“I’ve got to go find these guys,” Leander said. “Probably taking a siesta. What was Burton thinking when he put a house trailer down here? I’ll be back in a second.”

“Then what?”

“Then Ignacio will shoot you, I’m guessing.”

This was a first: a guy that actually did what you asked him to do. When she heard a car coming down the ranch road, she asked Steve to make himself look like a trailer and he had done it. Sure, she had to make a little box diagram in the air with her hands, and he missed the first time, trying to make himself look like the tin shed next to him, a miserable failure that resulted in only his head changing and making him look like a dragon wearing an aluminum bag over his head, but after a few seconds he got it. What a guy. Okay, his tail, which had always hung down into the creek bed before, was showing, but maybe no one would notice.

“What a guy,” she said, patting him on his air-conditioning unit. Or at least it was an air-conditioning unit now. No telling what body part it had been before he changed into a trailer.

She’s patting my unit, Steve thought. A low growl of pleasure rolled out of his front door.

Molly ran and hid behind the shed, peeking out to watch the white Volvo pull up and stop. She almost stepped out to say hi to Theo, then saw the other man in the car holding a gun on him. She listened as the bald guy led Theo into the shed and made some threats. She wanted to jump out and say, “No, Ignacio won’t be shooting anyone, Mr. Bald Guy. He’s busy being digested right now,” but the guy did have a gun. How the hell did Theo let himself be taken prisoner by someone who looked like an assistant principal?

When it was evident that the bald guy was coming out, she ran to the dragon trailer, caught the edge of the air-conditioning unit, and swung herself up onto the roof.

The bald guy was going around to the front door. She ran over Steve’s back and looked down over the edge.

“Miguel! Ignacio!” the bald guy yelled. “Get out here!” He seemed uncertain about going into the trailer.

“I saw them go in there,” Molly said.

The bald guy stepped back, looking like he was going to go into a fit searching for where the voice had come from.

“You’re an assistant principal, aren’t you?” Molly said.

The bald guy finally spotted her and tried to hide the gun behind his back. “You’re that crazy woman,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Molly scooched up to the edge of the dragon trailer. “‘Scuse me? Pardon me? Beg your pardon? I’m the what?”

He ignored her question. “What are you doing here?”

“Excuse me. Excuse me, excuse me,” she almost sang. “There is an as-yet-unapologized-for aspersion on the floor. You’ll have to handle that before we move on.”

“I’m not apologizing for anything. What are you doing here? Where are Ignacio and Miguel?”

“You’re not apologizing?”

“No. Get down from there.” He showed her the gun.

“‘Kay,” Molly said, patting Steve on the head/roof. “Steve, eat this impolite motherfucker.”

She’d seen it before, but it was especially exciting to be sitting on Steve’s head when he changed shape and his tongue leapt out below her to wrap around the assistant principal. After the initial slurp, the inevitable crunch (which had bothered her before) was sort of satisfying.

She couldn’t figure out if it was because the assistant principal had pointed a gun at her friend and called her a crazy woman, or if she was just getting used to it.

“That was just swell,” she said. She ran across Steve’s back, slid down to the top of the air-conditioning unit, then jumped to the ground.

Steve growled and the angles of his trailer form melted into the curves and sinew of his dragon shape. He rolled over on his side and Molly watched as the scales on his belly parted and seven feet of dragon penis emerged as thick and stiff as a telephone pole. Luminescent colors flashed up the length of the organ.

“Wow, that is impressive,” Molly said, taking a few steps backward.

Steve sent her a message similar to the one he had sent to the fuel truck. It worked better on Molly. Her knees went wobbly, a warm tingling ran up her thighs, and she could feel the pulse rising in her temples.

She looked into Steve’s eyes (well, one of them anyway), stepped up to his face and gently touched him on the lips (or what would have been lips, if he’d had them), and let the sweetly acrid smell of his breath (a mix of Old Spice, manly Mexicans, and barfed cow) wash over her.

“You know,” she said, “I never kissed a guy with assistant principal on his breath.”

Intimacies, what happens between two people in private (or one person and a Sea Beast in a pasture), are not the business of anyone but the parties involved. Still, for the sake of the voyeur in us all, a tidbit or two to satisfy curiosity…

Molly tried, made a valiant effort in fact, but even for a woman of such fine physical conditioning, the task was too great. She did, however, manage to locate near the shed a gas-powered weed-whacker (which the late drug chefs used to clear flammables from the area) and with firm but gentle application of that rude machine, and a little coaxing, was able to bring Steve to that state the French inscrutably call “the little death.”

And soon after, what at first seemed an insurmountable obstacle, the size difference, was turned to advantage, allowing Molly to join Steve in that place of peace and pleasure. How? Imagine a slow slide down a long, slippery bannister of a tongue, each taste bud a tease and tingle in just the right place, and you can understand how Molly ended up a satisfied puddle snuggled in that spot between his neck and shoulder that women so love. (Except in Steve’s case, it didn’t make his arm go to sleep.)

Yes, there was a bit of the awkwardness that comes with the unfamiliarity and exploration of new lovers, and

Theo’s Volvo was soundly smashed before Steve realized that rolling around on the ground was an inappropriate way to display his enthusiasm, but a boxy Swedish automobile is a small price to pay for passion in the great scheme of things.

And that is all you need to know about that.

Over the years, Theo had learned to forgive himself for having inappropriate thoughts at inappropriate times (imagining the widow naked at the funeral, rooting for a high death toll in Third World earthquakes, wondering whether white slavers provided in-house financing), but it worried him more than somewhat that, while hand-cuffed to a chair, waiting for his executioner, he was thinking about getting laid instead of escaping or making amends with his creator. Sure, he’d tried to get away, managing to do little more than tip the chair over and give himself a bug’s-eye view of the dirt floor, but shortly after that, when the voices outside had stopped, he was overtaken with thoughts of women he’d had and women he hadn’t, including an erotic mental montage of the erstwhile actress and resident Crazy Lady, Molly Michon.

So it was embarrassment as much as relief that he felt when, after the sound of a weed-whacker and the crashing of metal, Molly popped her head into the shed.

“Hi, Theo,” she said.

“Molly, what are you doing here?”

“Out for a walk.” She didn’t come in, just craned her head around the corner.

“You’ve got to get away from here, Molly. There’s some very dangerous guys around here.”

“Not a problem. You don’t want any help then?”

“Yes, go get help. But get away from here. There’s guys with guns.”

“I mean, you don’t want me to uncuff you or anything?”

“There’s no time.”