"I remember."

"Just scouting out the premises. I like to do that, earliest opportunity. Same as I was doing when you and I first met."

"We met the same night you came to meet Opel."

"Earlier," he said. "I knew you'd been in touch with Happy Valley. Wanted to scout out the whole neighborhood, including your place. Just a quick look around, swish-swish, in and out, to get my bearings."

"When was this?"

"I was the brush salesman. I came around with a sample case and some patter about mutilation and exchange rates."

"Gaw-damn."

"An old, a very old routine of mine. Thought I'd dust it off and try it, being I was here in town."

"I was told you didn't travel anymore," I said.

"I'll tell you how word got out on that. I leaked that particular word. Have to keep people off balance. If you let people maintain their balance, there's any number of things likely to happen, the likeliest of which is that you lose the edge. Operations of this kind are a matter of balance and edge. I still travel. I like slipping in and out. Like corning to New York four, five times a year."

"Not me," Menefee said. "I have to load up on dope every time we come to New York. I stoke myself like a coal-burning engine. New York is too real. It's just about the realest thing there is in the observable universe."

"We're growing a race of giants here," I said. "This fact isn't clear yet but will be one day soon. Men, women and children. All giants. Prepared to eat glass and punch their way through concrete."

"I stoke up, man. I mix me some weird concoctions. That's the only way I can survive this kind of realness."

"I like traveling close to the ground," Dr. Pepper said. "Getting to know the road people. The drifters. The pure products. I can recall Roy Best, a legendary banjo player who was working for a perforating company when I ran across him. Bushwick Perforating, Roy Best. Another legend about that time was Vincent T. Skinner, habitue of the billiard parlors, a whole anthropological culture in itself, Vinny Skinny, sold pool tables door to door because he loved the game, Vincent T. Skinner, froze to death in the middle of summer when he went to sleep in a refrigerated packing house between shifts. Mylon Ware, the mad dog folk singer, a near legend. James Radley, nutritionist, a legend many times over. The semi-legendary disc jockey, Howard Mud Stump Meegan, a man who wore white socks every day of his life because his feet were allergic to colored dyes. Bobby Boy Todd, a free spirit who worked as a dispatcher for a bus company, dispatching buses until he quit to travel, just travel, nothing but travel, spent his days and nights traveling, a free spirit, a legend of travel, married a half-breed girl and on his wedding day fractured both legs riding a kid's tricycle down a ravine. Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb? Rosalee Dowdy, the comic book queen, a legend and a half. Tristan Bramble, folklorist and musicologist, busted for possession nine times, an important early influence. Earlene Griffin, the r-and-b arranger, a seminal figure. Just last night at the Port Authority Bus Terminal where I hike to hang out when I'm in New York, I ran into Vernon Kliegl and Mary Kliegl, the husband and wife midgets who became legends in the late fifties for department store pilferage. They're more or less retired now, living on deferred income. Stone drunk when I ran into them. Hanging all over each other. I called them but they were too drunk to hear me. So I followed them toward the down escalator. The down escalator as it turns out was not running at all, out of order, stalled. The Kliegls are standing there on the top step, too drunk to know they're not moving. The up escalator is working fine and about a hundred people go gliding past the Kliegls before Mary Kliegl realizes they've been stationary all this while and begins punching Vernon Kliegl on the arm and chest, demanding to know what the hell is going on. A smile creases my face. I choose this moment to get them off the escalator. Vernon recognizes me right away and we shake hands and start talking about this and that. I'm aware all the while we're talking that Mary Kliegl is looking up at me and squinting, too drunk to know who I am. She resumes her battering of Vernon's arm and chest, all the time squealing out at him: 'Who is that, who is he, do we know him?' I finally had to cut the conversation short for the sake of Vernon Kliegl's physical well-being. She wouldn't even let me explain who I was. Midgets are clannish people."

His hands were set flat on the table. All through the narrative there was no change in his expression. I knew those people were out there. The pure so-called products. Found dead near railroad tracks or shipped in bulk to the warehouses of the certifiably insane. Pepper nevertheless seemed to be reciting for mere exercise. Maybe he was giving this particular identity a workout, stretching its muscles, adding a furlong to its distance. To my ear there were no defects in the unstressed delivery of his voice.

"What happens now?" I said.

"Eventually I want to package the stuff in twenty-five-milligram green capsules. Mean green beans. Too early to work out pricing."

"But you don't have the sample. Hanes has it."

"That's why I'm here, Buck. Hanes won't be able to unload the product easy as all that. Hanes doesn't know about balance and edge. The kid's untried and untested, a pissy little babe among the timber wolves. He doesn't have any up-top connections and he doesn't know what it's like out there, although by this time he's maybe finding out. He'll be back is my guess. He can't stay out there indefinitely without putting himself in grave danger. This whole business qualifies as high risk. If he survives at all, back here is the first place he'll come. I'm all but convinced of that. Hell put the thing back where he got it from. That's the first instinct of the trapped man. Meanwhile I'll be close by. Ill be keeping an eye on things. I'll be in touch."

"I may not be here," I said.

"Buck, I want this product badly. This may be my last venture in the field of drugs and drug abuse. I crave new frontiers. There's a craving in my breast for the uncharted spaces and territories of the human mind. Energy. I want to tap untapped fields of energy. Dope is okay. Dope is the power of the earth, the use of earth products to dig deeper into the earthen parts of the mind. But energy is the power of the universe. I want to tap that power. I see masses of people changing their energy patterns by controlling bio-rhythms from the basic frequencies of the universe. Stereo electrodes. Control of internal changes. I envision abuses, of course. I envision mail-order ads in the rear extremities of men's magazines. Cures cancer in seconds I Adds inches to your cock! But that kind of booshit's inevitable and I can't take time to worry about it, much as it grieves me in the professional sense. I'm already semi-involved in a process I call the process of centrifugalism. Stereo electrodes. Blood-pressure impactors. What I call the auto-domination of the inner mind."

"I've got problems right now that don't have anything to do with you or Hanes or the universe."

"I want to end this phase of my career with a technical and merchandising feat that goes beyond the legendary. You and I, friend, are the only two people in positions of trust. Once the product is returned, we'll go into deep consultation. Where there's money to be made and legends to be created, I don't leave anything to chance and it strikes me as boding well for the future of our partnership that you've been wooed by other agencies of the underground without releasing the product. But accept a word of caution. This operation is fraught with danger. Bohack is not a man to be trifled with. He's an edgy gent with all kinds of deliveries. Some reasonable. Some not so."