Fander removed another small bottle from his bag, this one unmarked.

'Aureomycin,' he said. 'Take one by mouth every six hours. But – mark this well, Mr Halleck – if you start having diarrhea, stop the antibiotic at once. In your state, diarrhea is a lot more apt to kill you than an infection from this wound.'

He snapped the bag shut and stood up.

'One final piece of advice that has nothing to do with your adventures in the Maine countryside. Get some potassium tablets as soon as possible and begin taking two every day – one when you get up, one when you go to bed. You'll find them at the drugstore in the vitamin section.'

'Why?'

'If you continue to lose weight, you will very soon begin to experience instances of heart arrhythmia whether you take Darvon or any other drug. This sort of arrhythmia comes from radical potassium depletion in the body. It may have been what killed Karen Carpenter. Good day, Mr Halleck.'

Fander let himself out into the first mild light of dawn.

For a moment he only stood there looking toward the sound of the ocean, which was very clear in the stillness.

'You really ought to get off whatever hunger strike you are on, Mr Halleck,' he said without turning around. 'In many ways the world is nothing but a pile of shit. But it can also be very beautiful.'

He walked toward a blue Chevrolet that was idling at the side of the building and got into the backseat. The car moved off.

'I'm trying to get off it,' Billy said to the disappearing car. 'I'm really trying.'

He closed the door and walked slowly back to the small table beside his chair. He looked at the medicine bottles and wondered how he was going to open them one-handed.

Chapter Twenty-one. Ginelli

Billy ordered a large lunch sent in. He had never been less hungry in his life, but he ate all of it. When he was done he risked taking three of Fander's Empirin, reasoning that he was putting them on top of a turkey club sandwich, french fries, and a wedge of apple pie that had tasted quite a bit like stale asphalt.

The pills hit him hard. He was aware that the pain transmitter in his hand had suddenly been reduced to a mere five thousand watts, and then he was cavorting through a feverish series of dreams. Gina danced across one of them, naked except for gold hoop earrings. Then he was crawling through a long dark culvert toward a round circle of daylight that always, maddeningly, stayed the same distance away. Something was behind him. He had a terrible feeling it was a rat. A very large rat. Then he was out of the culvert. If he had believed that would mean escape, he had been wrong – he was back in that starving Fairview. Corpses lay heaped everywhere. Yard Stevens lay sprawled in the middle of the town common, his own barber's shears driven deep into what remained of his throat. Billy's daughter leaned against a lamppost, nothing but a bunch of jointed sticks in her purple-and-white cheerleader's outfit. It was impossible to tell if she were really dead like the others or only comatose. A vulture fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. Its talons flexed once and its head darted forward. It ripped out a great swatch of her hair with its rotting beak. Bloody strands of scalp still clung to the ends, as clumps of earth cling to the roots of a plant which has been roughly pulled out of the ground. And she was not dead; Billy heard her moan, saw her hands stir weakly in her lap. No! he shrieked in this dream. He found he had the girl's slingshot in his hand. The cradle was loaded not with a ball bearing but a glass paperweight that sat on a table in the hall of the Fairview house. There was something inside the paperweight – some flaw – that looked like a blue-black thunderhead. Linda had been fascinated with it as a child. Billy fired the paperweight at the bird. It missed, and suddenly the bird turned into Taduz Lemke. A heavy thudding sound started somewhere – Billy wondered if it was his heart going into a fatal spell of arrhythmia. I never take it off, white man from town, Lemke said, and suddenly Billy was somewhere else and the thudding sound was still going on.

He looked stupidly around the motel unit, at first thinking this was only another locale in his dreams.

'William!' someone called from the other side of the door. 'Are you in there? Open this up or I'm gonna break it in! William! William!'

Okay, he tried to say, and no sound came out of his mouth. His lips had dried and gummed shut. Nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It was Ginelli.

'William? Will … Oh, fuck.' This last was in a lower I'm-talking-to-myself voice, and was followed by a thump as Ginelli threw his shoulder against the door.

Billy got to his feet and the whole world wavered in and out of focus for a moment. He got his mouth open at last, his lips parting with a soft rip that he felt rather than heard.

'That's okay,' he managed. 'That's okay, Richard. I'm here. I'm awake now.'

He went across the room and opened the door.

'Christ, William, I thought you were . .

Ginelli broke off and stared at him, his brown eyes widening and widening until Billy thought: He's going to run. You can't look that way at anyone or anything and not take to your heels as soon as you get over the first shock of whatever it was.

Then Ginelli kissed his right thumb, crossed himself, and said, 'Are you gonna let me in, William?'

Ginelli had brought better medicine than Fander's Chivas. He took the bottle out of his calfskin briefcase and poured them each a stiff hooker. He touched the rim of his plastic motel tumbler to the rim of Billy's.

'Happier days than these,' he said. 'How's that?'

'That's just fine,' Billy said, and knocked the shot off in one big swallow. After the explosion of fire in his stomach had subsided to a glow, he excused himself and went into the bathroom. He didn't need to use the toilet, but he did not want Ginelli to see him cry.

'What did he do to you?' Ginelli asked. 'Did he poison your food?'

Billy began to laugh. It was the first good laugh in a long time. He sat down in his chair again and laughed until more tears rolled down his cheeks.

'I love you, Richard,' he said when the laughter had tapered off to chuckles and a few shrill giggles. 'Everyone else, including my wife, thinks I'm crazy. The last time you saw me I was forty pounds overweight and now I look like I'm trying out for the part of the scarecrow in the remake of The Wizard of Oz and the first thing out of your mouth is “Did he poison your food?”'

Ginelli waved away both Billy's half-hysterical laughter and the compliment with the same impatience. Billy thought, Ike and Mike, they think alike, Lemke and Ginelli, too. When it comes to vengeance and countervengeance, they have no sense of humor.

'Well? Did he?'

'I suppose that he did. In a way, he did.'

'How much weight have you lost?'

Billy's eyes strayed to the wall-sized mirror across the room. He remembered reading – in a John D. MacDonald novel, he thought – that every modem motel room in America seems filled with mirrors, although most of those rooms are used by overweight businessmen who have no interest in looking at themselves in an undressed state. Its state wag very much the opposite of overweight, but he could understand the antimirror sentiment. He supposed it was his face – no, not just his face, his whole head which had thrown such a fright into Richard. The size of his skull had remained the same, and the result was that his head perched atop his disappearing body like the hideously oversize head of a giant sunflower.

I never take it off you, white man from town, he heard Lemke say.

'How much weight, William?' Ginelli repeated. His voice was calm, gentle even, but his eyes sparkled in an odd, clear way. Billy had never seen a man's eyes sparkle in quite that way, and it made him a little nervous.