skinned," Phil finished. "And a humdinger of a job, too. This is some serious, calculated work here, Chief."

"Tell me about it."

The corpse lay in the ravine as if haphazardly dropped there, its arms and legs canted at impossible angles. Probably pushed out of a moving car, Phil guessed, though he pitied the poor chump who had to clean the car out afterward. Sinew, tendons, and even veins remained flawlessly intact along the flensed musculature. "Yeah," Phil mumbled. "Somebody really did the job on this guy...if it even is a guy."

This observation was pertinent; though the corpse appeared to possess a male frame, its obvious loss of genitalia left its gender in question. And there was no hair either-it had been scalped. What remained of its head grinned back liplessly at them, a crimson meaty lump.

"It"s a guy," Mullins said. He pointed ten yards to his right. "Those ain"t a woman"s duds."

Further along the ravine, Phil spotted clothing-a pair of men"s straight-leg jeans, a large flannel shirt, and a pair of decent-looking cowboy boots-strewn about as recklessly as the corpse. Then Susan, squinting, noticed something else.

"Is that a wallet lying there, too?" she asked.

"Yeah," Mullins said. "That"s why I wanted you to bring gloves and evidence gear. Check it out."

Both Phil and Susan slipped on pairs of polyvinyl evidence gloves, and approached the strewn garments. A braided wallet sat next to one of the boots. Susan knelt and, very gingerly, opened the wallet with a pair of Ballenger forceps. "No cash," she discerned. "But-"

Just as gingerly, then, she slipped out something else.

"Driver"s license," Phil noted. "Not surprising."

Mullins, in spite of his obvious nausea, grew excited. "Ain"t that some luck? We got an instant ID."

"It"s not luck, Chief," Phil said. "This is a hit, and I"ll bet my next paycheck it"s drug-related."

"How the h.e.l.l do you know that?" Mullins testily asked.

"It"s protocol for dealers," Susan told him. "They left the wallet on purpose."

"Exactly," Phil added and shook open an evidence bag. "Whoever did this wants the word to get around that this guy got whacked. I saw stuff like this every other day on Metro."

"Jake Dustin Rhodes," Susan read the name off the license. "Waynesville address." Then she dropped the license into the bag.

"And I"ll bet another paycheck," Phil went on, "that this guy"s got dope busts on his record."

"You seem to know an awful lot," Mullins grumbled. "I still don"t know what you"re driving at."

Phil frowned. He kept forgetting that this wasn"t the city anymore. "This guy Rhodes is a cowboy, ten to one, and some other cowboys did this to him for moving on their turf. This is how dealers put the word out: deal on our territory, and this will happen to you."

"That"s a h.e.l.l of a way to leave a message," Mullins commented.

"Yeah, but it always works." Phil bagged the wallet next, and then he and Susan began putting the clothes into larger evidence bags. "On Metro, they"d do this all the time, decapitations, dismemberments, blow-torch jobs, then leave the body with the ID so word will get around. This guy was dealing dope on somebody else"s territory. And since they left the body within Crick City town limits, we can safely a.s.sume that the territory in question is Crick City itself."

"Natter," Mullins said.

"It"s a good bet, unless your previous intelligence is wrong."

"It ain"t wrong. It all fits." Mullins pulled out his bag of Red Man, grimaced, then put it back. "I"ll bet that sick, ugly f.u.c.ker had one of his Creekers do this."

"Let"s not jump the gun just yet. We still gotta check everything out. I could be wrong. I just doubt that I am."

Mullins ran a squab hand over his pasty face. Phil sympathized; Mullins was a down-home, laid-back town police chief-he didn"t know how to deal with situations like this, and since the office of police chief was an elected post in Crick City, that was a further worry. Mutilation, murder, drug a.s.sa.s.sinations came as alien to Chief Mullins as bottles of Seagrams at MADD meetings. Mullins was trying hard not to fall apart, and he wasn"t doing too keen a job of it. He didn"t want to look weak in front of his employees, which presented a side of the man-vulnerability-that Phil had never fathomed.

"I-I gotta wait for the M.E.," Mullins wavered. Every time he glanced into the ravine, he looked like he might keel over. "You two get back to the station and start a rundown on this Rhodes character."

"I"ll wait with you, Chief," Phil offered. "Help you change that tire."

"No, get on back, the both of you. I ain"t a baby, you know. I been at this business since you were wearing diapers."

"Look, Chief, I"m not saying you"re a baby, for G.o.d"s sake. But you"re obviously a little shaken up."

"I ain"t shaken up," Mullins insisted. He steeled himself then, and stuffed a chaw of the Man into his cheek. "Take the evidence back to the station," he ordered. "Run a rap check on Rhodes. And whatever either of you do, don"t tell anyone about this, not the county cops, not the state, not any-f.u.c.king-body. We"re not town clowns, you know. We"re a police department just as good as anyone else, and I don"t want some outside agency hogging our case. This is our problem, and we"re gonna be the ones who fix it."

"Chief, look-"

"Get on back to the station with Susan," Mullins commanded, more resolutely this time. "I"m your boss, so don"t give me no lip. You don"t like it, go work someplace else."

"Got"cha, Chief," Phil obeyed. "See you in awhile."

He and Susan put the evidence bags in the trunk, and without further word, took the cruiser back down the Route. In the rearview, Mullins" discomposed reflection shrank as they drove away: a fat, old, broken man.

"I"ve never seen him like that before," Susan said from behind the wheel. "He was in pieces."

"It"s hard for him to cope with-s.h.i.t-getting out to change a flat and finding somebody skinned in his juris? He just doesn"t want to let on that he"s shook up. And he"s right about one thing. We can handle this ourselves. We don"t need the county cops wiping our noses."

"Yeah, but-"

"But what?" Phil asked.

Susan"s pretty face looked in complete disarray as she steered the cruiser through the Route"s weaving bends. "This is serious business, Phil."

"We"ll handle it."

"I mean, Christ, you saw what they did to that guy. Who could possibly do something like that?"

"Psychopaths, that"s who. The only thing worse than a psychopath is a psychopath who"s a businessman. Drugs are just like any other business: you succeed by cutting out the compet.i.tion. I guarantee, the people who did the job on that guy, it was all in a day"s work to them. They don"t give a s.h.i.t."

And then, without any warning at all, as his hair sifted in the breeze from the window and the first streams of sunlight peeked gloriously over the ridge, the most macabre question occurred to him.

What the h.e.l.l did they do with the guy"s skin?

Thirteen.

Both Phil and Susan got out of the station by noon. Mullins had returned earlier, after fixing his flat and signing the corpus of one Jake Dustin Rhodes off to the morgue; it hadn"t taken the M.E. very much time to officially p.r.o.nounce Rhodes dead. It was hard to be much deader...

Phil"s estimation had been right on the mark; Susan"s rap check on Rhodes had revealed a profusion of arrests, convictions, suspended sentences (famous in this state), and even some time in the county slam-all for possession, distribution, and sales of PCP. He"d even been held as a suspect in a couple of drug-related murder investigations but had been released due to insufficient evidence. The world would not miss Jake Dustin Rhodes. After being a cop for a decade now, Phil was not surprised by the sense of detachment that overcame him shortly after seeing the state of the corpse; the sensibility went along with the job: when you see dead people, you don"t take it personally, and when you see dead drug-dealers, you care even less. Nor was Phil surprised by the strange and accelerated manner in which this narcotics investigation had bloomed. For weeks he"d been on the case and uncovered nothing to suggest a PCP operation in Crick City. Yet now, and literally overnight, he had Eagle Peters with a PCP history, a missing person named Orndorf with a PCP history, and a corpse named Rhodes with a PCP history. Another aspect of police work-sheer spontaneity-that he was well used to by now. Dumb luck was frequently a cop"s most reliable friend.

"Don"t forget our date tomorrow," Susan reminded him when they both got out at Old Lady Crane"s boardinghouse.

Are you kidding me? He"d sooner forget his name. "I know, h.e.l.l hath no fury like a dispatcher scorned."

"See you at work tonight," she said, skipping up the old carpeted stairs.

Phil smiled in spite of his fatigue, and walked down the first-floor hall to his own room. He felt a numb elation; he hadn"t been on a real "date" in some time. And what pleased him much more was the growing attraction he felt for Susan. It seemed easy and honest, not just his physical attraction to her-each day, though, she did seem even more beautiful, her eyes more blue, her hair more silken, her physique more alluring-but his personal attraction as well; he liked her in too many ways he could name, and she clearly liked him. I must be doing something right, he gave himself credit. Why would she want to go out with me if she didn"t think I was a cool guy?

Right now, though, he was a tired guy. Night shifts skewed his metabolism to begin with, and worse was the fact that, thanks to today"s unavoidable overtime, he was getting to bed hours later than he was used to. The simple prospect of sleep never seemed more luxurious as he closed and locked his door and began to undress.

He only had one wish.

No dreams today, okay, Mr Sandman? No nightmares.

The dreams were subtly haunting him now. It seemed that the instant he dozed off, his mind took him back to that byway of his childhood. Like a grainy, ill-exposed movie: his ten-year-old self wandering through the humid, vine-tangled woods. The little Creeker girl, pretty in spite of her deformities, running away into the blistering sun. The high hill surrounded by dying gra.s.s that was as tall as he was, and atop the hill- The House.

Christ...

And its marred, narrow windows set into whitewashed wood. Windows like eyes glaring straight into the throbbing heart of the nightmare itself...

He hung up his gunbelt in the closet, unfastened his badge and pulled off his shirt. A moment ago he"d been in a great mood-now it was ruined. The nightmare festered even when he was awake; it sabotaged him. Why should he remain so obsessed with the memory? That had all been over two decades ago, if it had even been real at all. I should see a shrink, he considered. It wasn"t fully a joke. The nightmare was stressing him out now, making raids on his sleep, and pecking at his waking thoughts like some demented, needle-beaked grackle gorging on a pile of delectable worms. It was now to the point that, exhausted as he was, he felt afraid to go to bed. For he knew the specter would be waiting to feast on more of his memory, the grim, blade-sharp images of the things he thought he"d seen in the House that day...

Jesus Christ, can"t you quit thinking about that s.h.i.t! he hollered at himself. What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you, you basketcase!

And at the end of this self-explosive thought, the tiniest rap of knuckles sounded at the door. His mind felt so disarranged at that moment, he didn"t even at first contemplate who it might be. Susan, maybe. Maybe she forgot to tell him something. Or maybe it was his landlady, or Mullins. But when he answered the door he saw, in smothered shock, that it was none of these people.

"h.e.l.lo, Phil," came the subdued and slightly sultry voice. Slightly sultry, yes, but more than slightly familiar, Phil gulped as if swallowing dry oatmeal.

"h.e.l.lo...Vicki," he replied.