“That’s a crock.”

“Sorry, I’ll shut up now.”

“I’d appreciate that. I really don’t need the ‘voices’ symptom, thanks.”

“You’ve still got the monster-trailer hallucination outside.”

“I thought you were going to shut up.”

“Sorry, that’s the last you’ll hear from me. Really.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“You said…”

“Sorry.”

So without voices all she had to deal with was the hallucination. The trailer was still sitting there, but admittedly, it just looked like a trailer. Molly could imagine trying to tell the shrink at county about it when they admitted her.

“So you saw a trailer?”

“That’s right.”

“And you live in a trailer park?”

“Yep.”

“I see,” the shrink would say. And somewhere between those two little words the judgment would be pronounced: crazy.

No, she wasn’t going to go that route. She would confront her fears and go forward, just as Kendra had in The Mutant Slayer: Warrior Babes II. She grabbed her sword and left her trailer.

The sirens had subsided now, but she could still see an orange glow from the explosion. Not a nuclear blast, she thought, just some sort of accident. She strode across the lot and stopped about ten feet away from the trailer.

Up close, it looked—well, it looked like a damn trailer. The door was in the wrong place, on the end instead of the side, and the windows were frosty, as if they’d iced over. There was a thin patina of soot over its entire length, but it was a trailer. It didn’t look like a monster at all.

She stepped forward and ventured a poke with her sword. The aluminum skin of the trailer seemed to shy away from the sword point. Molly jumped back.

A warm wave of pleasure swept through her body. For a second she forgot why she had come out here and let the wave take her. She poked the trailer again, and again the pleasure wave washed over her, this time even more intense. There was no fear, no tension, just the feeling that this was exactly where she should be—where she should always have been. She dropped her sword and let the feeling take her.

The frosty layer on the trailer’s two end windows seemed to lift, revealing the slitlike pupils of two great golden eyes. Then the door began to open, not from side to side, but splitting itself in the middle and opening like a mouth. Molly turned on her heel and ran, wondering even as she went why she hadn’t just stayed there by the trailer where everything felt so good.

Estelle was wearing a leather fedora, a pair of dark sunglasses, a single lavender sock, and a subtle and satisfied smile. Sometime after her husband had died—after she’d moved to Pine Cove and started taking the antide-pressants, after she’d stopped coloring her hair or giving a damn about her wardrobe—Estelle had vowed that no man would ever see her naked again. At the time, she considered it a fair trade: carnal pleasures, of which there were few, for guilt-free cookies, of which there were many. Now, having broken that vow and lying in her feather bed next to this sweaty, stringy old man, who was teasing her left nipple with his tongue (and who didn’t seem to mind that said nipple was leading her breast over her arm rather than jutting skyward like the cupola on the Taj Mahal), Estelle felt like she understood, at last, the Mona Lisa’s smile. Mona had been getting some, and she had her cookies too.

“You are some storyteller,” Estelle said.

A spidery black hand crawled up her thigh and parked an index finger moistly on her pleasure button—just settled there—and she shuddered. “I didn’t finish,” Catfish said.

“You didn’t? Then what was all that ‘Hallelujah, Lord, I’m comin home!’ followed by the barking?”

“I didn’t finish the story,” Catfish said, his enunciation remarkably clear, considering he didn’t miss a lick.

Harmonica player, Estelle thought. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”

And she didn’t. One minute they were sipping spiked tea and the next there was an explosion and she had her mouth locked over his, moaning into him like a saxophonist playing passion.

“You didn’t see me fightin you,” Catfish said. “We got time.”

“We do?”

“Sho‘, but you gonna have to pay my way now. You done chased the Blues off me and I feels like they ain’t never comin back. I’m out a job.”

Estelle looked down to see Catfish grinning in the soft orange light and grinned herself. Then she realized that they hadn’t lit any candles, and she didn’t have any orange lights. Somewhere in the tussle between the kitchen and the bedroom, amid the tossing of clothes and groping of flesh, they had turned the lights out. The orange glow was coming through the window at the foot of the bed.

Estelle sat up. “The town is on fire.”

“It is in here,” Catfish said.

She pulled the sheets up to cover herself. “We need to do something.”

“I got an idea a somethin we can do.” He moved his spidery fingers and her attention was taken away from the window.

“Already?”

“Seem soon to me too, girl, but I’m old and this could be my last one.”

“That’s a cheery thought.”

“I’m a Bluesman.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. Then she rolled over on him and stayed there, off and on, until dawn.

Nine

When Mikey “the Collector” Plotznik wheeled into town and saw that the Texaco station had blown up, leaving a charred circle two hundred yards wide around it, he knew that it was going to be a great day. It was a shame about the burger stand going up too, and he’d miss their spicy fries, but hey, you don’t often get to see the toasting of a major landmark like the Texaco. The fire was all out now, but several firemen were still sifting through the wreck-age. The Collector waved to them as he wheeled by. They waved back, somewhat reticently, for the Collector’s reputation preceded him and made them nervous.

Today would be the day, Mikey thought. The Texaco was an omen, the star in the sky over his lifelong dream. Today he’d catch Molly Michon naked, and when he did (and brought back the proof), his reputation would grow to mythic proportions. He patted the disposable camera he carried in the front pouch of his hooded sweatshirt. Oh yes, he’d have evidence to back up his story. They would believe him—and bow to him.

At this point in his life, the Collector was more interested in explosions than in naked women. He was only ten, and it would be a couple of years before his interests moved to girls. Freud never identified a stage of devel-opment known as “pyrotechnic fascination,” but that was only because there wasn’t an abundant supply of disposable lighters in nineteenth-cen-tury Vienna. Ten-year-old boys blow shit up. It’s what they do. But today a strange new feeling had come over Mikey, a feeling he couldn’t put a word to, but if he could, the word would have been “horny.” As he Rollerbladed through town, tossing the Los Angeles Times into the shrubs and gutters of businesses along Cypress Street, he felt a tightness in his shorts that until now he had associated with having to take a raging pee in the morning. Today it signified a need to see the Crazy Lady in a state of undress.

Paperboys are the carriers of preadolescent myth. On every paper route, there is a haunted house, a kid-eating dog, an old woman who tips with twenties, and a woman who answers the door in the nude. Mikey had never actually seen any of these things, but that never stopped him from spinning wild stories for his buddies at school. Today he would get proof, he could feel it in his loins.

He skated down the driveway into the Fly Rod Trailer Court, chucked a paper into the rose bushes in front of Mr. Nunez’s trailer, then made a beeline for the Crazy Lady’s house. He could see a blue glow coming through her windows, a TV. She was home and awake. Yes!