"Oh, man... ." I complained, but Pat was adamant. Besides, when he was in his cups Pat complained that Catherine was not being very "wifely" lately. I think he was hoping that this would somehow charm him back onto Catherine's side of the bed. Mind you, Pat was as drunk as a lord, so this made sense to him, and I was d.a.m.n near pickled, so it more or less made sense to me, too. Father Callahan could have gotten a month's worth of h.e.l.lfire sermons on the dangers of hard liquor out of the way Pat and I handled this affair. Of course, Father Callahan's dead now, so there's that.

Anyway, we wound up doing as Pat said and we near busted our guts picking up Sophie and slumping her onto a wheelbarrow. We dusted off the green stuff as best we could, but we forgot about the piece in her mouth and the action of dumping her on the 'barrow must have made that glowing green chunk slide right down her gullet. If we'd been a lot less drunk we'd have wondered about that, because on some level I was pretty sure I heard her swallow that chunk, but since she was dead and we were grunting and cursing trying to lift her, and it couldn't be real anyway, I didn't comment on it. All I did once she was loaded was peer at her for a second to see if that great big bosom of hers was rising and fallingwhich it wasn'tand then I took another suck on my sleeve.

It took near two hours to haul her fat a.s.s up the hill and through the streets and down to Pat's little place on DeKoven Street. All the time I found myself looking queer at Sophie. I hadn't liked that sound, that gulping sound, even if I wasn't sober or b.a.l.l.sy enough to say anything to Pat. It made me wonder, though, about that glowing green piece of comet. What the h.e.l.l was that stuff, and where'd it come from? It weren't nothing normal, that's for sure.

We stood out in the street for a bit with Pat just staring at his own front door, mopping sweat from his face, careful of the bruises from Mean-Dog. "I can't bring her in like this," he said, "it wouldn't be right."

"Let's put her in the cowshed," I suggested. "Lay her out on the straw and then we can fetch the doctor. Let him p.r.o.nounce her dead all legal like."

For some reason that sounded sensible to both of us, so that's what we did. Neither of us could bear to try and lift her again so we tipped over the barrow and let her tumble out.

"Ooof!" she said.

"Excuse me," Pat said, and then we both froze.

He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both looked at Aunt Sophie. My throat was suddenly as dry as an empty shot gla.s.s.

Pat's face looked like he'd seen a ghost and we were both wondering if that's what we'd just seen in fact. We crouched over her, me still holding the arms of the barrow, him holding one of Sophie's wrists.

"Tell me if you feel a pulse, Paddy my lad," I whispered.

"Not a single thump," he said.

"Then did you hear her say 'ooof' or some suchlike?"

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't."

"Lying's not always a sin," I observed.

He dropped her wrist, then looked at the pale green dust on his handsthe glow had fadedand wiped his palms on his coveralls.

"Is she dead or isn't she?" I asked.

He bent and with great reluctance pressed his ear to her chest. He listened for a long time. "There's no ghost of a heartbeat," he said.

"Be using a different word now, will ya?"

Pat nodded. "There's no heartbeat. No breath, nothing."

"Then she's dead?"

"Aye."

"But she made a sound."

Pat straightened, then snapped his fingers. "It's the death rattle," he said. "Sure and that's it. The dead exhaling a last breath."

"She's been dead these two hours and more. What's she been waiting for?"

He thought about that. "It was the stone. The green stoneit lodged in her throat and blocked the air. We must have dislodged it when we dumped her out and that last breath came out. Just late is all."

I was beginning to sober up and that didn't have the ring of logic it would have had an hour ago.

We stood over her for another five minutes, but Aunt Sophie just lay there, dead as can be.

"I got to go tell Catherine," Pat said eventually. "She's going to be in a state. You'd better scram. She'll know what we've been about."

"She'll know anyway. You smell as bad as I do."

"But Sophie smells worse," he said, and that was the truth of it.

So I scampered and he went in to break his wife's heart. I wasn't halfway down the street before I heard her scream.

I didn't come back until Thursday and as I came up the street, smoking my pipe, Pat came rushing around the side of the house. I swear he was wearing the same overalls and looked like he hadn't washed or anything. The bruises had faded to the color of a rotten eggplant but his lip was less swollen. He grabbed me by the wrist and fair wrenched my arm out dragging me back to the shed; but before he opened the door he stopped and looked me square in the eye.

"You got to promise me to keep a secret, Pegleg."

"I always keep your secrets," I lied, and he knew I was lying.

"No, you have to really keep this one. Swear by the baby Jesus."

Pat was borderline religious, so asking me to swear by anything holy was a big thing for him. The only other time he'd done it was right before he showed me the whiskey still.

"Okay, Paddy, I swear by the baby Jesus and his Holy Mother, too."

He stared at me for a moment before nodding; then he turned and looked up and down the alley as if all the world was leaning out to hear whatever Patrick O'Leary had to say. All I saw was a cat sitting on a stack of building bricks distractedly licking his b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. In a big whisper Pat said, "Something's happened to Sophie."

I blinked at him a few times. "Of course something happened to her, you daft b.u.g.g.e.r, a comet fell on her head and killed her."

He was shaking his head before I was even finished. "No... since then."

That's not a great way to ease into a conversation about the dead. "What?"

He fished a key out of his pocket, which is when I noticed the shiny new chain and padlock on the cowshed door. It must have cost Pat a week's worth of whiskey sales to buy that thing.

"Did Mean-Dog pay us now?"

Pat snorted. "He'd as soon kick me as pay us a penny of what he owes."

I nodded at the chain. "You afraid someone's going to steal her body?"

He gave me the funniest look. "I'm not afraid of anybody breaking in."

Which is another of those things that don't sound good when someone says it before entering a room with a dead body in it.

He unlocked the lock, then he reached down to where his shillelagh leaned against the frame. It was made from a whopping great piece of oak root, all twisted and polished, the handle wrapped with leather.

"What's going on now, Paddy?" I asked, starting to back away, and remembering a dozen other things that needed doing. Like running and hiding and getting drunk.

"I think it was that green stuff from the comet," Paddy whispered as he slowly pushed open the door. "It did something to her. Something unnatural."

"Everything about Sophie was unnatural," I reminded him.

The door swung inward with a creak and the light of day shone into the cowshed. It was ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, with a wooden rail, a manger, stalls for two cowsthough Paddy only even owned just the one. The scrawny milk cow Catherine doted on was lying on her side in the middle of the floor.

I mean to say what was left of her was lying on the floor. I tried to scream but all that came out of my whiskey-raw throat was a crooked little screech.

The cow had been torn to pieces. Blood and gobs of meat littered the floor, and there were more splashes of blood on the wall. And right there in the middle of all that muck, sitting like the queen of all d.a.m.nation was Aunt Sophie. Her fat face and throat were covered with blood. Her cotton gown was torn and streaked with cow s.h.i.t and gore. Flies buzzed around her and crawled on her face.

Aunt Sophie was gnawing on what looked like half a cow liver and when the sunlight fell across her from the open door she raised her head and looked right at us. Her skin was as gray-pale as the maggots that wriggled through little rips in her skin; but it was her eyes that took all the starch out of my knees. They were dry and milky but the pupils glowed an unnatural green, just like the piece of comet that had slid down her gullet.

"Oh... lordy-lordy-save a sinner!" I heard someone say in an old woman's voice, and then realized that it was me speaking.

Aunt Sophie lunged at us. All of sudden she went from sitting there like a fat dead slob eating Paddy's cow and then she was coming at us like a charging bull. I shrieked. I'm not proud; I'll admit it.

If it hadn't been for the length of chain Paddy had wound around her waist she'd have had me, too, 'cause I could no more move from where I was frozen than I could make leprechauns fly out of my bottom. Sophie's lunge was jerked to a stop with her yellow teeth not a foot from my throat.

Paddy stepped past me and raised the club. If Sophie saw it, or cared, she didn't show it.

"Get back, you fat sow!" he yelled and took to thumping her about the face and shoulders, which did no noticeable good.

"Paddy, my dear," I croaked, "I think I've soiled myself."

Paddy stepped back, his face running sweat. "No, that's her you smell. It's too hot in this shed. She's coming up ripe." He pulled me further back and we watched as Sophie snapped the air in our direction for a whole minute, then she lost interest and went back to gnawing on the cow.

"What's happened to her?"

"She's dead," he said.

"She can't be. I've seen dead folks before, lad, and she's a bit too spry."

He shook his head. "I checked and I checked. I even stuck her with the pitchfork. Just experimental like, and I got them tines all the way in but she didn't bleed."

"But... but... "

"Catherine came out here, too. Before Sophie woke back up, I mean. She took it hard and didn't want to hear about comets or nothing like that. She thinks we poisoned her with our whiskey."

"It's strong, I'll admit, but it's more likely to kill a person than make the dead wake back up again."

"I told her that and she commenced to hit me, and she hits as hard as Mean-Dog. She had a good handful of my hair and was swatting me a goodun' when Sophie just woke up."

"How'd Catherine take that?"

"Well, she took it poorly, the la.s.s. At first she tried to comfort Sophie, but when the old b.i.t.c.h tried to bite her Catherine seemed to cool a bit toward her aunt. It wasn't until after Sophie tore the throat out of the cow that Catherine seemed to question whether Sophie was really her aunt or more of an old acquaintance of the family."

"What'd she say?"

"It's not what she said so much as it was her hitting Sophie in the back of the head with a shovel."

"That'll do 'er."

"It dropped Sophie for a while and I hustled out and bought some chain and locks. By the time I came back Catherine was in a complete state. Sophie kept waking up, you see, and she had to clout her a fair few times to keep her tractable."

"So where's the missus now?"

"Abed. Seems she's discovered the medicinal qualities of our whiskey."

"I've been saying it for years."

He nodded and we stood there, watching Sophie eat the cow.

"So, Paddy me old mate," I said softly, "what do you think we should do?"

"With Sophie?"

"Aye."

Paddy's bruised faced took on the one expression I would have thought impossible under the circ.u.mstances. He smiled. A great big smile that was every bit as hungry and nasty as Aunt Sophie.

It took three days of sweet talk and charm, of sweat-soaked promises and cajoling but we finally got him to come to Paddy's cowshed. And then there he was, the Mean-Dog himself, all six-and-a-half feet of him, flanked by Killer Muldoon and Razor Riley, the three of them standing in Paddy's yard late on Sunday afternoon.

My head was ringing from a courtesy smacking Mean-Dog had given me when I'd come to his office; and Pat lips were puffed out againbut Pat was still smiling.

"So, lads," Mean-Dog said quietly, "tell me again why I'm here in a yard that smells of pig-s.h.i.t instead of at home drinking a beer."

"Cow s.h.i.t," Pat corrected him, and got a clout for it.

"We have a new business partner, Mr. Mulligan," I said. "And she told us that we can't provide no more whiskey until you and she settle accounts."

"She? You're working with a woman?" His voice was filled with contempt. "Who's this woman, then? Sounds like she has more mouth than she can use."

"You might be saying that," Pat agreed softly. "It's my Aunt Sophie."

I have to admit, that did give even Mean-Dog a moment's pause. There are Cherokee war parties that would go twenty miles out to their way not to cross Sophie. And that was before the comet.

"Sophie Kilpatrick, eh?" He looked at his two bruisers. Neither of them knew her and they weren't impressed. "Where is she?"

"In the cowshed," Pat said. "She said she wanted to meet somewhere quiet."

"Shrewd," Mean-Dog agreed, but he was still uncertain. "Lads, go in and ask Miss Sophie to come out."