Sheriff John Burton was prepared for a confrontation with DEA agents, he was prepared for a high-speed escape, he was even prepared for a shoot-out with Mexican drug dealers, if it came to that. He prided himself on being tough and adaptable and thought himself superior to other men be-cause of his cool response to pressure. He was, however, not prepared to see a Mercedes cruise by with a Labrador retriever at the wheel. His Uber-mensch arrogance shriveled as he stared gape-jawed at the passing Mercedes. It made an erratic turn at the next corner, bouncing off a curb before disap-pearing behind a hedge.

He wasn’t the sort of man who doubted his own perceptions—if he saw it, he saw it—so his mind dropped into politician mode to file the experi-ence. “That right there,” he said aloud, “is why I will never support a bill to license dogs to drive.”

Still, political certainties weren’t going to count for much if he didn’t get to Betsy Butler and find out what had happened to his prized drug mule. He pulled a U-turn and headed back to the Coast Highway, where he found himself looking a little more closely than usual at the drivers in oncoming cars.

There were thirty of them all together. Six stood side by side at the cave entrance; the rest crowded behind them, trying to get a look inside. Molly recognized the one doing the talking, she was the ditzy waitress from H.P.‘s cafe. She was in her mid-twenties, with short blonde hair and a figure that promised to go pear-shaped by the time she hit forty. She wore a white choir robe over jeans and aerobics shoes.

“You’re Betsy from H.P.‘s, right?” Molly asked, leaning on her broadsword.

Betsy seemed to recognize Molly for the first time, “You’re the craz—”

Molly held up her sword to hush the girl. “Be nice.”

“Sorry,” said Betsy. “We’ve been called. I didn’t expect you to be here.”

Two women stepped up beside Betsy, the pastel church ladies that Molly had chased away from the dragon trailer. “Remember us?”

Molly shook her head. “What exactly do you all think you are doing here?”

They looked to each other, as if the question hadn’t occurred to them before this. They craned their necks and squinted into the cathedral chamber to see what was behind Molly. Steve lay curled up in the dark at the back of the chamber, sulking.

Molly turned and spoke to the back of the chamber. “Steve, did you bring these people here? What were you thinking?”

A loud and low-pitched whimper came out of the dark. The crowd at the entrance murmured among themselves. Suddenly a man stepped for-ward and pushed Betsy aside. He was in his forties and wore an African dashiki over khakis and Birkenstocks, his long hair held out of his face with a beaded headband. “Look, man, you can’t stop us. There’s something very special and very spiritual happening here, and we’re not going to let some crazy woman keep us from being part of it. So just back off.”

Molly smiled. “You want to be a part of this, do you?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” the man said. The others nodded behind him.

“Fine, I want you all to empty your pockets before you come in here. Leave your keys, wallets, money, everything outside.”

“We don’t have to do that,” Betsy said.

Molly stepped up and thrust her sword into the ground between the girl’s feet. “Okay then, naked.” Molly said.

“What?”

“No one comes in here unless they are naked. Now get to it.”

Protests arose until a short Asian man with a shaved head shrugged off his saffron robes, stepped forward, and bowed to Molly, thus mooning the rest of the group.

Molly shook her head dolefully at the monk. “I thought you guys had more sense.” Then she turned to the back of the cave and shouted, “Hey, Steve, cheer up, I brought home Chinese for lunch.”

Twenty-six

Val and Gabe entered the bar, then stepped out of the doorway and stood by the blinking pinball machine while their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Val wrinkled her nose at the hangover smell of stale beer and cigarettes; Gabe squinted at the sticky floor, looking for signs of interesting wild life.

Morning was the darkest part of a day at the Head of the Slug Saloon. It was so dark that the dingy confines of the bar seemed to suck light in from the street every time someone opened the door, causing the daytime regu-lars to cringe and hiss as if a touch of sunshine might vaporize them on their stools. Mavis moved behind the bar with a grim, if wobbly, determin-ation, drinking coffee from a gar-goyle-green mug while a Tarryton extra long dangled from her lips, dropping long ashes down the front of her sweater like the smoking turds of tiny ghost poodles. She went about setting up shots of cheap bourbon at the empty curve of the bar, lining them up like soldiers before a firing squad. Every two or three minutes an old man would enter the bar, bent over and wearing baggy pants—leaning on a four-point cane or the last hope of a painless death—and climb onto one of the empty stools to wrap an arthritic claw around a shot glass and raise it to his lips. The shots were nursed, not tossed back, and by the time Mavis had finished her first cup of coffee, the curve of the bar looked like the queue to hell: crooked, wheezing geezers all in a row.

Refreshments while you wait? The Reaper will see you now.

Occasionally, one of the shots would sit untouched, the stool empty, and Mavis would let an hour pass before sliding the shot down to the next daytime regular and calling Theo to track down her truant. Most often, the ambulance would slide in and out of town as quiet as a vulture riding a thermal, and Mavis would get the news when Theo cracked the door, shook his head, and moved on.

“Hey, cheer up,” Mavis would say. “You got a free drink out of it, didn’t you? That stool won’t be empty for long.”

There had always been daytime regulars, there always would be. Her new crop started coming in around 9 A.M., younger men who bathed and shaved every third day and spent their days around her snooker table, drinking cheap drafts and keeping a laser focus on the green felt lest they get a glimpse of their lives. Where once were wives and jobs, now were dreams of glorious shots and clever strategies. When their dreams and eyesight faded, they filled the stools at the end of the bar with the day-time regulars.

Ironically, the aura of despair that hung over the day-time regulars gave Mavis the closest thing to a thrill she’d felt since she last whacked a cop with her Louisville Slugger. As she pulled the bottle of Old Tennis Shoes from the well and poured it down the bar to refill their shot glasses, a bolt of electric loathing would shoot up her spine and she would scamper back to the other end of the bar and stand there breathless until her stereo pacemakers brought her heartbeat back down from redline. It was like tweaking death’s nose, sticking a KICK ME sign on the head of a cobra and getting away with it.

Gabe and Val watched this ritual without moving from their spot by the pinball machine. Val was cautious, just waiting for the right moment to move to the bar and ask if Theo had called. Gabe was, as usual, just being socially awkward.

Mavis retreated to her spot by the coffeepot, presumably out of death’s reach, and called down to the couple. “You two want something to drink, or you just window-shopping?”

Gabe led them down the bar. “Two coffees please.” He looked quickly to Val for her approval, but she was fixated on Catfish, who was seated across from Mavis near the end of the bar. Just beyond him was another man, an incredibly gaunt gentleman whose skin was so white it appeared translucent under the haze of Mavis’s cigarette smoke.

“Hello, uh, Mr. Fish,” Val said.

Catfish, who was staring at the bottom of a shot glass, looked up and forced a smile through a face betraying hangdog sorrow. “It’s Jefferson,” he said. “Catfish is my first name.”