At the door stood Louis, a huge Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker shotgun in his hands, the rubber stock still fast against his shoulder. "Man just had himself a 10-gauge handshake," he said. From the back of the house came more shots and the sound of a car accelerating fast. Louis jumped over the corpse, with me close behind. We headed through the ruined kitchen to the back door and looked out on the yard beyond. Angel stood at the gate, a Glock 9mm in his hand, and shrugged at us.

"He got away, the ugly fuck. I didn't even see him until he was in the car."

"Mifflin," I said, wearily.

Louis looked at me. "That freak still alive?" He shook his head in wonder.

"Maybe we could blast him into space and hope he burns up on reentry," mused Angel.

I shivered in the cold, with only the bandages to cover my upper body. They were already soaked with red. My ears rang from the noise of the gunfire in the enclosed space of the house. Louis slipped off his overcoat and put it over my shoulders. Despite the cold, I felt like I was burning up.

"You know," said Angel. "You oughta be more careful. You're gonna catch your death like that."

The three of us started at a noise from behind, but only Lorna stood at the door. I walked up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around herself, keeping her eyes on me and away from the bodies on the floor behind her.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked.

"We're going back to Dark Hollow. I need Billy Purdue alive."

"And Rand?"

"I'll do what I can. You better call him, tell him what's happened."

"I tried. Our phone is dead. They must have cut the wires before they came in."

"Go to a neighbor's house and make the call. With a little luck, we'll get to Dark Hollow shortly after." All of which assumed that the lines hadn't been cut from outside town, in which case Dark Hollow itself would be cut off. My cell phone had failed to raise a signal here, so I doubted if anyone else would have better luck.

Already there were neighbors appearing at their gates, trying to figure out what all the noise was about. It was time to go, but Lorna raised a hand. "Wait," she said, and went back upstairs. When she returned she had my shoes in her arms, along with a thick cotton shirt, a pair of dark pants, a sweater and a padded jacket from LL Bean. She helped me to put on the clothes, glancing away when I stripped off my wet pants, then touched my hand gently as I prepared to leave.

"You take care."

"You too."

Behind me, Angel started up the Mercury, Louis in the front seat. I climbed in back and we moved off. I looked back to see Lorna standing in her yard, watching us until we were gone from her sight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The roads were deserted as we drove, the silence around us broken only by the purr of the Mercury's engine and the soft thud of snowflakes impacting on the windshield. The pain in my side burned fiercely, and once or twice, I closed my eyes and seemed to lose a couple of seconds. I caught Louis taking careful glances back at me in the rearview mirror, and I raised a hand to let him know that I was okay. It might have looked more convincing if the hand hadn't been covered in blood.

When we pulled into the parking lot in front of the police department there were two cruisers parked ahead of us, along with an orange '74 Trans-Am that looked like it would take a miracle to start it and a couple of other vehicles that had remained stationary long enough for the snow to blur their lines, including a rental Toyota out of Bangor. There was no sign of Tony Celli, or any of his men.

We entered through the front door. Ressler stood behind the desk, examining the jack on the telephone. Behind him was a second, younger patrolman whom I didn't recognize, probably another part-timer, and farther back again, standing across from the station house's two holding cells, was Jennings himself. In a chair beside the desk sat Walter Cole. He looked shocked at my appearance. I was kind of unhappy about it myself.

"The fuck do you want?" said Jennings, causing Ressler to rise from his position and cast a wary eye first over Louis and Angel, then me. He didn't look too happy at the sight of our guns and his hand hovered near his own side arm. His eyes widened a little as he saw the marks on my face and the blood on my clothing.

"What's wrong with the phones?" I returned.

"They're out," Ressler said, after a moment's pause. "All communications are down. Could be the weather."

I moved past him to the cells. One was empty. In the other, Billy Purdue sat with his head in his hands. His clothes were filthy and his boots were stained with mud. He had the haunted, desperate look of an animal caught in a snare. He was humming to himself, like a little boy trying to block out the world around him. I didn't ask Rand Jennings's permission to talk to him. I wanted answers, and he was the only one who could provide them.

"Billy," I said sharply.

He looked up at me. "I fucked up," he said, "didn't I?" Then he went back to humming his song.

"I don't know, Billy. I need you to tell me about the man you saw, the old man. Describe him to me."

Jennings's voice came from behind me. "Parker, get away from the prisoner."

I ignored him. "You listening to me, Billy?"

He was rocking back and forth, still humming, his hands wrapped around his body "Yeah, I hear you." He screwed his face up in concentration. "It's hard. I didn't but hardly see him. He was… old."

"Try harder, Billy. Short? Tall?"

The humming started again, then stopped. "Tall," he said, during the pause. "Maybe as tall as me."

"Slim? Stocky?"

"Thin. He was a thin guy, but lean, y'know?" He stood, interested now, trying hard to picture the figure he had seen.

"What about his hair?"

"Shit, I don't know from hair…" He went back to his song, but now he added the words, only half forming some of them as if he was not entirely familiar with them.

"Come all you fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court your man…"

And I remembered the song at last: "Fair and Tender Ladies." Gene Clark had sung it, with Carla Olson, although the song itself was much older. With the recognition came the remembrance of where I had heard it before: Meade Payne had been humming it as he walked back to his house.

"Billy," I said. "Have you been out at Meade Payne's place?"

He shook his head. "I don't know no Meade Payne."

I clutched the bars of the cell. "Billy, this is important. I know you were heading out to Meade. You won't get him into trouble by admitting it."

He looked at me and sighed. "I didn't get out there. They picked me up before I even got into town."

I spoke softly and distinctly, trying to keep the tension out of my voice. "Then where did you hear that song, Billy?"

"What song?"

"The song you're humming, "Fair and Tender Ladies." Where did you hear it?"

"I don't recall." He looked away, and I knew that he did remember.

"Try."

He ran his hands through his hair, gripping the tangled locks at the back as if afraid of what his hands might do if he didn't find some way to occupy them, and began to rock back and forth again. "The old man, the one I saw at Rita's place, I think he might have been singing it to himself. I can't get the damned thing out of my head." He started to cry.

I felt my throat go dry. "Billy, what does Meade Payne look like?"

"What?" he asked. He looked genuinely puzzled. From behind me, I heard Jennings say: "I'm warning you for the last time, Parker. Get away from the prisoner." His footsteps sounded on the floor as he walked toward me.

"That's Meade over there, in that picture on the wall," said Billy, standing up as he spoke. He pointed to the framed photograph of three men which hung on the wall near the front desk, a similar version of that which hung in the diner but with only two faces instead of three. I walked over to it, nudging Rand Jennings out of my way as I went. In the middle of the group was a young man in a U.S. Marines uniform, his right arm around Rand Jennings, his left arm around an elderly man who grinned back with pride at the lens. A plaque below the photograph read "Patrolman Daniel Payne, 1967-1991."