"Steve Ribbon's your sheriff, right?"

"Yep, sure is."

"And Hammerback Ellison, he's Harrison County sheriff? They're both up for reelection next fall."

The dividing line between what he should say and what he shouldn't had always been blurry for Jim Slocum. "Yep. I believe so. I'm not sure they're running."

Watkins wiped a wave of sweat off his forehead. That was the smell, Slocum recognized. Sweat. Not onions. Watkins grinned. "Lotta folk say Steven Ribbon's bubble's a little off-plumb."

Slocum's eyes weaseled away from Watkins's and he studied the spine of Modern Sociopathology. "I don't know about that."

"Naw, I suppose you wouldn't." Watkins smiled like he'd hit a hole in one. "Well, you want to make this more'n what it is -"

"Hey -"

"That's your all's business." Then the smile left his face and he said, "With only one killing and on these facts it's way too early to know what you've got. You need more information."

"Can't you give us some idea, going on the assumption it's a cult?"

"I can give you the textbook profile for a classic cult killer if you want. But don't take it to the bank. I've got no idea whether it applies or not."

"I understand that. Sure."

"That said, you want me to go ahead?"

"Shoot." Slocum straightened up and flipped his notebook open. As he did so he glanced at the skull and had a passing thought. Where could a man get himself one of those?

"Dogit," Amos Trout said. "Why'd it have to happen just now?"

"Always the way. You oughta -"

"Can't afford a new one. You gotta patch her."

Trout stood with the mechanic in the left bay of the Oakwood Mall's Car-Care Centre, looking down at the tub of water so grimy it might have come from Higgins Creek downstream of the old paper mill. In the tub was a Goodyear tire and out of its side was escaping a steady stream of greasy bubbles.

Trout, forty-four, was wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt. He had thinning hair, cut short and combed back. In his plastic pocket protector were three pens, a tiny calculator and a sales tax chart. Trout sold carpeting at Floors for All. He looked sadly at the bubbles. "What'll it cost for a patch?"

"Five seventy-five."

"I could do it myself, I was home," Trout said.

"You ain't home."

"Looks to be a pretty slow leak and she got me all the way here this morning. I could just pump her up and take my chances."

"You could. You wouldn't want to do that, without you had yourself a good spare. That's my opinion."

Trout wouldn't have been so concerned about the tire if after he closed up tonight he and the wife weren't driving up to Minnesota to catch big lazy muskies and sit in lawn chairs while they drank cocktails out of the back of their beige accordion Travel-All. And it was going to be four weeks before he got back to thirteen-ninety-five acrylic pile your choice of colors pad included free if you buy today.

"Plug her," he said. "And do a good job. I'm about to put some road under that Buick."

Four blessed weeks thank you Lord though I'm sorry about the wife part.

The tire man went to work. After a moment he held up a piece of glass like a Dodge City doctor who'd just extracted a bullet from a gun-slinger's arm. "There she be. You had steel belteds it wouldn't even've dented 'em."

Trout studied the glass. "I knew I picked up something. Tuesday night I was coming back late on 302. And you know that curve by the dam? Blackfoot Pond? Where everybody fishes?"

The mechanic slicked a plug with glue and began driving it into the puncture. "Uhn."

"Well, I went around the curve and this fellow comes running up right into my lane."

"Maybe your lights're on the blink. I could check -"

"They're fine except one high beam's out of whack."

"I can just -"

That's okay. And so I went off the road so's not to hit him. Wham bam just like that. He froze. I went over a beer bottle. You know it's those fishermen, they leave all kinds of crapola around. "They don't do that in Minnesota."

"They don't?"

Trout said, "Scared the living you know what out of me, seeing that fellow. He looked scared as I was."

"Don't blame him. I wouldn't wanta be Buick feed myself."

"Yessir." Trout looked at his watch. It was two o'clock. He paid for the plug. "You sell propane?"

"You got a tank, you can fill it."

"No, I mean for a Coleman."

"Naw, gotta go to the Outdoor Store for that."

"Guess I better. Long lunch hour today. But, hell with it, I'm almost on vacation."

The sound of the gears buzzing was just audible over the wind that hissed past his ears.

Jamie Corde upshifted as he came to the crest of the hill on Old Farm Road. Below him, a hazy mile away, the school sat in a field – tar-topped brick buildings squatting in a couple of acres of parking lots and lime-green grass.

This was his favorite stretch of road – a sharp decline of smooth asphalt, which if you caught it at the right time of day was pretty much traffic free. Although he now rode a fifteen-speed Italian racing bike, the boy often surged down this road on his old three-speed Schwinn, which was mounted with a speedometer. On a summer day with tires fat from the heat inflation he could hit fifty miles per hour before he had to brake for the stop light where Old Farm crossed Route 116.

He started downhill.

Jamie Corde loved to run and he was a ragingly fast runner, but he knew that nothing could beat the feeling of speed not of your own making – flying down a mountain of snow in Colorado or racing down a slope like this one, effortlessly, the gears ratcheting beneath your toe-clipped feet. As if the powers of nature were taking you someplace you couldn't find by yourself.

The bike was steady under his strong arms as the dotted centerline became a single gray blur. He leaned forward to cut the drag and concentrated on nothing but steering around patches of pebbles. He did not think of his mother or his sister, he did not think of his father. With the exception of a few images of Greg LeMond in the Tour de France, Jamie Corde thought of speed and speed only.

Halfway down the incline, to his enormous delight, he passed a car. True, it was an old Volkswagen diesel and it was being driven by someone who resembled Mrs. Keening, his antiquated Latin teacher. But it was nonetheless a car and he had outraced it, feeling with utter ecstasy the motion of the driver's head as she glanced at him with disapproving awe.

A half mile ahead at the foot of the hill lay the intersection. He noticed with disappointment that he had timed his assault on the slope wrong. If he had waited three or four minutes at the top and started his descent just as the stoplight had turned red, he might have arrived when it was green and he would have swept smoothly through. But the light was now changing to yellow. Route 116 was heavily trafficked and was favored by this particular light, which kept drivers on Old Farm Road waiting impatiently for long minutes.

He slowly squeezed the rear brake lever. Thonk. A sudden sensation. Something had struck his right calf. He believed he had hit a small animal – a field mouse or chipmunk – and it had been flung up against his leg by the hissing wheel. Almost simultaneously his hand on the brake lever began to cramp. He glanced at the handlebars and noticed that the lever was all the way to the metal.

Jamie looked down at the rear wheel. What had struck his leg had not been an animal. It was the rubber pad of the rear brake shooting from its housing. The metal seemed slightly bent and he realized with horror that when he had lifted the bike onto the pegs in the garage last night, he must have hit the steel jacket that held the pad, loosening it. His father had warned him a dozen times to be careful when he placed the bike on the wall; he continually ignored the advice.