“Yeah, it was a hot day, all right,” Goliath said, and Paul was alarmed by how much closer his voice was. In the parlor? Yes, almost certainly in the parlor. Big or not, the guy moved like a goddamned lynx. When Annie responded, her own voice was closer. The cops had moved into the parlor. She was following. She hadn't asked them, but they had gone in there anyway. Looking the place over.

Although her pet writer was now less than thirty-five feet away, Annie's voice remained composed. She had asked if he would like to come in for an iced coffee; he said he couldn't. So she had asked if he'd like to take along a cold bottle of - “Please don't break that,” Annie interrupted herself, her voice sharpening. “I like my things, and some of them are quite fragile.”

“Sorry, ma'am.” That had to be David, his voice low and whispery, both humble and a little startled. That tone coming from a cop would have been amusing under other circumstances, but these were not other circumstances and Paul was not amused. He sat stiffly, hearing the small sound of something being set carefully back down (the penguin on his block of ice, perhaps), his hands clasped tightly on the arms of the wheelchair. He imagined her fiddling with the shoulder-bag. He waited for one of the cops - Goliath, probably - to ask her just what the hell it was she had in there.

Then the shooting would start.

“What were you saying?” David asked.

“That I asked him if he'd like to take along a cold Pepsi from the fridge because it was such a hot day. I keep them right next to the freezer compartment, and that keeps them as cold as you can get them without freezing them. He said that would be very kind. He was a very polite boy. Why did they let such a young boy out alone, do you know?”

“Did he drink the soda here?” David asked, ignoring her question. His voice was closer still. He had crossed the parlor. Paul didn't have to close his eyes to imagine him standing there, looking down the short hall which passed the little downstairs bathroom and ended in the closed guest-room door. Paul sat tight and upright, a pulse beating rapidly in his scrawny throat.

“No,” Annie said, as composed as ever. “He took it along. He said he had to keep rolling.”

“What's down there?” Goliath asked. There was a double thud of booted heels, the sound slightly hollow, as he stepped off the parlor carpet and onto the bare boards of the hallway.

“A bath and a spare bedroom. I sometimes sleep there when it's very hot. Have a look, if you like, but I promise you I don't have your trooper tied to the bed.”

“No, ma'am, I'm sure you don't,” David said, and, amazingly, their footfalls and voices began to fade toward the kitchen again. “Did he seem excited about anything while he was here?”

“Not at all,” Annie said. “Just hot and discouraged.” Paul was beginning to breathe again.

“Preoccupied about anything?”

“No.”

“Did he say where he was going next?” Although the cops almost surely missed it, Paul's own practiced ear sensed the minutest of hesitations - there could be a trap here, a snare which might spring at once or after a short delay. No, she said at last, although he had headed west, so she assumed he must have gone toward Springer's Road and the few farms out that way.

“Thank you, ma'am, for your cooperation,” David said. “We may have to check back with you.”

“All right,” Annie said. “Feel free. I don't see much company these days.”

“Would you mind if we looked “m your barn?” Goliath asked abruptly.

“Not at all. Just be sure to say howdy when you go in.”

“Howdy to who, ma'am?” David asked.

“Why, to Misery,” Annie said. “My pig.”

31

She stood in the doorway looking at him fixedly - so fixedly that his face began to feel warm and he supposed he was blushing. The two cops had left fifteen minutes ago.

“You see something green?” he asked finally.

“Why didn't you holler?” Both cops had tipped their hats to her as they got in their cruiser, but neither had smiled, and there had been a look in their eyes Paul had been able to see even from the narrow angle afforded by the corner of his window. They knew who she was, all right. “I kept expecting you to holler. They would have fallen on me like an avalanche.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“But why didn't you?”

“Annie, if you spend your whole life thinking the worst thing you can imagine is going to happen, you have to be wrong some of the time.”

“Don't be smart with me!” He saw that beneath her assumed impassivity she was deeply confused. His silence did not fit well into her view of all existence as a sort of Big-Time Wrestling match: Honest Annie vs. that all-time, double-ugly tag-team of The Cockadoodie Brats.

“Who's being smart? I told you I was going to keep my mouth shut and I did. I want to finish my book in relative peace. And I want to finish it for you.” She looked at him uncertainly, wanting to believe, afraid to believe… and ultimately believing anyway. And she was right to believe, because he was telling the truth.

“Get busy, then,” she said softly. “Get busy right away. You saw the way they looked at me.”

32

For the next two days life went on just as it had before Duane Kushner; it was almost possible to believe Duane Kushner had never happened at all. Paul wrote almost constantly. He had given the typewriter up for the nonce. Annie put it on the mantel below the picture of the Arc de Triomphe without comment. He filled three legal pads in those two days. There was only one left. When he had filled that one, he would move on to the steno pads. She sharpened his half-dozen Berol Black Warrior pencils, he wrote them dull, and Annie sharpened them again. They shrank steadily as he sat in the sun by the window, bent over, sometimes scratching absently with the great toe of his right foot at the air where the sole of his left foot had been, looking through the hole in the paper. It had yawned wide open again, and the book rushed toward its climax the way the best ones did, as if on a rocket sled. He saw everything with perfect clarity - three groups all hellbent for Misery in the crenellated passages behind the idol's forehead, two wanting to kill her, the third - consisting of Ian, Geoffrey, and Hezekiah - trying to save her… while below, the village of the Bourkas burned and the survivors massed at the one point of egress - the idol's left ear - to massacre anyone who happened to stagger out alive.

This hypnotic state of absorption was rudely shaken but not broken when, on the third day after the visit of David and Goliath, a cream-colored Ford station wagon with KTKA / Grand Junction written on the side pulled into Annie's driveway. The back was full of video equipment.

“Oh God!” Paul said, frozen somewhere between humor, amazement, and horror. “What's this fuck-a-row?” The wagon had barely stopped before one of the rear doors flew open and a guy dressed in combat-fatigue pants and a Deadhead tee-shirt leaped out. There was something big and black pistol-gripped in one hand and for one wild moment Paul thought it was a tear-gas gun. Then he raised it to his shoulder, and swept it toward the house, and Paul saw it was a minicam. A pretty young woman was getting out of the front passenger seat, fluffing her blow-dried hair and pausing for one final appraising look at her makeup in the outside rear-view mirror before joining her camera-man.

The eye of the outside world, which had slipped away from the Dragon Lady these last few years, had now returned with a vengeance.

Paul rolled backward quickly, hoping he had been in time.

Well, if you want to know for sure, just check the six o'clock news, he thought, and then had to raise both hands to his mouth to plug up the giggles.