As he stood up, the sun's rays struck him across the face, and he shuddered, knowing that today someone would try to kill him. He made the sign of the cross in the air and looked around for a piece of wood to touch. There were none, so he picked up some gravel and threw it in front of him saying, "May my road be higher than the river and lower than the sun, and may my feet find a safe way home."

He brushed his hands on his shirt and set off, keeping to alleys as much as possible, always staying alert for the police. As he walked he found a clothing store and stole a snakeskin belt (the only snakeskin he could find), pulled a twig from a hazel tree, and begged a small quantity of holy water from a confused priest. He drank a bowl of tasteless soup and a cup of weak coffee at a Howard Johnson's, then continued to forage. As he walked, his vision began to blur, and he felt his headache coming back. He took the piece of paper out of his pocket and tried to remember how the scribbling on it could cure the headache, but it was no good- He laughed grimly to himself. "When my head doesn't hurt," he thought,"I don't think of it, and when it does, I can't read it." He took wheat flour from a grocery store and a white candle from a pharmacy. He took a piece of bark from an oak, and, with the knife, scratched designs of the moon and the stars on the bark.

Armed with these things, he made his way back to his place beneath the overpass and waited for the rising of the full moon of autumn.

They said. "Why are you here?"

I said, "I'm doing time,

'Cause I'm willing to break laws

But I won't commit no crime."

"NO PASSENGER"

It was humiliating to be a coachman and to be forced to ride in a cab; a humiliation only partly alleviated by riding up front, with the driver. Sometimes they wouldn't let you do that, but this man, big and burly like an innkeeper and gnarled like a peasant woman,didn't seem to mind. His nod was an implied shrug,and as the Coachman settled into place he said, "Whereto?"

"The bus station," he said. More humiliations in store.

The cab pulled away. "Meeting someone?"

"No, going somewhere."

The driver frowned for a moment then shrugged. The lack of luggage probably puzzled him. He said,"Where ya going?"

"I'm looking for birds," he said, only coming to realize it as the words were spoken.

"Birds?"

"I have to find a Raven and an Owl before the Dove kills himself."

The driver cleared his throat and twitched nervously, obviously having second thoughts about having this wacko in the front seat "Whatever you say,buddy," he finally said. They spoke no more during the journey.

My partner doesn't even know my name.

If he did I think I'd hate him

Just the same.

"STEPDOWN"

Stepovich wished he were driving. Durand always talked while he drove, and flapped his right hand at Stepovich, as if that were an essential part of talking.

"So the lab guy says, 'Yeah, that bastard drove that knife into her like he was trying to shove it clear to China, but that wasn't the weirdest part of it, though,'so I says, 'Oh, yeah,' kind of casual, and he says,'No, the weirdest part was the wound configuration.I didn't know what the hell it was, I thought maybe the killer had a defective knife or something, but one of the older guys, he looks at it and says, hey, will you look at the hilt impressions on this wound?' "

The taxicab at the corner barely curtsied to the stop sign before it swung out in front of them. Durand crammed on the brakes and Stepovich's palm, slapped the dash as he braced himself.

"Shit," hissed Stepovich, and spent a few futile moments groping for the ends of the seat belt, but as always it was stuffed somewhere in the crevice of the seat back.

"Yeah!" Durand agreed enthusiastically, hardly pausing in his story. "You know, a hilt impression.It's a mark around the knife wound when a blade gets really driven in. This one was really weird. The lab guy tells me the old guy said the knife must be a custom job. It left these three little bruises around the wound, like there were little studs sticking out from the guard. That knife-"

"Durand." Stepovich spoke without looking at him, but his cold tone stopped the story in midsentence. "It's a homicide, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah," Durand sounded sulky.

"Then leave it to the homicide guy. They hate it when guys like us sniff around in their shit. You won't get any thanks for it. No one's going to think you're Sherlock Holmes. Even if you come up with something, you won't get the credit. The only thing you'll get is a reputation as a hotshot boy scout who can't mind his own business. Worse, they're gonna figure you're out to make them look bad, so they're going to devote a little time to making you look bad. Only they're going to be better at it. You're suddenly going to find that you've screwed up any crime scene you're called to, that you've mishandled evidence and handled witnesses all wrong. And that's going to go in your file. You get what I'm saying?" Dumbshit.

"Fuck."

"Yeah," Stepovich agreed, and leaned back, scanning the street and listening to the gabble and hiss of the radio.

"But don't it count for nothing that we were there first, that we found her? And that we probably even had brought them the guy, cause the description from the tenant next door matched our bust. Hell, we had that gypsy, all locked up, and it never woulda happened if some fuckup hadn't cut him loose before…"

A sick, cold little animal had gotten into Stepovich's belly, and now it was stretching. He hadn't been listening that closely to Dumbshit's story, and he should have. "You talking about that old gypsy woman? And the guy we'd hauled in from in front of the cemetery, on suspicion of the liquor store killing?"

"Shit, yes! I wouldn't a been pumping the lab guy if I didn't think we had a stake in it, and…"

"Say the thing about the knife again," Stepovich cut in, but he didn't really need to hear it again. He could feel it, cold under his thumb as he pressed down on the little stars and wondered what they signified. He hadn't really thought about what kind of marks they would leave when he was sitting on his bed looking at the piece of evidence he hadn't turned in. Hadn't thought of anything at all but getting rid of it. Of returning the damning evidence to the murderer…

"Couldn't have been," he said, suddenly remembering that he'd had the knife when the gypsy woman was killed, that it had been tucked away in the drawer of his night stand. But whoever had one custom blade was likely to have two, or would at least know where the other one had come from, hell, it could be some kind of cult, all of them using the same weapons, and maybe Durand had been right, they'd had the thread that could unravel it the day they'd had that John Doe Gypsy.

"You okay?"

Durand's question was very careful, and Stepovich suddenly realized it had been very quiet in the car for some time. He looked at his hands braced against the dashboard as if to hold off some sudden collision. He forced them to drop down, felt his elbows rubbery with tension. "Just stretching. And thinking. That lab guy, he say anything else?" He stared out at the passing panorama of Cushman Street. Transition blocks.Old hotels that were more like cheap rooming houses now, lobbies full of snoozing winos and the smell of dirty carpets, interspersed with cheap bars and sex show places. LIVE NUDES ON STAGE flashed with the sign. Well, hell, at least it didn't say DEAD NUDES ON STAGE. Maybe that would be next week's show. "I mean, was there anything else weird about the killing?" he nudged Durand. Shoulda been listening before, he chided himself.