Bobby said, "Hey, you want to try something?"

Ned said, "I guess. I don't know."

Bobby pulled an envelope out of his pocket, a small manilla envelope. He rattled it. "Surprise."

"What's that?" the boy asked.

He opened the envelope and showed the contents to the boy.

"The hell's that?"

Inside were two dozen bits that looked like rock candy.

"It's sweet," Bobby said.

Billy gently shook the envelope until three or four spilled into the boy's hand. He lifted them and smelled.

"Don't smell like much."

"Yep."

"We're gonna eat fucking candy?"

"Sure, why not?"

Billy and Bobby each took one. The boy lifted his palm to his lips but they touched his wrist. Billy on the right, Bobby on the left. "Uh-uh. Just one at a time."

"Huh?"

"Just one."

The boy dropped the others back into the envelope. Then lifted the single crystal to his mouth. He ate it slowly.

"It is sweet. It's-" He stopped speaking. His eyes went wide then suddenly his lids drooped. "Man," he whispered. "This is totally fresh. Man." He brushed at his ears as if they were clogged, a dumb grin on his face. "What the fuck is this?" His words faded into a giggle. "Man. Excellent."

They knew what was happening-how the soft cotton was expanding into the crevices of his mind, the warmth, the coming feeling starting at the fingertips and flowing along the skin like a woman laying slowly, slowly down on your body, dissolving into a warm liquid, flowing, melting…

"You happy?" Bobby asked.

The boy giggled. "Man." He opened his mouth and inhaled as if he were tasting air.

Billy caught his brother's eye and a slight nod passed between them. Bobby closed up the envelope and slipped it into the boy's jeans pocket, where his hand lingered for a long moment.

9

The third on his list. The R &W Trading Post on Route 9, which the poker-playing boys had been kind enough to suggest to him, was the one. The time was 9 a.m. and a faded sign promised the place was open.

Pellam parked the camper in the small lot and walked back along the shoulder, which was gravelly and strewn with flattened Bud cans and cello wrappers from junk food. Occasional cars and pickups zipped past and he felt the snap of their slipstream.

The Trading Post stretched away behind a gray, broken stockade fence, which was decorated with some of the artifacts that were waiting to be traded: A rusted Mobil gas sign, a blackface jockey hitching post, a cracked wagon wheel, a whiskey aging barrel, an antique wheelbarrow, a dozen hubcaps, a bent plow, a greasy treadle sewing machine mechanism. If R &W had put the premier items here in the window Pellam wasn't too eager to see what lay behind the fence.

But that didn't interest him anyway. What had caught his attention was what rested at the far end of the lot, where the chain-link gate opened onto the secrets of the Trading Post: the rental car responsible for Marty's death.

There was a small shack in front of the fence. It leaned to the left at a serious angle, like a Dogpatch residence. When Pellam knocked no one answered. He strolled over to the jetsam of the car.

The wreck was scary, the way bad ones always are-seeing the best Detroit can do, no longer glossy and hard, but twisted, with stretch marks deep in the steel. The front half was pretty much intact but in the back the paint was all blistered or missing and it was filled with black, melted plastic. Pellam could see the gas tank had blown up. The metal had bent outward like foil. Inside of the car nothing remained of the seats except springs and one or two black tufts of upholstery, sour as burnt hair.

Then he found the holes.

At first, he wasn't sure-there were so many perforations in the car. Parts where the metal had burned clean through, dents and triangular wounds where shrapnel from the tank had fired outward. But, crouching down, studying the metal, he found two holes that were rounder than the others, about a third of an inch in diameter. Just the size of a.30 or.303 bullet-which wasn't to say that some hunters or kids hadn't left the holes there after they found the wreck (Pellam himself had spent a number of lovely, clandestine afternoons playing Bonnie and Clyde with his father's Colt.45 automatic and an abandoned 1954 Chevy pickup). But still-

"Help you?"

Pellam rose slowly and turned.

The man was in his thirties, rounding in the belly, wearing overalls and a cowboy hat. He had a moonish face and weird bangs.

"Howdy," Pellam offered.

"To yourself," the man said, grinning. His hands were slick with grease and he wiped them ineffectually with a wad of paper towels.

"This your place?"

"Yep. I'm the R of R &W. Robert. Well, Bobby I go by."

"Got a lot of interesting stuff here, Bobby."

"Yep. Used to be all Army-Navy but surplus ain't what it used to be."

"That a fact?" Pellam said.

"You don't get the deals you used to. My daddy, owned the place before us, he'd buy some all-right from Uncle Sam. Compasses, Jeep parts, tires, clothes. World War Two, you know. Bayonets, Garands, M-1s. Originals, I'm talking. I'm talking creosote and oil paper."

The man's eyes strayed to the wreck. "I got a better set of wheels, you're interested."

"Nope, just happened to notice it."

"I bought it from a garage over in Cleary. A hundred bucks. There'll be something under the hood I'm thinking I can salvage, then sell 'er to somebody for scrap. Could clear three hundred… But if you're not after a vehicle what would you be looking for?"

"Just sight-seeing."

"You're not from around here," Bobby said, "but your, you know, accent. Sounds familiar."

"Born over in Simmons. Only about fifty miles away."

"Got a cousin lives there." The man walked back toward the shack. "You need any help, just holler. I don't mark prices on nothing, too much trouble but you see something you take a liking to we'll work something out. I'll listen to any reasonable offer."

"Keep that in mind."

"You price stuff too high," Bobby explained, "people just aren't going to buy it. Never make money unless you make a sale."

"Good philosophy."

This time it was the sheriff himself.

Pellam hadn't even set foot on the asphalt of Main Street before the man was next to him. He smelled of Old Spice or some kind of drugstore aftershave. Unlike the deputies he was tall and thin, like a hickory limb. He wasn't wearing any Cool-Hand Luke law enforcer sunglasses either.

"How you doing today, sir?"

Sir, again.

He was wearing that smile, that indescribable smile the whole constabulary seemed to have. Like Moonies.

Pellam stepped out of the camper and answered, "Not bad. How 'bout yourself?"

"Getting by. Hectic this time of year. Crazy, all these people come looking at colored leaves. I don't get it myself. I'm thinking maybe we should open a travel agency here, take tours of people into Manhattan to look at all the concrete and spotlights."

Pellam grinned back.

"Name's Tom Sherman." They shook hands.

"Guess you know me," Pellam said.

"Yessir, I do."

"You're back in town now," Pellam pointed out. "I heard you were away."

"Some personal business. How you feeling, sir, after your little accident?"

"Stiff is all."

"Wanted to let you know, we probably wouldn't be inclined to cite Mrs Torrens for anything. Unless you were thinking of filing a complaint…"

Pellam was shaking his head. "No. She's taken care of the medical bills. I'm not looking to make a profit."

"Well, I think that's fair, sir. You don't see much of that. I was reading in TIME about people suing people over all sorts of things. This woman-I saw this on TV-Sixty Minutes maybe, I don't recall. This woman, what she did was she opened this package of cereal and there was a dead mouse inside and she sued the company and got, I don't know, a half million dollars. She didn't eat it or anything. She just looked at it. She said she had dreams about mice for a year. That a crock, or what?"