He got a handful of toilet tissue from the bathroom, soaked it in water, and wiped up the streak, looked at it: even dissolved in water, it was brown. Maybe steak sauce or something, he thought. He threw the wad of paper in the duffel bag, picked up the plastic bag with the amputated finger, turned off the light, and carried it all out to the car. The duffel bag went in the backseat, the plastic bag under the front seat.

He was done, but he sat a moment, reviewing it. He'd programmed this pause into the killing. He could not come back, so if he'd forgotten anything…

He thought, and thought for another minute, and he slipped his left thumb under the vinyl glove of his right hand, ready to peel it off, and then the word bracelet popped into his head.

Good God, he'd forgotten the bracelet. He got out, a thread of panic running through him. There was no way he could have forgotten the bracelet. He popped the trunk again, got the small bolt cutters from the spare tire well, fumbled in the dark until he found the bracelet on Charlie's ankle, cut it loose.

He carried the bracelet between his little finger and thumb up to the trailer and inside. He dropped it next to the couch, about where it might land if you sat on the couch to cut it off.

Anything else? The panic was still there, and he ran through his mental to-do list. He'd gone over it a hundred times in his mind, or even a thousand times, and here, at the critical moment, he'd forgotten the bracelet.

But there was nothing else. He got back in the car, turned the ignition key to the second stop, let the windows roll down. He sat and listened some more. When he was as sure as he could be that he wasn't watched, he headed out to Interstate 35.

On the highway, a sudden cold squirt of adrenaline made his hands shake on the steering wheel. Christ, he couldn't have forgotten the bracelet. The excitement of the killing had done something to him, had taken him to a level where the mundane realities of the process had slipped away from him. He had to check for blood, he had to clean up, he had to do all the little chores that the Gods Down the Hall had forgotten. He had to remember, the Gods Down the Hall were smart enough, but they were Down the Hall because they'd gotten careless.

He never thought it would happen to him, a mistake like that, an oversight, because he was too smart-but now he saw how it could happen. The motion, the push to move, could get on top of you. Next time, he would have a checklist with him, a written to-do list. If he were going to kill for pleasure, he'd mix hard science with the art of passion. No way he wanted to end up Down the Hall-far better to be dead.

THE NIGHT WAS WARM and hazy, with a low overcast, and as the killer drove across the prairie, the small towns would first come up as a glow in the sky, street and business lights reflected off the cloud base, then as points of light, then as a harsh blue-white and orange-white grid. He passed through them silently, slowly, safely, taking no risks with the speed limit.

Forty-five minutes after the killing, he pulled into a turnout at a historical marker. He drove by the place daily and had never seen a car in it. At the same time, the turnout road ran through a small alley of trees and brush, out of sight of the road.

He got out, lifted the trunk lid. Charlie was lying on a carefully arranged bed of logging chain. He pulled loops of the chain around the body and, with precut five-inch loops of aluminum wire, fastened together opposing links from the chain.

He worked quickly in the weak light of the trunk lid, listening for cars on the gravel road; nobody came down it in the hurried, heavy five minutes of work. He was alone with the dead man and felt a small curl of hair-raising superstitious dread. What if Charlie's eyes opened…

He giggled again. Hell, he'd have a heart attack is what would happen. But Charlie was as dead as a carp on a riverbank, and his eyes didn't open. The killer shut the lid on the car trunk, backed out of the historical site-he had no idea of what it marked-and on to the road.

The bridge was only a half mile away. He took the gravel out to the blacktop, turned left, idled over a low hill. A car was coming toward him. He saw it move to the middle of the road as it crossed the bridge, then back to the right as it cleared it. He idled along at forty miles an hour, checking the rearview mirror, looking for lights, and watching for lights out front…

When he was sure he was clear, he hurried on down the hill to the bridge; stopped in the middle of it, popped the trunk, and walked over to the railing and looked down. Sometimes fishermen parked beside the bridge: there was just enough space for two cars. Never, as far as he knew, at night: and there was nothing this night…

He went back to the car trunk, dragged Charlie out. With the extra weight of the chain, he struggled to get him to the railing. When he got him there, he had to lift Charlie's legs first, prop them on the railing, then walk around to pick up Charlie's head.

And when he did, the feet fell off the rail. He was breathing hard and felt a little panic rising in his throat: this was impossible. He couldn't get the body high enough to prop up the head end. He finally bent it upright, got Charlie's neck hooked over the sharp edge of the rail, took a breather for five seconds, then hoisted the dead man's chest over, balanced the body, then got the feet going. The chain caught on the edge, and he spent a moment wrestling back and forth, the chain making a loud ripping noise on the metal guardrail.

And then Charlie went, falling into the darkness. A moment later, the killer heard a satisfying splash from below: Charlie's last dive was a belly flop into thirty feet of water.

He brushed his hands together, felt the stickiness. As he walked around the front of the car, he looked at them in the headlights. Jesus: he was covered with blood. Hadn't thought about that, either, Didn't have any way to clean up. He knelt in the headlights, looking as his shirt. More blood…

Man, the complications were piling up. If he was going to do all this, if he was going to do what the Gods Down the Hall demanded that he do, he was going to have to get a hell of a lot better than this.

And quick: they were hungry for the first woman. Tired of descriptions, tired of what-we-might-do.

They wanted meat. They wanted it now.

He thought about Millie Lincoln. The woman did crazy things to him, and the thought of her blood drove him into a near frenzy.

Not now; if he took Millie Lincoln, the cops would be on him for sure.

But he would take her later. He licked his lips at the thought. Millie.

MILLIE LINCOLN HAD a decent body, she thought-not Hollywood quality, but decent. Maybe she could lose a few pounds. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror that she and her roommates had pinned to the back of the front door: Okay, maybe ten pounds…

"You think my ass looks fat?" she asked Mihovil, who was sitting on a couch, reading a Dilbert cartoon book.

"I would have to see it closer…"

"Hey: does it look fat, or doesn't it?"

"Every time I see it good, I get hard," he said; "What more do you want?"

She went over and plopped on the couch next to him and said,

"Pizza."

"I think so. I am starved to death."

But he kept his nose in the book, not quite ignoring her. She crossed her legs and put them across his. He said, "Pizza," and dropped the book on the floor, and brushed his hands up and down her legs. "Mmm. You're sticky."

"Haven't shaved my legs in a week," she said.

"Don't shave your legs until I come back," he said "Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will shave your legs for you."