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  “Mmmm,” she answered, momentarily distracted. “Picking up Micki at eleven, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he groaned. “Micki.” Oboy. Visions of tofu, sandalwood, crystals and pentacles danced in his head. “How long’s she staying again?”

  “Till the baby’s born, and I’m back on my feet,” Gwen purred, anticipating the resistance. Gary grumbled. That meant at least six weeks of weed walks, witchy rituals, and West Coast weirdo diets. Probably more, if past experience was any judge.

  “It’ll be good for the baby,” she said, shifting into a comfortable angle. “Besides, we’ve got the book to work on…”

  Gary grumbled some more as he pressed into her. Gwen took it in stride, angling her hips and lifting one leg. Her pelvis was widened for the passage, her lips moist and full as the gates parted and Gary slid home.

  The argument was over before it even started, as they locked on a slow, sensual rhythm of heat and love and life.

  And morning came to another Sunday in Paradise.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  First light fell on Dark Hollow Road at half past six: cutting through the scraggly woods of Windsor Township, slicing the darkness down into narrow strips of shadow. The storm had dwindled to mist and memory; but now the night was fading, too. In its place came ugly, cloud-refracted sunlight: unseasonably warm, and painful to behold.

  But then again, everything was painful now.

  He was a great big dying man, and he couldn’t go much farther. Every agonized, crutching step forward was an ultimate act of will. He had been traveling south down the back roads of Hellam, in just this way, for hours.

  The will was not entirely his own.

  He rounded the final bend and paused there: swaying grotesquely swollen. Before him, the Flinchbaugh place splayed out like a tacky, white-trash Disneyland; it was all that remained between him and home. Dozens of lawn ornaments crowded Eb Flinchbaugh’s manicured lawn: concrete jockey and leprechaun faces locked in lifeless smiles, little Dutch girl’s eyes staring sightlessly through him as he passed.

  Artificial flamingos and deer were clustered around the centerpiece: a working fountain, burbling incessantly, its sound soothing to his ears. The temptation to simply lay down among them and rest—perhaps forever—was overwhelming.

  He could not let it happen.

  Not when he was so close.

  One shivering, shambling step after another, he descended into the hollow. Boonie’s personal finish line in the bad-news relay race loomed before him; the rust-hued shimmer of the yard below was like a beacon.

  Calling him home.

  Sometime after seven, Otis Pusser pulled up to the gate, slouching beneath the peeling vinyl top of his ’79 Buick Skylark. He leaned into the horn, meaty palm pressing the wheel rim so hard it felt like it would snap clean off.

  “GODDAMMIT! BOONIE!” he roared. “OPEN THIS GODDAMNED GATE!”

  The horn lowed like a buttfucked sow. Behind the gate, DamDog and Coonie joined in, raggedy junkyard yowls compounding the din. They were mutts, scrawny-assed and nasty to the bone, bred mean and kept that way. While he watched, Coon jumped all fours into the air and snapped at the chain link, came down on DamDog, and got bit for his trouble. The air filled with fur and dog spit and dust.

  “Stupid damn animals,” he muttered, shaking his head and honking some more.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t have keys; he just didn’t want to get up. Otis tipped in at a couple of hairs over three hundred and fifteen pounds, most of it hard fat and body odor. His features were large-pored and leathery—the wages of a life of hard labor—and his nose was a vibrant rococo fresco of scarlet capillary distress. A Big Gulp cup was wedged between his thighs, filled three-to-one with coffee and Wild Turkey.

  Otis gazed skyward, perturbed. A pocked metal sign above the gate read PUSSER’S SCRAP & SALVAGE. It was his lifeblood, his legacy, and his bread and butter.

  Which accounted in no small part for why Otis was so pissed. Here he was, up and ready for business, and where was his no-good son? Probably sleeping off a stone-drunk, the little shit.

  Otis gave the horn one final blat, to no avail. “Some balls will roll,” he grumbled, then threw open the door and squeezed through the gap. It took a minute to waddle over and unlock the gate; he swung it back, hitting the dogs in the process. DamDog yipped and skittered off Coon.

  “Bitch! Git out the damn way!” Otis barked, returning to the car. The dogs scattered as he gunned the engine and motored into Pusserland proper.

  It was a tad over three acres of rusted refuse, the cannibalized corpses of the American dream. Junked cars. Junked refrigerators. Junked air conditioners and hot-water heaters. Lots of just plain junk, passing through Otis’s hands on its way to oblivion.

  Otis had an eye for worth, and oodles of connections. He could rip the copper out of a Kool King faster than a kapo could yank teeth, and he knew just who to sell it to. It was a gift.

  Like last night’s load, he thought with no small satisfaction. Not bad for one night’s work. Twenty-five drums at forty bucks per, a cool grand for the simple magic trick of making someone else’s problem disappear. Otis was an alchemical endstop in the digestive tract of society, siphoning off the last ounce of value, turning shit to gold.

  In the grand scheme of things, Pusser’s was the dungheap at the end of the line.

  And Otis was the undisputed King of Turd Mountain.

  He tooled down the main drive to the trailer, a forty-foot Airstream that double-dutied as both the office and Boonie’s bachelor pad. Otis parked beside it and got out, noting that the lights were on in the trailer, even though the truck was gone. Running up the goddamned electric bill again, he thought. There was gonna be some serious butt kicked today.

  He stomped toward the trailer door, brimming with fatherly, corporate, and inebriated rage. To his complete dissatisfaction, he found it unlocked and ajar. A thin sliver of gold light squirted out the crack, glowing in the pale blue dawn.

  He slammed his way inside, preparing to pounce.

  Then suddenly, abruptly, stopped.

  The interior of the trailer was cramped, smelling of spilled beer and gym socks and crammed with cast-off furniture and antique porno mags. Another smell—dense, chemical, heady—hovered in the closed, dark space.

  The boy was hunkered in front of a piece of mirror, propped on the battered steel desk that delineated the office. A gooseneck lamp was twisted up for illumination.

  When the door flew open, Boonie whirled as if caught jerking off, though his expression conveyed far less surprise than pain. He had been mewling when his father came bursting in.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Otis whispered, staring dumbstruck at the mess that was his son.

  “Pa…” Boonie whimpered, stuffing psychic ice chips down the core of Otis’s spine.

  He clutched a pair of bloody tweezers in one hand and a gore-smeared rag in the other. A pile of glass cubes glistened before him like a grisly display from Van Scoy’s Diamond Mine. It was only half the prize; the rest was still imbedded in Boonie’s face.

  The cleaned side was raw, almost abscessed; the lacerations had opened up, given rise to clusters of smaller open sores, like craters on the alien landscape of his cheek, nose, and forehead.

  A bottle of hydrogen peroxide sat uncorked on the table. Boonie grabbed it with swollen fingers and doused the rag, then daubed his mangled right cheek.

  It fizzed audibly, sputtering pinkish foam; Boonie cried out and brought one clawed hand up to hover an inch away from the angry surface. He looked up at Otis, his eyes bloodshot watery orbs. “Pa, I fucked up. I fucked up, bad, Pa…”

  Otis listened, as Boonie fessed up. It took two minutes. Otis didn’t believe half the drugged-out shit his boy said, but the other half more than did it. Two sweeps of the second hand were more than enough time for Otis to imagine his kingdom crumbling beneath his feet.

  Otis waited until Boonie finished, got the facts as straight as he could. />
  Then he kicked the shit out of him.

  First things first.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You’re joking,” Harold Leonard said.

  There was a thin sheen of extremely cold sweat on his brow. It hadn’t been there a minute ago. A minute ago, he’d been piling Marge and their six lovely children into the Arrow, mini-vanning in style to another Sunday service. A little Christian fellowship, promptly followed by the Bob’s Big Boy buffet. It was a little chilly for golf, but Harold was a diehard. A quick nine holes down at the club, and he’d be back in time for the Eagles game.

  A minute ago, he’d had it all figured out.

  That minute was gone forever.

  The voice on the other end of the phone was drunken, surly, strangely out of breath. It assured him that, no, it certainly wasn’t a joke, then proceeded to rattle off a coarse litany of hugely unpleasant specifics. Each and every one of them fanned the spark of dread taking root in his lungs, peed fire into his paunchy gut.

  Harold Leonard was the owner and operator of Paradise Waste Disposal, the area’s largest legitimate waste disposal facility. For some fifteen years, the local industrial community had come to him with its dirty diapers: paying him dearly to clean them up or, at the very least, store them somewhere inoffensive and safe.

  The good news was that business was grand; the one thing we never ran out of was waste. The bad news was that there was far too much of it. Even with the most up-to-date technology he was willing to spring for, he couldn’t process but a fraction of what he took in. Every day, every month, every year.

  That was where Harold’s operation tiptoed somewhat afoul of the law.

  Harold Leonard was a middleman in every sense of the word: middle-aged, middle-class, pickle in the middle. His stature in the business community commanded a respect that he rarely achieved in his personal life. Liver-lipped, beak-nosed and weasel-eyed, he was the last guy you’d have picked for your team in school: the fat kid who always got two for flinching.

  He was flinching now, that much was for certain. The phone’s receiver was slick in his porcine hand. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he heard himself whine. “We’ll work this out.”

  “You’re goddam right we’ll work this out,” spat the voice from the other end. “I wanna know what you’re gonna do about my boys.”

  Harold didn’t know what to say. The hospital was out, for obvious reasons. His brain flailed in search of contingency plans that didn’t exist. “Look,” he began. “I’ve got to talk to some people. You haven’t told anyone else yet, have you?”

  “What, are you stupid?”

  He silently thanked God; and in that moment, his brain began to work. Perhaps it was the power of prayer. “Okay, listen up,” he said. “First, I want you to call the cops.”

  “Yeah, right! FUCK you!”

  “Will you listen to me!” Harold pressed, more forcefully. He was in his element now: weaseling in real time, thinking on his feet. “Tell ‘em that you just got in, and the truck was stolen. Probably last night.”

  The moron to whom he was speaking made a colorful noise of comprehension. Redeemed in his own eyes, Harold pressed on. “That’ll cover you if they find it, and buy us some time to work this mess out.”

  “Okay. I like that…”

  “And for Christ’s sake, keep your big mouth shut. Don’t say anything to anybody until I get back to you.”

  Leonard slammed the phone down, ending their chat on a power note. Then he stood there, just shaking for one long, dreadful minute, trying mightily to quell his panic. His ulcer bubbled like a gastric Jacuzzi; his heart slammed in his temples.

  “Everything’s gonna be fine,” he told himself, wanting hard to believe it. “I’ll just have to tell Blake. He’ll know what to do…”

  Outside, Marge or one of the kids tapped out “Shave and a Haircut” on the horn. It shook him out of his stupor, made him long for their warmth and companionship. I’m not a bad guy, he told himself.

  Wanting hard to believe it.

  I’m not…

  Then Harold Leonard donned his coat and hat, locked the door of his cozy little house in Haines Acres, walked through the yard of his snug little hunk of suburban Paradise.

  And went to join his loving family in worship.

  At the church of his choice.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By a quarter after ten, on a Sunday morning, the legions of God’s faithful were off and running.

  Whatever else one might say about the people of Paradise County, Deitz noted, they were awfully big on Sunday services. And with eighty-seven houses of worship within the city limits alone—representing twenty-eight Christian denominations—there was certainly no shortage of Godanointed service stations. While the wicked slept in, the righteous deployed, flocking en masse to their respective personal savior pit stops.

  From the Mennonite farms at the county’s edge to the African Episcopal Church downtown, the children of God made their holy presence known. Between the hours of nine and noon, they virtually owned the roads: station wagons, packed to the gills with Baptists, Brethren, and Bible Fellows; drive-thru windows, dispensing Sausage and Egg McMuffins by the truckload to Methodists and Mormons alike; gas stations, meeting the motoring needs of Catholics, Christian Scientists, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Assemblymen of God.

  Austin Deitz stood at the back of the Mt. Rose Amoco Shop ‘N’ Go, where Route 24 crossed Mt. Rose Avenue at the mouth of the eastern valley. He was perusing the Yummy Potato Chip snack rack while he waited for Jennie to return.

  She’d disappeared behind the EMPLOYEES ONLY door ten minutes ago. As store manager, she’d been torn from her bed and called in to troubleshoot the latest crisis: some loser named Ozzie who’d called in sick at the very last minute with tickets for the Eagles game.

  That Ozzie now ranked among the unemployed was no consolation at all. Only Ozzie’s ability to deep-six their Sunday plans held even the remotest level of interest for him. It was, after all, a very special occasion.

  Their fourth—count ‘em, fourth—anniversary.

  Four solid weeks together, Deitz mused, smiling. My God. That’s practically a whole month! Somebody alert the media!

  Almost an entire month where you could virtually call me happy.

  Austin Deitz was a month shy of forty, a tall gangly man with knobby calloused hands and a face like a young Abe Lincoln’s. He had the same intense dark eyes and severe, gaunt hollows to his cheeks, the same shock of cowlicked hair and horsey overbite. The only things he lacked were the beard and the bullet hole, and he was in no great hurry to acquire either one.

  He was not exactly what he’d consider a love machine, but Jennie didn’t seem to mind. In fact, ever since their eyes met over the barbecue chicken pit at the Stoverstown Fire Company’s Fall Festival, she’d changed his mind about a lot of things.

  Jennie Quirez was slight and slender, with a broad yet delicate face framed by warm mahogany hair and offset by the clearest, finest deep brown eyes he’d ever seen. She was either late twenties or early thirties—Deitz hadn’t gotten around to asking yet, though he didn’t think she’d mind—far enough along, anyway, for her rich tan complexion to take on the supple, slightly leathery etch of time.

  She smiled a lot and didn’t take an ounce of shit from anyone, a combination that Deitz found irresistible. She was also, as if that wasn’t enough, a compulsive reader of science fiction, whose childhood dream was to be an astronaut one day. For a kid who grew up thinking that Heinlein and Bradbury were gods, there could not have been a more perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy than a girl who knew what to grok in fullness really meant, or who could savor both the strange peace and melancholic beauty of a book like The Martian Chronicles and the icy, hardwired edginess of Gibson’s Neuromancer.

  But the sf she loved most was fundamentally optimistic, like herself. She liked to believe that there really were other species out there somewhere—intelligent, kind, benevolent species—
and that one day we’d actually evolve enough to join them in the stars.

  Moreover, she liked to encourage those qualities in people here on Earth, for what she felt were pretty obvious reasons: a) to help us evolve just a little bit faster; b) because, quite simply, life was better when you treated people right; and c) because the odds were good that, given her current career trajectory, she’d never actually make it into space.

  She’ll find someone to work, he told himself. Just have a little faith. You’ve got the Baltimore Aquarium and the Inner Harbor waiting, then dinner at Dobson’s and a room at the Hunt Valley Inn. Which is to say: you cannot fail.

  Keep playing your cards right. And pray for a miracle.

  Today just might be the best day of your life.

  And, of course, it was true. Or at least it might be. Certainly, every Sunday since he’d first met Jennie had been better than the last. It was the first time, in what felt like forever, that Deitz had gotten so tight with somebody so quickly.

  It was kind of like falling in love.

  Which was an awful lot like a miracle in itself.

  In the meantime, Deitz cruised the aisles aimlessly, waiting. There wasn’t a nontoxic unit of food in the whole goddam store—not Jennie’s fault; she was a manager, not a buyer—but that didn’t stop a dozen consumers from stocking up on nutritionless, oversalted, or sugar-crammed delights. Deitz watched them mill about, comparing poisons: it was a desperate bid, on his part, to take his mind off his sudden apprehension.

  He glanced at the data pager tucked onto his belt, its tiny power light forever glowing. What if something happens? he thought gloomily, watching Dobson’s and the Hunt Valley Inn sprout wings and flutter away without them.

  The beeper remained both alert and mercifully silent.

  Okay, then, he thought. What if she can’t find a sub…?

  “Now stop,” he interrupted himself. “You promised, remember? Today, nothing gets to you. You’re the happiest man on earth.”