Mavis sat another beer in front of Robert and counted his money on the bar. “Very smooth,” she said. “You’ve got four bucks left to your name.”

Robert looked up. Rachel was almost to the door. “Rachel!”

She turned and waited, an elegant hand on an exquisite hip.

“I’m staying at The Breeze’s trailer.” He told her the phone number. “Call me, okay?”

Rachel smiled. “Okay, Robert, I’ll call.” She turned to walk out.

Robert called out to her again. “You haven’t seen The Breeze, have you?”

Rachel grimaced. “Robert, just being in the same room with The Breeze makes me want to take a bath in bleach.”

“Come on, he’s a fun guy.”

“He’s a fun-gus,” Rachel said.

“But have you seen him?”

“No.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Call me.”

“I will.” She turned and walked out. When she opened the door, light spilling in blinded Robert. When his vision returned, a little man in a red stocking cap was sitting next to him. He hadn’t seen him come in.

To Mavis the little man said, “Could I trouble you for a small quantity of salt?”

“How about a margarita with extra salt, handsome?” Mavis batted her spider-lashes.

“Yes, that will be good. Thank you.”

Robert looked the little man over for a moment, then turned away to watch the pool game while he contemplated his destiny. Maybe this job for Rachel was his way out. Strange, though, things didn’t seem to be bad enough yet. And the idea that Rachel could be his fairy godmother in disguise made him smile. No, the downward spiral to salvation was going quite nicely. The Breeze was missing. The rent was due. He had made enemies with a crazed Mexican drug dealer, and it was driving him nuts trying to figure out where he had seen the stranger at the pool table.

The game was still going strong. Slick was running the balls with machinelike precision. When he did miss, the stranger cleared the table with a series of impossible, erratic, curving shots, while the crowd watched with their jaws hanging, and Slick broke into a nervous sweat.

Slick McCall had been the undisputed king of eight ball at the Head of the Slug Saloon since before it had been called the Head of the Slug. The bar had been the Head of the Wolf for fifty years, until Mavis grew tired of the protests of drunken environmentalists, who insisted that timber wolves were an endangered species and that the saloon was somehow sanctioning their killing. One day she had taken the stuffed wolf head that hung over the bar to the Salvation Army and had a local artist render a giant slug head in fiberglass to replace it. Then she changed the sign and waited for some half-wit from the Save the Slugs Society to show up and protest. It never happened. In business, as in politics, the public is ever so tolerant of those who slime.

Years ago, Slick and Mavis had come to a mutually beneficial business agreement. Mavis allowed Slick to make his living on her pool table, and in return, Slick agreed to pay her twenty percent of his winnings and to excuse himself from the Slug’s annual eight-ball tournament. Robert had been coming into the Slug for seven years and in that time he had never seen Slick rattled over a pool game. Slick was rattled now.

Occasionally some tourist who had won the Sheep’s Penis Kansas Nine-Ball tournament would come into the Slug puffed up like the omnipotent god of the green felt, and Slick would return him to Earth, deflating his ego with gentle pokes from his custom-made, ivory-inlaid cue. But those fellows played within the known laws of physics. The dark stranger played as if Newton had been dropped on his head at birth.

To his credit, Slick played his usual methodical game, but Robert could tell that he was afraid. When the stranger sank the eight ball in a hundred-dollar game, Slick’s fear turned to anger and he threw his custom cue across the room like a crazed Zulu.

“Goddammit, boy, I don’t know how you’re doing it, but no one can shoot like that.” Slick was screaming into the stranger’s face, his fists were balled at his sides.

“Back off,” the stranger said. All the boyishness drained from his face. He could have been a thousand years old, carved in stone. His eyes were locked on Slick’s. “The game is over.” He might have been stating that “water is wet.” It was truth. It was deadly serious.

Slick reached into the pocket of his jeans, fished out a handful of crumpled twenties, and threw them on the table.

The stranger picked up the bills and walked out.

Slick retrieved his stick and began taking it apart. The daytime regulars remained silent, allowing Slick to gather his dignity.

“That was like a fucking bad dream,” he said to the onlookers.

The comment hit Robert like a sock full of birdshot. He suddenly remembered where he had seen the stranger. The dream of the desert came back to him with crippling clarity. He turned back to his beer, stunned.

“You want a margarita?” Mavis asked him. She was holding a baseball bat she had pulled from under the bar when things had heated up at the pool table.

Robert looked to the stool next to him. The little man was gone.

“He saw that guy make one shot and ran out of here like his ass was on fire,” Mavis said.

Robert picked up the margarita and downed its frozen contents in one gulp, giving himself an instant headache.

Outside on the street Travis and Catch headed toward the service station.

“Well, maybe you should learn to shoot pool if you’re going to get money this way.”

“Maybe you could pay attention when I call a shot.”

“I didn’t hear you. I don’t understand why we just don’t steal our money.”

“I don’t like to steal.”

“You stole from the pimp in L.A.”

“That was okay.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Stealing is immoral.”

“And cheating at pool isn’t?”

“I didn’t cheat. I just had an unfair advantage. He had a custom-made pool cue. I had you to push the balls in.”

“I don’t understand morality.”

“That’s not surprising.”

“I don’t think you understand it either.”

“We have to pick up the car.”

“Where are we going?”

“To see an old friend.”

“You say that everywhere we go.”

“This is the last one.”

“Sure.”

“Be quiet. People are looking.”

“You’re trying to be tricky. What’s morality?”

“It’s the difference between what is right and what you can rationalize.”

“Must be a human thing.”

“Exactly.”

10

AUGUSTUS BRINE

Augustus Brine sat in one of his high-backed leather chairs massaging his temples, trying to formulate a plan of action. Rather than answers, the question, Why me? repeated in his mind like a perplexing mantra. Despite his size, strength, and a lifetime of learning, Augustus Brine felt small, weak, and stupid. Why me?

A few minutes before, Gian Hen Gian had rushed into the house babbling in Arabic like a madman. When Brine finally calmed him down, the genie had told him he had found the demon.

“You must find the dark one. He must have the Seal of Solomon. You must find him!”

Now the genie was sitting in the chair across from Brine, munching potato chips and watching a videotape of a Marx Brothers movie.

The genie insisted that Brine take some sort of action, but he had no suggestions on how to proceed. Brine examined the options and found them wanting. He could call the police, tell them that a genie had told him that an invisible man-eating demon had invaded Pine Cove, and spend the rest of his life under sedation: not good. Or, he could find the dark one, insist that he send the demon back to hell, and be eaten by the demon: not good. Or he could find the dark one, sneak around hoping that he wasn’t noticed by an invisible demon that could be anywhere, steal the seal, and send the demon back to hell himself, but probably get eaten in the process: also, not good. Of course he could deny that he believed the story, deny that he had seen Gian Hen Gian drink enough saltwater to kill a battalion, deny the existence of the supernatural altogether, open an impudent little bottle of merlot, and sit by his fireplace drinking wine while a demon from hell ate his neighbors. But he did believe it, and that option, too, was not good. For now he decided to rub his temples and think, Why me?