"Yeah?"

"Tonight when you"re on the job?"

"Yeah?"

Mullins chuckled. "Try not to kill more than ten people, huh? Would ya do that?"

Phil drove home numb. Morning sunlight glared like a great blade-an annoying scimitar-across the windshield. Only now were the realities sinking in. He"d killed men last night, a lot of men. Eagle had been killed.

And he"d nearly been killed himself.

All that adrenalin left him hungover now. He felt jittery, dry-mouthed. Two pinpoint headaches buzzed behind his eyes as he drove the Malibu down the Route, and he could swear his heart was still skipping beats in the aftermath of split-second terror.

When he parked at the boardinghouse and got out, he instinctively glanced up at Susan"s window. Her curtains were drawn. She"s asleep by now, he realized, and this depressed him. He wanted to sleep with her, not to make love, just to...sleep. After the frenzy of last night, he didn"t want to be by himself.

I want to be with her, he thought sappily.

Should he go up to her room right now and knock on her door? Should he wake her? Would she mind?

It didn"t matter; Phil never got the chance.

Just as he was about to go up the stairs to her room, the faintest sound wisped from down the darkened hall.

A moan.

Phil turned.

Something sat huddled right beside his door.

Susan?he stupidly thought. No, it wasn"t Susan.

The huddled figure moaned again. When Phil realized it was Vicki-and that something was very wrong-he ran down the hall to help her.

He knelt down; her hand reached out.

"Good G.o.d, Vicki. What happened?"

She was only partly conscious when he helped her up. Her hair was disarrayed, her clothes were torn, and when Phil looked at her face- Oh, Christ, no...

-he could tell at once that she"d been beaten.

"Calm down," Phil said, gingerly daubing at the cut on her forehead. "It"s not as bad as it looks."

Vicki flinched for probably the hundredth time. "That hurts, Phil!"

"Hey, I ain"t Dr. Kildare, the alcohol is going to sting a little-"

"A little? Jesus!"

"-but you don"t want it to get infected. So pipe down and let me do this," Phil finished. There hadn"t been much blood, and the bruises weren"t too severe. It was easy, though, to see what had happened. Yeah, somebody gave her a pretty good knocking around, he observed. But why?

"How did you get here?" Phil asked, next applying a Band-Aid over the small cut.

"I walked," she said.

"All the way from Sallee"s?"

She nodded groggily.

"That"s some haul." Phil sat down on the edge of the bed while Vicki lay back on the couch holding a cold wet rag over her eyes. "How do you feel? Are you dizzy? Confused? Are you seeing double or anything like that?"

"Just tired mostly," she murmured and sighed. "It was a long night."

I guess it was. For you and me both. "Yeah, well, come on. I better take you to the hospital."

"No, no-"

"Vicki, it"s a good idea. You could have a concussion or something."

"I don"t have a concussion," she complained rather testily. "I just got slapped around a little, no big deal. Just-" She sighed again. "Just let me lie here for a little while. Is that okay?"

"Sure," Phil said. Actually, it wasn"t okay-what if Susan found out she was here? What would he say? How could he possibly explain it? But he couldn"t very well throw her out. Something serious had happened, and Phil wanted to know what. I"ll just let her calm down a little, he decided. Susan had cla.s.ses this afternoon before work.She can sleep on the couch till Susan goes to school. Then I"ll figure out how to get her out of here.

"So," he got on to the next question. "What happened?"

"It"s a long story, Phil. You don"t want to hear it."

"You"re right, I probably don"t, but tell me anyway. Did your husband do this to you?"

She relaxed back on the couch with her feet up. Her jeans looked scuffed. Her blouse had been ripped open; she feebly clasped it together with her hand but not very effectively. Phil could see almost all of one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Since I married Cody, he"s kind of held me in reserve," she said. "He stopped making me turn regular tricks."

"He made you his top-drawer, in other words," Phil suggested, remembering how things worked on the street when he was with Metro. Pimps got prestige by "marrying" their most marketable women and charging more for them.

"Yeah," she affirmed. "He"d save me for the bigger money tricks. Anyway, last night after my set at Sallee"s, he wanted me to do a six-way with three guys and two of the Creeker dancers. I had no choice. If I didn"t do it, Cody would"ve beat the s.h.i.t out of me."

"So who did beat the s.h.i.t out of you?"

She paused as if to quell something. "Christ, you should"ve seen these guys, they were three bikers who ran dust north of Waynesville. Some friends of Cody"s. They just came off a big drop and were loaded with cash. Things got out of hand pretty fast; they were all smoking flake and doing c.o.ke at the same time."

"Bad combination," Phil said.

"Tell me about it. Anyway, these guys were kinks, and they started beating up on the two Creeker girls. Cody doesn"t mind so long as they don"t bust them up too bad. Lotta guys pay extra to rough them up. But these guys-s.h.i.t. They got to beating up on the two Creekers like really hard. So I started to pitch a fit, and when they wouldn"t stop, I tried to leave."

"So it was the three bikers who beat you up."

"No," she said. "It was Druck. He slapped me around and threw me right back in the room. Told me I shouldn"t embarra.s.s Cody in front of his friends."

"Jesus," Phil commented. Then he took the mark. "So how is it that Cody"s friends with out-of-town dust dealers?"

She shrugged. "They spend a lot of money in the club."

"That the only reason?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Was she lying? Was she hiding something? Phil couldn"t tell. Maybe she doesn"t even know that Natter"s the main dust supplier in the area. "I don"t know," he eventually said. "It just seems strange."

Vicki let out a quick, cynical laugh. "The whole thing"s strange, Phil. Christ... I could tell you things you wouldn"t believe."

"Try me."

"Just forget it, okay? I don"t feel like talking about it right now."

Phil looked at her. So maybe that means she"ll feel like talking about it later, he considered.

"You know something, Vicki? You"re flushing your whole life down the toilet with people like that. Being married to Natter, working in his club. You"re just a curio to him, you know. You"re just status."

"I know." She laughed humorlessly again. "The top-drawer wh.o.r.e. The White Trash Queen of the Creekers."

"So why don"t you do something about it? That whole Creeker scene is crazy. Why don"t you leave Natter? Go somewhere else, start over and try to get your s.h.i.t together?"

"Phil, you don"t even know what you"re saying. If I did that..."

"What? He"d send people after you? He"d kill you if you left him?"

She made no reply.

"Well, let me tell you something, he"s killing you right now, and you don"t even realize it. The only way you"re ever going to make your life better is to get away from him."

"I don"t need a lecture, Phil," she said wearily.

"You need something," he pressed. "As long as you"re running with Natter and his crowd, you aren"t going anywhere but down."

"Don"t you think I know that!" she almost yelled. "Don"t you think I know what"s happened to me! My whole life has been s.h.i.t since the day you left town ten years ago!"

"Calm down," he said. "I just want you to start thinking about things a little more, about what you"re going to do with your life. And you can"t blame me for your problems. Yeah, I left town, that"s true, but I"m not the one who puts c.o.ke up your nose and makes you turn tricks at a strip joint."

"I know," she said much more quietly.

Phil got off her case and let her collect herself. Then he asked, "So where was Natter last night when all this s.h.i.t was happening with the three bikers?"

"He was out. Somewhere-don"t know."

Yeah, well I think I do, Phil felt sure. I think maybe your darling hubby was sending his Creeker boys out for a little party in the woods. Killing Eagle. Trying to kill me. But, of course, he couldn"t tell her anything about that...

He let more silence pa.s.s, looking at her. He felt helpless. She wasn"t part of his life anymore; nevertheless he hated to see her like this. He hated what Natter was doing to her. But what could he do to help her?

Nothing, he concluded. The only person who could help her was herself "Look, I"m really sorry about dumping myself here," she said. "I didn"t know where else to go. I better leave now."

"Stay here," he said. "Sleep on the couch. Get some rest for now. You can figure out what you"re going to do later."

"Thank you," she whispered. Her voice was trailing away. "Thank you..."

Then she was asleep.

Phil turned off the light, drew the shades, then quietly undressed and got into his bed. In minutes, he too was fast asleep.

And dreaming.

Twenty-Five.

"Look-it, look-it," Dawnie urged, hunched behind him and pushing at his shoulders.

Phil"s ten-year-old eye opened wide over the first keyhole. What he saw at first was just a stark, white glare; his eye, going from the hot dark of the third-floor hall to such glaring whiteness, needed time to adjust. But eventually his vision focused, and he could see.

He could see what was inside the room...

It was like a hole in the wall to h.e.l.l.

In the room lay a sunlit bed. It was big and white. And on the bed lay some weird kind of motion Phil couldn"t figure out at first.

Shapes.

Shapes the color of skin.

One shape was a bearded man with a big hairy belly. He had long hair and was buck-naked.

"Suzie, Suzie," he was saying.

Then Phil noticed the other shape on the bed. A woman- "Suzie, Suzie..."

She had hair on her head that was blacker than Phil"s aunt"s fire hearth. Her skin was whiter than their front yard the time last winter when it snowed.