'I see you got y'lunch,' the cabbie said as Billy got in.

'Or somebody's,' Billy replied, and laughed. 'Because that's really what it's all about, isn't it? Just trying to make sure somebody gets their lunch.'

The cabbie looked dubiously at him in the rearview mirror for a moment, then shrugged. 'Whatever you say, my friend -you're paying the tab.'

A half-hour after that he had been on the phone to Heidi.

Now he lay here and listened to something breathe in the dark -something that looked like a pie but which was really a child he and that old man had created together.

Gina, he thought, almost randomly. Where is she? 'Don't hurt her' – that's what I told Ginelli. But I think if I could lay my hands on her, I'd hurt her myself … hurt her plenty, for what she did to Richard. Her hand? I'd leave that old man her head … I'd stuff her mouth full of ball bearings and leave him the head. And that's why it's a good thing I don't know where to lay my hands on her, because no one knows exactly how things like this get started; they argue about that and they finally lose the truth altogether if it's inconvenient, but everybody knows how they keep on keeping on: they take one, we take one, then they take two, and we take three … they shoot up an airport so we blow a school … and blood runs in the gutters. Because that's what it's really all about, isn't it? Blood in the gutters. Blood …

Billy slept without knowing he slept; his thoughts simply merged into a series of ghastly, twisted dreams. In some of these he killed and in some he was killed, but in all of them something breathed and pulsed, and he could never see that something because it was inside himself.

Chapter Twenty-six

MYSTERY DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN GANGLAND SLAYING

A man found shot to death last evening in the cellar of a Union Street apartment building has been identified as a New York City gangland figure. Richard Ginelli, known as 'Richie the Hammer' in underworld circles, has been indicted three times – for extortion, trafficking and sale of illegal drugs, and murder – by New York State and federal authorities. A combined state and federal investigation into Ginelli's affairs was dropped in 1981 following the violent deaths of several prosecution witnesses.

A source close to the Maine state attorney general's office said last night that the idea of a so-called 'gangland hit' had come up even before the victim's identity was learned, because of the peculiar circumstances of the murder. According to the source, one of Ginelli's hands had been removed and the word 'pig' had been written on his forehead in blood.

Ginelli was apparently shot with a large-caliber weapon, but state-police ballistics officials have so far declined to release their findings, which one state-police official termed 'also a bit unusual.'

This story was on the front page of the Bangor Daily News Billy Halleck had bought that morning. He now scanned through it one final time, looked at the photograph of the apartment building where his friend had been found, then rolled the paper up and pushed it into a trashbin with the state seal of Connecticut on the side and PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE written on the swinging metal door.

'That is what it's all about,' he said.

'What, mister?' It was a little girl of about six with ribbons in her hair and a smear of dried chocolate on her chin. She was walking her dog.

'Nothing,' Billy said, and smiled at her.

'Marcy!' the little girl's mother called anxiously. 'Come over here!'

'Well, 'bye,' Marcy said.

'Bye, hon.' Billy watched her cross back to her mother. the small white poodle dog strutting ahead of her on its leash, toenails clicking. The girl had no more than reached her mother when the scolding began – Billy was sorry for the girl, who had reminded him of Linda when Lin was six or so, but he was also encouraged. It was one thing to have the scales tell him he had put back on eleven pounds; it was another – and better – thing to have someone treat him as a normal person again, even if the someone happened to be a six-year-old girl walking the family dog in a turnpike rest area … a little girl who probably thought there were lots of people in the world who looked like walking gantry towers.

He had spent yesterday in Northeast Harbor, not so much resting as trying to recover a sense of sanity. He would feel it coming … and then he would look at the pie sitting atop the TV in its cheap aluminum plate and it would slip.

Near dusk he had put it in the trunk of his car, and that made it a little better.

After dark, when that sense of sanity and his own deep loneliness both seemed strongest, he had found his old battered address book and had called Rhoda Simonson in Westchester County. A moment or two later he had been talking to Linda, who was deliriously glad to hear from him. She had indeed found out about the res gestae. The chain of events leading to the discovery, as well as Billy could (or wanted to) follow it was as sordid as it was predictable. Mike Houston had told his wife. His wife had told their oldest daughter, probably while drunk. Linda and the Houston girl had had some sort of kids' falling-out the previous winter, and Samantha Houston had just about broken both legs getting to Linda to tell her that her dear old mom was trying to get her dear old dad committed to a basket-weaving factory.

'What did you say to her?' Billy asked.

'I told her to stick an umbrella up her ass,' Linda said, and Billy laughed until tears squirted out of his eyes … but part of him felt sad, too. He had been gone not quite three weeks, and his daughter sounded as if she had aged three years.

Linda had then gone directly home to ask Heidi if what Samantha Houston had said was true.

'What happened?' Billy asked.

'We had a really bad fight and then afterward I said I wanted to go back to Aunt Rhoda's and she said well, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.'

Billy paused for a moment, and then said, 'I don't know if you need me to tell you this or not, Lin, but I'm not crazy.'

'Oh, Daddy, I know that,' she said, almost scoldingly.

'And I'm getting better. Putting on weight.'

She squealed so loudly he had to pull the telephone away from his ear. 'Are you? Are you really?'

'I am, really.'

'Oh, Daddy, that's great! That's … Are you telling the truth? Are you really?'

'Scout's honor,' he said, grinning.

'When are you going home?' she asked.

And Billy, who expected to leave Northeast Harbor tomorrow morning and to walk in his own front door not much later than ten o'clock tomorrow night, answered: 'It'll still be a week or so, hon. I want to put on some more weight first. I still look pretty gross.'

'Oh,' Linda said, sounding deflated. 'Oh, okay.'

'But when I come I'll call you in time for you to get there at least six hours before me,' he said. 'You can make another lasagna, like when we came back from Mohonk, and fatten me up some more.'

'Bitchin'!' she said, laughing, and then, immediately: 'Whoops. Sorry, Daddy.'

'Forgiven,' he said. 'In the meantime, you stay right there at Rhoda's, kitten. I don't want any more yelling between you and Mom.'

'I don't want to go back until you're there anyway,' she said, and he heard bedrock in her voice. Had Heidi sensed that adult bedrock in Linda? He suspected she had – it accounted for some of her desperation on the phone last night.

He told Linda he loved her and rang off. Sleep came easier that second night, but the dreams were bad. In one of them he heard Ginelli in the trunk of his car, screaming to be let out. But when he opened the trunk it wasn't Ginelli but a bloody naked boy-child with the ageless eyes of Taduz Lemke and a gold hoop in one earlobe. The boy-child held gore-stained hands out to Billy. It grinned, and its teeth were silver needles.