He trailed off vaguely, looking at the licorice whip in his hand. I thought of prodding him and decided not to.

At last he said, 'Most of the others would lie about it, the way people lied and said they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his homer, that's all I mean. But people lied about being at that ballgame because they wished they had been there. People would lie to you about being in Derry that day because they wish they hadn't been. Do you understand me, sonny?'

I nodded.

'You sure you want to hear the rest of this?' Mr Keene asked me. 'You're looking a bit peaked, Mr Mikey.'

'I don't,' I said, 'but I think I better, all the same.'

'Okay,' Mr Keene said mildly. It was my day for memories; as he offered me the apothecary jar with the licorice whips in it, I suddenly remembered a radio program my mother and dad used to listen to when I was just a little kid: Mr Keene, Tracer of LostPersons.

'Sheriff was there that day, all right. He was s'posed to go bird-hunting, but he changed his mind damn quick when Lal Machen came in and told nun that he was expecting Al Bradley that very afternoon.'

'How did Machen know that?' I asked.

'Well, that's an instructive tale in itself,' Mr Keene said, and the cynical smile creased his face again. 'Bradley wasn't never Public Enemy Number One on the FBI's hit parade, but they had wanted him — since 1928 or so. To show they could cut the mustard, I guess. Al Bradley and his brother George hit six or seven banks across the Midwest and then kidnapped a banker for ransom. The ransom was paid — thirty thousand dollars, a big sum for those days — but they killed the banker anyway.

'By then the Midwest had gotten a little toasty for the gangs that ran there, so Al and George and their litter of ratlings run northeast, up this way. They rented themselves a big farmhouse just over the town line in Newport, not far from where the Rhulin Farms are today.

That was in the dog-days of '29, maybe July, maybe August, maybe even early September . . . I don't know for sure just when. There were eight of em — Al Bradley, George Bradley, Joe Conklin and his brother Cal, an Irishman named Arthur Malloy who was called "Creeping Jesus Malloy" because he was nearsighted but wouldn't put on his specs unless he

absolutely had to, and Patrick Caudy, a young fellow from Chicago who was said to be kill-crazy but as handsome as Adonis. There were also two women with them: Kitty Donahue, George Bradley's common-law wife, and Marie Hauser, who belonged to Caudy but sometimes got passed around, according to the stories we all heard later.

'They made one bad assumption when they got up here, sonny — they got the idea they were so far away from Indiana that they were safe.

'They laid low for awhile, and then got bored and decided they wanted to go hunting. They had plenty of firepower but they were a bit low on ammunition. So they all came into Derry on the seventh of October in two cars. Patrick Gaudy took the women around shopping while the other men went into Machen's Sporting Goods. Kitty Donahue bought a dress in Freese's, and she died in it two days later.

'Lal Machen waited on the men himself. He died in 1959. Too fat, he was. Always too fat. But there wasn't nothing wrong with his eyes, and he knew it was Al Bradley the minute he walked in, he said. He thought he recognized some of the others, but he wasn't sure of Malloy until he put on his specs to look at a display of knives in a glass case.

'Al Bradley walked up to him and said, "We'd like to buy some ammunition."

'"Well," Lal Machen says, "you come to the right place."

'Bradley handed him a paper and Lal read it over. The paper has been lost, at least so far as I know, but Lal said it would have turned your blood cold. They wanted five hundred rounds of .38-caliber ammunition, eight hundred rounds of .45-caliber, sixty rounds of .50-caliber, which they don't even make anymore, shotgun shells loaded both with buck and bird, and a thousand rounds each of .22 short– and long-rifle. Plus — get this — sixteen thousand rounds of .45 machine-gun bullets.

'Holy shit! ' I said.

Mr Keene smiled that cynical smile again and offered me the apothecary jar. At first I shook my head and then I took another whip.

'"This here is quite a shopping-list, boys," Lal says.

'"Come on, Al," Creeping Jesus Malloy says. "I told you we wasn't going to get it in a hick town like this. Let's go on up to Bangor. They won't have nothing there either, but I can use a ride."

'"Now hold your horses," Lal says, just as cool as a cucumber. "This here is one hell of a good order and I wouldn't want to lose it to that Jew up Bangor. I can give you the .22s right now, also the bird and half the buck. I can give you a hundred rounds each of the .38– and .45-caliber, too. I could have the rest for you . . . " And here Lal sort of half-closed his eyes and tapped his chin, as if calculating it out. " . . . by day after tomorrow. How'd that be?"

'Bradley grinned like he'd split his head around the back and said it sounded just as fine as paint. Cal Conklin said he'd still like to go on up to Bangor, but he was outvoted. "Now. if you're not sure you can make good on this order, you ought to say so right now," Al Bradley says to Lal, "because I'm a pretty fine fellow but when I get mad you don't want to get into a pissing contest with me. You follow?"

'"I do," Lal says, "and I'll have all the ammo you could want, Mr — ?"

'"Rader," Brady says. "Richard D. Rader, at your service."

'He stuck out his hand and Lal pumped it, grinning all the while. "Real pleased, Mr Rader "

'So then Bradley asked him what would be a good time for him an d his friends to drop by and pick up the goods, and Lal Machen asked them right back how two in the afternoon sounded to them. They agreed that would be fine. Out they went. Lal watched them go. They met the two women and Gaudy on the sidewalk outside. Lal recognized Gaudy, too.

'So,' Mr Keene said, looking at me bright-eyed, 'what do you think Lal done then? Called the cops?'

'I guess he didn't,' I said, 'based on what happened. Me, I would have broken my leg getting to the telephone.'

'Well, maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't,' Mr Keene said with that same cynical, bright-eyed smile, and I shivered because I knew what he meant . . . and he knew I knew. Once something heavy begins to roll, it can't be stopped; it's simply going to roll until it finds a flat place long enough to wear away all of its forward motion. You can stand in front of that thing and get flattened . . . but that won't stop it, either.

'Maybe you would have and maybe you wouldn't,' Mr Keene repeated. 'But I can tell yo u what Lal Machen did. The rest of that day and all of the next, when someone he knew came in — some man — why, he would tell them that he knew who had been out in the woods around the Newport-Derry line shooting at deer and grouse and God knows what else with Kansas City typewriters. It was the Bradley Gang. He knew for a fact because he had recognized em. He'd tell em that Bradley and his men were coming back the next day around two to pick up the rest of their order. He'd tell them he'd promised Bradley all the ammunition he could want, and that was a promise he intended to keep.'

'How many?' I asked. I felt hypnotized by his glittering eye. Suddenly the dry smell of this back room — the smell of prescription drugs and powders, of Musterole and Vicks VapoRub and Robitussin cough syrup — suddenly all those smells seemed suffocating . . . but I could no more have left than I could kill myself by holding my breath.

'How many men did Lal pass the word to?' Mr Keene asked.

I nodded.

'Don't know for sure,' Mr Keene said. 'Didn't stand right there and take up sentry duty. All those he felt he could trust, I suppose.'