The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove Page 5

Nine

When Mikey "the Collector" Plotznik wheeled into town and saw that the Texaco station had blown up, leaving a charred circle two hundred yards wide around it, he knew that it was going to be a great day. It was a shame about the burger stand going up too, and he'd miss their spicy fries, but hey, you don't often get to see the toasting of a major landmark like the Texaco. The fire was all out now, but several firemen were still sifting through the wreck-age. The Collector waved to them as he wheeled by. They waved back, somewhat reticently, for the Collector's reputation preceded him and made them nervous.

Today would be the day, Mikey thought. The Texaco was an omen, the star in the sky over his lifelong dream. Today he'd catch Molly Michon naked, and when he did (and brought back the proof), his reputation would grow to mythic proportions. He patted the disposable camera he carried in the front pouch of his hooded sweatshirt. Oh yes, he'd have evidence to back up his story. They would believe him - and bow to him.

At this point in his life, the Collector was more interested in explosions than in naked women. He was only ten, and it would be a couple of years before his interests moved to girls. Freud never identified a stage of devel-opment known as "pyrotechnic fascination," but that was only because there wasn't an abundant supply of disposable lighters in nineteenth-cen-tury Vienna. Ten-year-old boys blow shit up. It's what they do. But today a strange new feeling had come over Mikey, a feeling he couldn't put a word to, but if he could, the word would have been "horny." As he Rollerbladed through town, tossing the Los Angeles Times into the shrubs and gutters of businesses along Cypress Street, he felt a tightness in his shorts that until now he had associated with having to take a raging pee in the morning. Today it signified a need to see the Crazy Lady in a state of undress.

Paperboys are the carriers of preadolescent myth. On every paper route, there is a haunted house, a kid-eating dog, an old woman who tips with twenties, and a woman who answers the door in the nude. Mikey had never actually seen any of these things, but that never stopped him from spinning wild stories for his buddies at school. Today he would get proof, he could feel it in his loins.

He skated down the driveway into the Fly Rod Trailer Court, chucked a paper into the rose bushes in front of Mr. Nunez's trailer, then made a beeline for the Crazy Lady's house. He could see a blue glow coming through her windows, a TV. She was home and awake. Yes!

He pulled up a couple of doors down and noticed that a new trailer had moved in next to the Crazy Lady. A new customer? Why not give it a try? The Crazy Lady didn't receive the paper, so his pretense for knocking on her door was to get her to subscribe. He could practice on these new people. As he skated up to the front door of the new trailer, lights came on in the two front windows. Yes! Someone was home. Strange curtains - they looked like cat's eyes.

Through a part in the curtains, Molly watched the kid come down the road into the trailer park. She liked kids, but she didn't like this kid. At least once a week he knocked on her door and tried to get her to subscribe to the paper, and once a week she told him to go away and never come back. Sometimes he would bring one of his little buddies along. She could hear them skulking around her trailer, trying to peek in the windows. "Swear to God, she's got a dead guy in there that she does it with. I've seen him. And she ate a kid once."

The kid was heading for the monster trailer.

In the background, a videotape was playing on her TV - Mechanized Death: Warrior Babe VII - and THE SCENE was coming up. Molly looked away from the window and watched THE SCENE for the thousandth time.

Kendra is standing in the back of a jeep, manning a rack of net guns as the jeep pursues the Evil Warlord across the desert. The driver turns, as he is supposed to, throwing up a fishtail of dust, but the front wheel of the jeep hits a rock and the jeep rolls. Kendra is thrown fifty feet in the air and lands in a heap. The steel bra she is wearing cuts deep into her chest and blood sprays out across the dust.

The bastards! Every time she watches THE SCENE she can't believe the bastards left it in. The accident was real, the blood was Molly's, and when she returned to the set ten days later, a security guard escorted her to the producer's trailer.

"I can pay you extra's wages as a mutant," the producer said, "but let's face it, babe, you didn't get your billing because of your acting ability. You think I'm gonna hold up filming for ten days when the whole schedule is only three weeks long? We got a new Kendra. Wrote the accident and the facial reconstruction into the script. She's a cyborg now. Now you can get in line with the mutants to pick up your bag of rags, or you can get the fuck off the set. My audience wants perfect bodies, and you were getting up there anyway. With that scar you don't sell anymore."

Molly had just turned twenty-seven years old.

She pulled herself from THE SCENE and looked out the window again. The kid was there, right there in front of the monster trailer. She should warn him or something.

She pounded on the window and the kid looked up, not startled, but with a dreamy expression on his face. Molly gestured for him to move away. The window she was looking out of didn't open. (Trailers built in those days were designed so people would burn up in case of a fire. The manufacturers thought it would keep the lawsuits down.)

The kid just stood there, his fist poised before the door as if he were frozen in the middle of knocking.

As Molly watched, the door began to open. Not on the hinges, but vertically, like a garage door. Molly pounded furiously on the window with the hilt of her sword. The kid smiled. A huge red tongue snaked out of the door, wrapped around the kid, and slurped him in, Rollerblades, paper satchel, and all. Molly screamed. The door slammed shut.

Molly watched, stunned, not knowing what to do. A few seconds later the mouth opened and expectorated a soccer-ball-sized wad of newspaper.

Theo

The hours of Theo's day had moved like slugs crawling on razor wire. By four in the afternoon, he felt as if he'd been awake for a week and the cups of French roast he'd been drinking had turned to foaming acid in his stomach. Mercifully, there hadn't been a single call for a bar fight or do-mestic dispute, so he had spent the entire day at the scene of the fuel truck explosion, talking to firemen, representatives from Texaco Oil, and an arson investigator sent up from the San Junipero Fire Department. Much to his surprise, going all day without a hit from his Sneaky Pete pot pipe had not sent him into fits of anxiety as it usually did. He was a little paranoid, but he wasn't sure that that wasn't just an informed response to the world anyway.

At a quarter past four, the arson investigator crossed the charred parking lot to where Theo was leaning on the hood of his Volvo. The investigator was in his late twenties, clean-cut, and carried himself like an athlete, even in the orange toxic waste suit. He carried a plastic space helmet under his arm like a tumorous football.

"Constable Crowe, I think that's about all I can do today. It'll be dark soon, and as long as we keep the area closed off, I'm sure everything will still be here in the morning."

"What's your call so far?

"Well, we generally look for evidence of accelerants, gas, kerosene, paint thinner - and I'd say there were definitely some flammable liquids involved here." He smiled a weary smile.

"So you don't know what happened?"

"Offhand, I'd say a fuel truck blew up, but without further investigation I'd hate to make a commitment at this time." Again the smile.

Theo smiled back. "So no cause?"

"The driver probably didn't seal the hose correctly and a cloud of fumes got set off. There wasn't much wind last night, so the fumes would have just clung to the ground and built up. Anything could have set it off: the driver could have been smoking, the pilot lights at the hamburger place, a spark in the truck exhaust. Right now I'd say it was totally accidental. It was a company-owned store, and it was turning a profit, so there really isn't a financial motive for arson. Texaco will definitely be building your town a new burger stand and probably paying off some nuisance settlements from people claiming trauma, duress, and irritation."

"I have the information on the driver," Theo said. "I'll check to see if he was a smoker."

"I asked him. He's keeping quiet" came a voice from a few yards away.

Theo and the arson investigator looked up to see Vance McNally coming toward them holding up a Ziploc bag full of white and gray powder. "I've got him right here," the EMT said. "You want to interrogate him?"

"Very funny, Vance," Theo said.

"They're going to have to do the autopsy with a flour sifter," Vance said.

The investigator took the Ziploc from Vance and examined it. "You find any remains of a cigarette lighter? Anything like that?"

"Not my job," Vance said. "The fire was so hot it turned the seat springs to liquid. Even incinerated the bones, except for those little bits of calcium in there. Honestly, this might not all be our boy. We might be giving his wife a bag full of burnt-up truck parts to put in an urn on the mantel."

The investigator shrugged and handed the bag back to Vance. Then to Theo he said, "I'm going home. I'll come back tomorrow and look around some more. As soon as I give the okay, the oil company will send in a crew to drain the ground tanks."

"Thanks," Theo said. The investigator left in a county car.

Vance McNally turned the Ziploc bag of truck driver in the air. "Theo, this ever happens to me, I want you to get all my friends together, have a big party, and snort me, okay?"

"You have friends, Vance?"

"Okay, it was just an idea," Vance said. He turned and carried his bag to the waiting ambulance.

Theo sipped his coffee and noticed something moving in the charred brush beyond the Texaco. It looked as if someone was holding up a TV antenna and getting altogether too close to the yellow tape he had run around the perimeter. Jeez, was he going to have to stay here all night guarding the scene? He pried himself off the Volvo and headed for the offender.

"Hey there!" Theo called.

Gabe Fenton, the biologist, emerged from the brush, indeed holding up some kind of antenna, followed by his Labrador retriever, Skinner. The dog ran to meet Theo and greeted him with two muddy paw prints on the chest.

Theo rubbed Skinner's ears to hold him at bay, the classic slobbering Labrador control move. "Gabe, what in the hell are you doing down here?"

The biologist was covered with burrs and foxtails, his face striped with soot from the charred brush. He looked exhausted, yet there was a note of excitement bordering on ecstasy in his voice. "You won't believe this, Theo. My rats moved en masse this morning."

Theo tried, but couldn't match Gabe's enthusiasm. "That's swell, Gabe. Texaco blew up last night."

Gabe Fenton looked around at the surrounding area as if seeing the destruction for the first time. "What time?"

"About four in the morning."

"Hmmm, maybe they sensed it."

"They?"

"The rats. Around 2 A.M. they all started moving west. I can't figure out what caused it. Here, look at the screen." Gabe had a laptop computer strapped into a harness around his waist. He turned it so Theo could see the screen. "Each of these dots represents an animal I have implanted with a tracking chip. Here's their location at 1 A.M." He clicked a key and the screen drew a topographical map of the area. Green dots were scattered pretty much evenly along the creek bed and the business district of Pine Cove.

Gabe hit another key. "Now here they are at two." All but a few of the dots had moved into the ranchland east of Pine Cove.

"Uh-huh," Theo said. Gabe was a nice guy. Spent too much time with vermin, but he was a nice guy. Gabe needs to talk to humans occasionally, Theo thought.

"Well, don't you see? They all moved at once, except for these ten over here that moved to the shore."

"Uh-huh," Theo said. "Gabe, the Texaco blew up. A guy was killed. I was talking to firemen in space suits all day. Every paper in the county has called me. The battery is almost out on my cell phone. I haven't eaten since yesterday and I only slept an hour last night. Help me find the significance in rat migration, okay?"

Gabe looked crestfallen. "Well, I don't know the significance yet. I'm tracking the ten that didn't move east, hoping the anomalies will give a clue to the behavior of the larger group. Strange thing is, four of the ten disappeared off my screen a little after two. Even if they were killed, the chips should still transmit. I need to find them."

"And I wish you the best of luck, but this area may still be dangerous. You can't be here, buddy."

"Maybe there were fumes," Gabe said. "But that doesn't explain why they all moved in the same direction. Some even came through this area from the shore."

Theo couldn't bear to express to Gabe how little he cared. "You had any dinner, Gabe?"

"No, I've been doing this since last night."

"Pizza, Gabe. We need pizza and beer. I'll buy."

"But I need to..."

"You're a single guy, Gabe. You need pizza every eighteen hours or you can't function properly. And I have a question to ask you about footprints, but I want you to watch me drink a few beers before I ask so I can claim diminished capacity. Come, Gabe, let me take you to the land of pizza and beer." Theo gestured to his Volvo. "You can stick the antenna out the sunroof."

"I guess I could take a break."

Theo opened the passenger door and Skinner leapt into the car, leaving sooty paw prints on the seat. "Your dog needs pizza. It's the humane thing to do."

"Okay," Gabe said.

"I want to show you something over by the creek bed."

"What."

"A footprint. Or what's left of one."

Ten minutes later they sat over frosty mugs of beer at Pizza in the Pines, Pine Cove's only pizza parlor. They'd taken a window table so Gabe could keep an eye on Skinner, who was bouncing up and down outside, giving them an ever-changing view of the street, then the street with dog face (ears akimbo), then the street, then the street with dog face again. Other than to order a beer, Gabe Fenton hadn't said a word since they'd gone to the creek bed.

"Will he just keep doing that?" Theo asked.

"Until we take him a slice of pizza, yes."

"Amazing."

Gabe shrugged. "He's a dog."

"Always the biologist."

"One needs to keep the mind limber."

"Well, what do you think?"

"I think that you obliterated most of what you thought was a footprint."

"Gabe, it was a footprint. A talon or something."

"There are a thousand explanations for a depression in the mud like that, Theo, but one of them is not an animal track."

"Why not?"

"Well, for one, there hasn't been anything that large on this continent for about sixty million years, and for another, animals tend to leave more than one track, unless it's a creature especially adapted for hopping." Gabe grinned.

The flying dog head pogoed by the windowsill.

"There were a lot of people and vehicles around there, the other tracks might have been wiped out."

"Theo, don't let your imagination run away with you. You've had a long day and..."

"And I'm a pothead."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"I know, I'm saying it. Tell me about your rats. What will you do when you find them?"

"Well, first I'm going to keep searching for the stimulus of their behavior, then I'll catch a few of the group that migrated and compare their brain chemistry to those that headed toward the shore."

"Does that hurt them?"

"You have to blend up their brains and run the liquid in a centrifuge."

"I guess so then."

The waitress brought their pizza and Gabe was severing cables of cheese from his first slice when Theo's cell phone rang. The constable listened for a second, then stood and dug into his pocket for money. "I've got to go, Gabe."

"What's up?"

"The Plotznik kid is missing. No one's seen him since he left on his paper route this morning."

"Probably hiding. That kid is evil. He rigged up something with his remote control car that affected the chips in my rats once. I spent three weeks trying to figure out why they were running figure eights in the parking lot outside the grocery story before I found him lurking in the weeds with the controller."

"I know," Theo said. "Mikey told me that if he wired ten of your rats together, he could pick up the Discovery Channel. I still have to find him. He has parents."

"Skinner is a pretty good tracker. Want to take him?"

"Thanks, but I doubt that the kid had a pizza in his pocket."

Theo folded his phone, snagged a slice of pizza for the road, and headed out the door.

Ten

Val Riordan leaned against her office door, trying to catch her breath and maintain her temper. Nothing in her clinical experience compared to the sessions she held on the day after the Texaco exploded. She had seen twenty patients in ten hours, and every one of them had wanted to talk about sex. And not abstract sex either, not issues or attitudes about sex, just squishy, thumping sex itself. It was unnerving.

She'd anticipated a spike in libido among her patients (it was a common symptom of withdrawal from antidepressants), but the books said not more than five to fifteen percent would have a reaction - about the same number that experienced a loss of libido upon taking the drugs. But today she'd hit one hundred percent. It was as if she were running a kennel for hopeless horndogs rather than a psychiatric practice.

After the last patient, she'd come out of her office to find her new receptionist, Chloe, furiously masturbating, her feet hooked into the edge of the desk, her steno chair squeaking like a tortured squirrel. Val had excused herself, turned on her heel, walked back into her office, and shut the door.

Chloe, twenty-one, had maroon hair, an entire wardrobe rendered in black, and a sapphire nose ring. Val had begun treating the girl in her teens for bulimia, then hired her when the volume of appointments skyrocketed after the placebo went into effect. Chloe worked in exchange for therapy; Val had thought it would be a good financial move. Frankly, she'd liked her better when she just threw up a lot.

Val was still trying to figure out exactly what to do when there was a soft knock on the door.

"Yes?"

"Sorry," Chloe said through the door.

"Uh, Chloe, that is not appropriate office behavior."

"Well, your last appointment had left. I thought that you would be working on your notes or something for a while. I'm really sorry."

"That's it? My last appointment leaves, so let the wild rumpus begin?"

"Am I fired?"

Val thought for a second. There were twenty more patients to see tomorrow and twenty the day after that. If the weirdness didn't kill her, the workload would. She couldn't afford to lose Chloe now. "No, you're not fired. But please, no more of that in the office."

"Do you have time to talk? I know my next session isn't until next week, but I really need to talk to you."

"Wouldn't you prefer to go home and, uh, think about things?"

"You mean finish? No, I'm finished for now. That's what I want to talk to you about. That wasn't the first time today."

Val gulped. It was highly unprofessional to talk to a patient through a door. She steeled herself and opened it. "Come in." She returned to her desk without looking at the girl. Chloe took a seat across from her.

"So this wasn't the first time today?" Val was the psychotherapist now, not the boss. If she'd been the boss, she would have come over the desk and strangled the little slut.

"No, I can't seem to get enough. I, well, it started about two in the morning, and I went straight though until time to get ready for work. Then once or twice while each patient was in session."

Val's jaw dropped. Sixteen hours of intermittent masturbation? The other patients she had seen had cited two in the morning as when their sexual adventures had started too. She said, "And how do you feel about that?"

"I feel okay. My wrist hurts a little. Do you think I could have carpal tunnel?"

"Chloe, if you think that you're going to file a workmen's compensation claim for this..."

"No no no, I just want to stop."

"Did something happen to set this off? Something at two in the morning? A dream perhaps?" Her other patients had described various sexual dreams. Winston Krauss, the pharmacist with the sexual obsession for marine mammals, confessed to dreaming of having sex with a blue whale, riding it through the depths like Ahab with a hard-on. Upon awakening, he'd abused his inflatable Flipper until it would no longer hold air.

Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Her long maroon hair hid her face. "I dreamed I was having sex with a tank truck, and it blew up."

"A tank truck?"

"I came."

"Sexual dreams are completely normal, Chloe." Right, a tank truck? That's normal. "Tell me, was there fire in your dream?" Pyromaniacs de-rived sexual pleasure from setting and watching fires. That's how they caught them, look in the crowd for a grinning guy with a woody and gas stains on his shoes.

"No, no fire. I woke up at the explosion. Val, what's wrong with me? All I want to do is, you know, do it."

"And you feel that you might do something impulsive?"

Chloe put on her cynical Goth-girl face. "If you mean something like buffing the muffin while I'm at work, yes, Dr. Riordan, I'm a little worried. Can't you adjust my medication or something?"

There it was. In the past, that would have been the answer. Increase the Prozac to eighty milligrams, about four times the dose for the average de-pressed patient, and let the side effect of reduced libido do the work. Val had used the method to treat a nymphomaniac when she was an intern and it had worked marvelously. But what now? Duct tape oven mitts to her receptionist's hands? Although her typing probably wouldn't suffer much, it might make the patients nervous.

Val said. "Chloe, masturbation is a natural thing. Everyone does it. But obviously there are appropriate times and places. Perhaps you should just cut back. Allow yourself to masturbate as a reward for controlling your urges."

Chloe's face went slack. "Cut down? I'm worried about driving home safely. I have a stick shift. I need both hands to drive, but I don't think I'm going to have them. Do you have a patch you can prescribe, like they do for smoking?"

"A patch?" Val suppressed a laugh. She imagined a twitching, moaning line of people around the block at the pharmacy, there to pick up their prescriptions for the orgasm patch. It would make heroin look like Gummi Bears. "No, there's no patch, Chloe. You're just going to have to try to control yourself. I have a feeling that this is a side effect of your medication. It should pass in a day or two. I want to hear more about this dream of yours. We'll talk tomorrow, okay?"

Chloe stood, obviously not satisfied with the help her therapist was offering, which was none. "I'll try." She left the office, closing the door behind her.

Val let her head fall to the desk. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, why didn't I go into pathology? she thought. It would be so peaceful sitting around, boiling up beakers of urine and culturing bugs. No wackos. No stress. Okay, occasionally you'd be exposed to some deadly anthrax spores, but at least other people's sex lives stay in the bedroom and the tabloids where they belong.

Her appointment with Martin and Lisbeth Luder rose in her head. They were in their seventies, had been in counseling because they hadn't had a decent conversation since 1958, and today they had come in and dumped a half hour of explicit sexual narrative on her, an account of perversions they'd indulged in the night before, starting at around 2 A.M. The visual conjured in Val's mind - all that parched, wrinkled flesh in furious fric-tion - culminated in flames, as if some giant cosmic Boy Scout had decided to rub two old people together to make a fire. The worst of it, the absolute worst of it, is that she'd found herself getting turned on while listening. She'd had to change her panties between appointments four times today.

She considered pouring herself a hefty tumbler of brandy and settling down in front of the television, but that wasn't going to do it. Batteries; she needed four C-cell batteries and she needed them now. Then it was time to dig through her lingerie drawers and find a long-forgotten friend - and hope that it still worked.

Molly

Long past dark and Molly was still staring though the gap in the curtains at the trailer that ate the kid. The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door. Not that she was ready to go out and pro-claim that fact to anyone, because no matter how sane you feel, some stuff just sounds too crazy. So she watched, still wearing her Warrior Babe outfit, hoping someone else would come along and notice. Around eight, someone did.

She saw Theophilus Crowe going from door to door in the park. He came into view two trailers down at the Morales home, spoke briefly with Mr. Morales at the door, then headed for the dragon trailer.

Molly was torn. She liked Theo. Yes, he'd taken her to County once or twice, but he'd always been kind to her - warned her about the guy in the day room who cheated at Parcheesi by eating the marbles. And he never spoke to her like she was a crazy woman. Theo was a fan.

As Theo was raising his black Mag lite to tap on the dragon trailer's door, Molly saw the two windows on the end slowly open, revealing the cat'seye pupils. Theo obviously didn't see them. He was looking at his shoes.

She threw up the aluminum sash and shouted, "They're not home!"

The constable turned toward Molly. "Just a second," she said.

She bolted out the door of her trailer and stopped by the street where Theo could see her. "They aren't home. Come here a second," she repeated.

Theo tucked his Mag lite into his belt. "Molly, how are you?"

"Fine, fine, fine. I need to talk to you, okay? Over here, okay?" She didn't want to tell him why. what if the eyes weren't there? What if it was just a trailer? She'd be on her way to County in a heartbeat.

"They're not home then?" Theo said, pointing over his shoulder to the dragon trailer. He was staring at her now, at the same time trying not to stare. He had a goofy grin on his face, the same sort Molly had seen on the kid right before he got slurped.

"Nope, gone all day."

"What's with the sword?

Oh shit! She forgot she'd grabbed the sword on the way out. "I was just making some stir-fry. Chopping up some veggies."

"That ought to do it."

"Broccoli stems," she said, as if that explained everything. He was looking at the leather bikini, and she watched his eyes stop on the scar above her breast, then look away. She covered the scar with her hand. "One of my old Kendra costumes. Everything else is in the dryer."

"Sure. Hey, you don't get the Times, do you?"

"Nope. Why?"

"The kid that delivers it, Mikey Plotznik, left for his route this morning and no one has seen him since. Looks like the last paper he delivered was a few doors down. You didn't happen to see him, did you?"

"About ten, blond kid, Rollerblades? Kinda evil?"

"That's him."

"Nope, haven't seen him." She watched the eyes of the dragon trailer close behind Theo and took a deep breath.

"You seem a little tense, Molly. You okay?"

"Fine, fine, just wanted to get back to my stir-fry. You hungry?"

"Did Val Riordan get hold of you?"

"Yep, she called. I'm not nuts."

"Of course not. I'd like you to keep an eye out for this kid, Molly. One of his buddies fessed up that Mikey had a little bit of an obsession with you."

"Me? No kidding?"

"He might be creeping around your trailer."

"Really?"

"If you see him, give me a call, would you? His folks are worried about him."

"I'll do that."

"Thanks. And ask your neighbors when they get home, would you?"

"You betcha." Molly realized he was stalling. Just staring at her with that goofy grin on his face. "They just moved in. I don't know them very well, but I'll ask."

"Thanks." He said, still just standing there, like a twelve-year-old ready to make an assault on the wall-flowers at his first dance.

"I'd better go, Theo. I have broccoli in the dryer." No, she had wanted to say she had to get back to dinner, or to her laundry, not both.

"Okay. See ya."

She ran into her trailer, slammed the door, and leaned against it. Through the window she could see the dragon trailer open an eye and close it quickly. She could have sworn it was winking at her.

Theo

A niggling voice in Theo's head told him that finding the Crazy Lady attractive - extremely attractive - was an indicator that he was less than sane himself. On the other hand, he didn't feel that bad about it. He didn't feel bad about anything, not since he'd walked into the trailer park anyway. He had to deal with an explosion, a lost kid, the recent increase in general nuttiness in town - a virtual shit storm of responsibility - but he didn't feel all that bad. And in that moment outside of Molly's trailer, reflecting and waiting for the tide of lust to ebb, he realized that he hadn't smoked any pot all day. Strange. Normally this long without nursing from his Sneaky Pete and his skin would be crawling.

He was heading back to his Volvo to resume the search for the lost boy when his cell phone rang. Sheriff John Burton didn't say hello.

"Get to a land line," Burton said.

"I'm in the middle of trying to find a lost kid," Theo replied.

"A land line now, Crowe. My private line. You have five minutes."

Theo drove to a pay phone outside the Head of the Slug Saloon and checked his watch. When fifteen minutes had passed, he dialed Burton's number.

"I said five minutes."

"Yes, you did." Theo smiled to himself in spite of Burton's tone, which was on the verge of screaming.

"No one goes on the ranch, Crowe. The lost kid is not on the ranch, do you hear me?"

"It's standard procedure to search all the ranchland. Emergency services has the area gridded out. We have to cover the whole grid. I was going to call in some deputies to help us. The volunteer fire guys are exhausted from the explosion this morning."

"No. None of my guys. Don't call the Highway Patrol or the CCC either. And no aircraft. If the grid on the ranch has to be checked off, then check it off. No one goes on that land, is that clear?"

"And what if the kid actually is on the ranch. You're talking about a thousand acres of pasture and forest that won't be searched."

"Oh bullshit, the kid is probably in a tree house somewhere with a stack of Playboys. He's only been missing for what, twelve hours?"

"What if he's not?"

There was silence on the line for a moment. Theo waited, watching three new couples leave the Head of the Slug in less than a minute. New couples: in Pine Cove everyone knew who everyone else was dating, and these were people who didn't go together. Not that unusual a phenomenon perhaps on a Friday night at 2 A.M., but this was Wednesday, and it was barely eight o'clock. Maybe he wasn't the only one feeling a wave of horniness. The couples were groping each other as if trying to get all the foreplay out of the way before they reached the car.

Burton came back on the line. "I'll see that the ranchland is searched and call you if they find the kid. But I want to be the first to know if you find him."

"That it?"

"Find that little fucker, Crowe." Burton hung up.

Theo got into his Volvo and drove to his cabin at the edge of the ranch. There were at least twenty citizen volunteers searching for Mikey Plotznik. The effort could spare him long enough to catch a shower and change his smoke-saturated clothes. As he parked the Volvo, an expensive, tricked-out red pickup truck pulled into the ranch entrance and rolled slowly by. As they passed, a Hispanic man sitting in the bed laughed and saluted Theo with the barrel of an AK-47 assault rifle.

Theo looked away and walked to the dark cabin, wishing that there was someone there waiting for him.