She stopped stroking him, and he began to slip over the edge of consciousness.

"Ouch!"

He felt something like a wasp sting in his shoulder. George leaped out of bed and cowered in the darkest corner of the room. He fumbled the light on and looked around, squinting against the sudden glare. Quite nude, George pressed into her corner, the hypodermic needle still in her hands, both thumbs against the plunger and the point directed at him, as though it were a gun she could protect herself with.

"You little bitch." Jonathan, also nude, advanced on her.

Fear and hate flickering in her eyes, she made a lunge at him with the needle, and with one broad backhand blow he reeled her along the wall and into the opposite corner, where she crouched like a treed cougar, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth and one nostril, her lips drawn back in a frozen snarl that revealed her lower teeth. He was moving in to expand on her punishment when the buzzing in his ears settled toward his stomach and made him stagger. He turned back toward the door, now an undulating trapezoid, but he realized he would never make it. He stumbled toward the phone. His knees buckled under him, and he went down, knocking over the bedside table and plunging the room into darkness as the lamp burst with a loud implosion. The buzzing pulsed louder and in tempo with the dancing bursts of light behind his eyes.

"Desk," answered a thin, bored voice near him on the floor, somewhere in the rubble of broken glass. He pawed about blindly, trying to find the receiver. "Desk." He felt a volley of pains in the small of his back, and he knew the little bitch was kicking him with the relentless rhythm of frightened fury. "Desk." The voice was impatient. He could not ward off the kicks; all he could do was curl up around the receiver and take it. The pains became duller and duller until they were only pressures. "Desk." Jonathan's tongue was thick and alien. With his disobedient lips pressing against the mouthpiece, he struggled to form a word.

"Ben!" he blurted with a treble whimper, and the word chased him down into warm black water.

ARIZONA: JUNE 29

A light fluttered on the black water, and Jonathan, disembodied, rushed through miles of space toward it. He gained on the spark, and it grew larger, until it developed into a window with stripes of daylight glaring through a Venetian blind. He was in his room. A great flesh-colored glob hung over him.

"How's it going, ol' buddy?"

He tried to sit up, but a thud of pain nailed him to the pillow.

"Relax. Doctor said you're going to be just fine. He says it may hurt for a few days when you piss. George sure gave your kidneys a going over."

"Give me something to drink."

"Beer?"

"Anything." Jonathan inched his way to a sitting position, moving up through strata of thickening headache.

Ben made a clumsy attempt to feed him the beer, but Jonathan relieved him of his heavy solicitude by snatching the can away after a third of it had spilled on his chest. "Where is she?" he asked once his thirst was slaked.

"I got her locked up, and a couple of my staff are watching her. Want me to call into town for the sheriff?"

"No, not yet. Tell me, Ben..."

"No, he hasn't. I figured you'd be wondering if this Mellough had checked out The desk will call me if he tries."

"So it was Miles?"

"That's what George says."

"All right. He's had it. Let's get me into the shower."

"But the doctor said—"

Jonathan's suggestion as to what the doctor could do with his advice was beyond the routine of physiotherapy and, moreover, beyond ballistic probability.

Ben half carried him into the shower where Jonathan turned on the cold water and let it beat on him, clearing the moss from his mind. "Why, Ben? I'm really not that bad."

"The oldest reason in the world, ol' buddy," he shouted over the noise of the shower.

"Love?"

"Money."

The water was doing its work, but with the return of feeling came a pounding headache and pains in his kidneys. "Toss me in a bottle of aspirin. What did she shoot into me?"

"Here." Ben's big paw thrust the bottle through the shower curtain. "Doctor says it was some relative of morphine. He had a name for it. But it wasn't a lethal dose."

"So it would appear." The aspirin disintegrated in his hand with the splatter of water, so he tipped the bottle up to his mouth then washed the tablets down by gulping under the shower head. He gagged as bits of aspirin caught in his throat "Morphine figures. Miles is in the drug business."

"Is that right? But how come he went that far and didn't put you away for good? George said he had promised her nothing serious would happen to you. Just wanted to scare you off."

"Her concern is touching."

"Maybe she just didn't want to die for murder."

"That sounds more like it." Jonathan turned off the water and began to towel himself down, but not too vigorously, because every sharp motion slopped pain around in his head. "My guess is that Miles intended to come in after George put me under and shoot me full of junk. The death would be attributed to an overdose. It's typical Mellough. Safe and oblique."

"He's a bad ass all right. What are you going to do about him?"

"Something massive."

After Jonathan dressed, they went down the hall to the room in which George was being kept. He felt a twinge of regret when he saw her swollen eye and the split lip he had given her, but this quickly faded when the bruises along his spine reminded him of how she had tried to help the morphine put him away.

She looked more Indian than ever, clutching a blanket around her shoulders, under which she was as naked as she had been when Ben broke in to save him.

"How much did he pay you, George?" he asked.

She almost spat back her response. "Goddam your eyes, you shit!"

These were the only words he ever heard her speak.

Ben could not help chuckling as they returned to Jonathan's room. "I guess she's been around me too much."

"It's not that, Ben. They always talk about my eyes afterwards. Look, I'm going to get a couple hours' sleep. Will you have your people at the desk make up my bill?"

"You leaving right away?"

"Soon. Is the Land-Rover ready?"

"Yeah."

"And the shotgun?"

"It'll be on the floorboards. I imagine you don't want Mellough to know you're checking out."

"On the contrary. But don't do anything special about it. He'll find out. Miles is a specialist in information."

He awoke refreshed three hours later. The effects of the morphine had worn off and his headache was gone, but his kidneys still felt a little soggy. He dressed with special care in one of his better suits, packed his suitcases, and telephoned to the desk to have them put in the Land-Rover.

As he entered the lounge he saw the blond wrestler sitting at the bar, a broad strip of tape over his swollen nose.

"Good afternoon, Dewayne." Ignoring the bodyguard's glare of hate, he passed through the lounge, along a walkway, and over a bridge to the table at which Miles sat, poised and impeccable in a suit of metallic gold.

"Join me, Jonathan?"

"I owe you a drink."

"So you do. And we all know what a stickler you are for old debts. You're looking very nice. Your tailor is accurate, if uninspired."

"I'm not feeling too well. I had a bad night."

"Oh? I'm sorry to hear that."

The young Indian waiter who had served them the first day approached the table, his glances at Miles filled with tender remembrance. Jonathan ordered, and the two of them watched the bathers around the pool until the drinks arrived and the waiter departed.