"Okay," but then she looked down at her cutoffs and top. "But I don't think they'll let me into the Exham Inn dressed like this."

"Forget the Exham Inn. We're going to Wade's Inn. The selection is limited but the service is outstanding."

Lydia smoked and nodded. He'd made the decision for her, extending her reprieve. There was nothing like borrowed time.

Wade parked up close in the lot. Lydia got out with her suitcase, as though someone might steal it. She smoked her Marlboro right down to the b.u.t.t and flicked it. Yes, a glamorous habit, she thought. Wade was scanning the lot and seemed confounded.

"What are you looking for?" she asked.

"Friend's car, it's not here. I was just wondering where he is." He walked around the Vette, toward the path. "Come on, I won't bite. I had my teeth pulled weeks ago."

Immediately, he put his arm about her waist. She felt comfortable like that, his hand touching her skin, his pinky stuck in her belt loop. They walked close, b.u.mping hips.

The security guard at the dorm desk was reading Shotgun News. He gave them a quick eye, then reburied his face in the ads. She and Wade rode the elevator up to 8. She could not escape the absurd image of herself: standing in an elevator with a student's arm around her, badge pinned to her cutoffs, and holding a suitcase full of spectroa.n.a.lyzed impactation. The perfect "What's wrong with this picture?" He led her down the silent hall to his room, turned on the light, and said, "There's a surprise for you in the refrigerator."

Beside the trash compactor-which she still thought of as the height of indulgence-was a small fridge devoted to extravagant beers. Right up front stood the devil's face on a bottle of- "Old Nick!" she exclaimed. "I'll bet you got it just for me."

"Actually I didn't," Wade confessed. "My friends and I are beer sn.o.bs. We keep our refrigerators stocked with a variety of the best brew. In a world of Bud, the true beer connoisseur must maintain vast reserves."

Lydia took his word for it. He poured two Nicks into good pilsner gla.s.ses and proposed a toast. "To spectrophotometry."

"Cheers," she said.

But she thought: What now?

It had to be a dream. It had to be.

Lois Hartley lay naked beneath smothering, moist heat and orange light, paralyzed. I'm paralyzed, she thought, and felt idiotically compelled to laugh. For she was h.o.r.n.y too-very h.o.r.n.y-and that's why she wasn't afraid. Paralysis plus nudity plus s.e.xual excitation could only mean one thing: nightmare.

I'm having a nightmare, that's all.

Blobs of voices oozed around her ears. Besmeared faces hovered, inquisitive before the sourceless orange field. They were dream voyeurs, another paradigmatic symptom. Yes, this was a cla.s.sic nightmare. Sigmund Freud meets Krafft-Ebing in the House of Gustave Dore. The hot light and its confines, of course, symbolized the womb: birth trauma. Paralysis while naked and painfully aroused equaled hidden desires to be dominated, or what her psych prof called the Rape Fantastique. This was a s.e.x nightmare. It was harmless, so she might as well lie back and enjoy it.

"There."

-Good.

Lois could still not see the dream watchers' faces. They hovered behind orange fog. But she could see the fat hand gripping her arm. Something was stuck in her flesh-more dream symbolism. It was a large hypodermic needle. As the fat hand worked it out of her arm, Lois felt no pain. Penetration/withdrawal. A big bead of blood welled at the puncture. Then a strange warm mouth sucked the blood off. Lois wished she could see. This was straight out of de Sade, the third work of Justine, where Prince Gernande drank blood from his wife's veins to excite himself before intercourse. Those Libertines sure had cla.s.s.

"Solubility tests will help us determine optimum doses."

"She'll be good and soft."

-Oh, good!

The faces shrank back, their words merging. Lois couldn't remember going to bed, and during some part of this dream, she recalled being tossed into a car trunk; she recalled a face peering down. And whatever happened to Zyro?

Zyro wasn't exactly her boyfriend; he was too self disposed to share himself with anyone. He was the cla.s.sic campus novelist-unpublished. He liked to walk around disgruntled, claiming that his "work" was "too aphoristic to be accepted by the capitalistic hierarchy. n.o.body understands me." He believed he would die young, and then his work would be heralded as the voice of his generation. He wrote "indictment of the times" fiction: deadbeat, f.u.c.ked up in the head on drugs characters with no social utility or motivation, which was supposed to serve as an astute literary observation. Christ, these days all a person had to do was write a plotless book about h.o.m.os.e.xual cocaine addicted dropouts and it was an instant best seller. Anyway, Lois had arranged to meet Zyro at the Pickman Gallery. She remembered waiting for him, but that was all...

The voyeurs were gone. Lois' eyes darted right. A thin black line pulsated on the wall. How did this play into the dream? The black line looked like an incision.

Then, from the incision, a figure emerged.

Was it Zyro? Lois' paralysis only allowed her to raise her sight an inch. In a moment, though, a shadow wobbled into view.

It must be someone crippled, she thought. The shadow hobbled, like a limping man, and with it came an irregular ticking. A limping man? she wondered. What kind of dream was this?

A tingling spread like sparks, describing the intricacies of her ribs, her spine, even her skull. What's more, her state of arousal crested to waves of hot, knifelike flashes through breast and loin. Her s.e.x visibly thumped.

Before the dark light, the limping man b.u.mbled forward. The sharp ticking drew close, and at last Lois was able to glimpse her new and mysterious suitor...

For s.h.i.t's sake! she thought.

One look and she'd had enough of this nightmare. The limping man was no man at all, but a preposterous parody. It appeared more insectoid than anything, a broad humped sh.e.l.l encircled by tiny clicking legs. It stood upright, however, on a pair of stout, jointed appendages with points. If it bore any semblance to humanity at all, that humanity was fanfare. This was no dream lover. It was a bug.

But it was a big bug, big as a man. Lois wondered what could be more disgusting than a man sized c.o.c.kroach. It seemed to have a face, or facsimile thereof. Cl.u.s.ters of blinking ocelli gazed at her, above a beaked enclosure that could only be a mouth. Something akin to a tongue lolled within the aperture, to lick plated lips. The thing reminded Lois of the Kafka story, where a man named Gregor turned into a big beetle. Zyro had deftly described the piece as an "axiological allegory symbolizing the transmogrification of modern man within the continuum of corporate bureaucracies bent on the total alienation of individuality." As far as Lois was concerned, it was nothing more than a story about a silly man named Gregor who turned into a bug. But who cared what the story meant? This was supposed to be a s.e.x dream, not some Kafkaesque joke. Nevertheless, here was Gregor, hobbling to meet her.

And again the question came: What could be more disgusting than a man sized c.o.c.kroach?

Answer: A man sized c.o.c.kroach with a p.e.n.i.s.

For s.h.i.t's sake! Lois thought again. I'm about to get f.u.c.ked by a bug!

Gregor's works bloomed, a steadily distending, meaty pink mound betwixt its walking joints. She could almost hear herself say: Hey, Gregor, is that twenty five pounds of hamburger in your pants or are you just happy to see me? Well, Gregor was happy indeed. The mound swelled forward, showing a puckered hole. Eventually something popped out and slapped to the floor-a slack pink tube with a fleshy nozzle. It drooped like loose hose.

Gregor crawled daintily over her, as if great care were utmost on its mind. But did this thing even have a mind? Vivificated breaths whistled through multiple spiracles along its sh.e.l.l, and she could see h.o.r.n.y pa.s.sion in its compound eyes. Dollops of green goo dropped from its irised mandibles onto her bare belly. Lois was revolted, yet her physical excitement, somehow, refused to wane. Gregor lay fully atop her now. The nozzled glans snuffled fanatically, and at last the pink cannula found her s.e.x. Lois' o.r.g.a.s.ms unwound in spastic quakes. The cannula throbbed, pa.s.sing jets of warm bug-sperm into her cervical ca.n.a.l as Gregor muttered sweet insectoid nothings into her ear.

"For s.h.i.t's sake!" Lois was finally able to exclaim.

Gregor's armored face inched up to hers. The mandibles opened to fullness, revealing soft lips and tongue, and more than a modest portion of the opaque green saliva, which dribbled liberally into Lois Hartley's aghast mouth.

In this business you were one of two things. You were either legit, or you were dirty. And if you were legit, you were also something else: You were poor.

Czanek was dirty.

It wasn't Czanek's dirt; it was other people's. He did not feel bad about uncovering the evil of others; he was just a cog in an inevitable machine. Bug planting was a good gig; he could pull in twenty large a year from bugs alone. Industrial espionage paid well too, and sabotage paid even better. Czanek had once taken ten grand for stealing a composite formula from a textile factory and fifteen more for burning the records room and production facilities. By the time they cleaned up the mess, the other company, Czanek's client, had already patented the stolen formula and was in full production. These were examples of what the trade called "surrept.i.tious entry" or "black bag." It involved invading privacy, violating personal rights, and, of course, breaking the f.u.c.k out of the law. If you were good at black bag, you made lots of money. If you were bad, you lost your license and went to jail. Though Czanek was small time, he was good at black bag, perhaps very good. Its diversity challenged him, and it brought in the cash. Dean Saltenstall, for instance, paid five hundred dollars per hour for a job. Good work reaped good money.

Tonight, though, Czanek was working for free.

Saltenstall was his best client, period. But if the dean ever found out that one of his bugs was transmitting to someone else's, Czanek would lose his professional credibility in less time than it took to wipe his a.s.s. He may have been the best dirty P.I. in the state, but he wasn't the only one. Other d.i.c.ks would kill for a client like Saltenstall. Some literally.

He walked up to the third floor of the sciences center. He wore maintenance overalls and had a phony card identifying him as Peter Hertz, a campus a/c technician. The building was empty at this hour, and the security guard wouldn't be making his rounds for another forty five minutes. Czanek used a 2mm tension wrench on Besser's office lock, applying nominal downward pressure with his pinky. Each lock had its own feel; too much pressure seized up the pins, and too little wouldn't hold them flush. Czanek stroked the pins twice with his #2 rake, and the cylinder opened. He was in the office and had the door locked behind him in four seconds.

He let his eyes adjust, then turned on a red filtered penlight. His gloved hands snooped a bit first, an unavoidable professional impulse. He memorized the exact position of everything on the desk and in the drawers. The bottom drawer, however, was locked.

It was an old Filex disc tumbler with an 18mm keyway. He used a wider tension wrench and a "doubleball." The slide bar slipped open immediately.

What he saw first made little sense-a list of typed names: L. ERBLING, S. ERBLING, L. HARTLEY, I. PACKER, E. WHITECHAPEL. L. Hartley's name had a line through it.

Beneath this lay a stack of folders stamped with the Exham seal. Medical files, Czanek noted. The top five matched the five names on the list. All the files belonged to female students. But next was another stack of files, males. A Qwik Note on the top folder read: Choose one holotype for Supremate. And the next line, in red: Wade St. John.

Holotype? Czanek thought. Supremate? And who's Wade St. John?

At the back of the drawer was a gun.

Czanek was stumped. The piece was some offbeat .25 auto. It smelled of cordite. He wrote down the serial number and put it back.

He didn't like any of this. Why would Besser have a gun? Czanek didn't know what to make of the notes and lists, but the gun was something else-guns were of his world. Could Winnifred and Besser really be planning to kill the dean for his insurance?

At the back of the drawer he spotted another Qwik Note. Four notations in florid writing, like a woman's: 1) Pick holotype. Wade seems best.

2) 2nd va.s.sal in case Tom wears out. Jervis Phillips?

3) Have Tom bury Penelope and Sladder.

Czanek should've been alarmed, extremely alarmed. One note mentioned Jervis Phillips, Czanek's own client. Another mentioned burying bodies. But none of that mattered to Czanek now. He could only stare unbelieving at the fourth and final notation: 4) Kill Czanek.

Czanek's eyes jittered. They knew about him, but how? Had Jervis squealed? There was no reason, and there was no reason for the dean to turn on him either. Had Winnifred hired her own d.i.c.k to watch her back? Had Czanek actually been made?

Then the thought toppled like rubble.

The bug.

Holy f.u.c.king s.h.i.t! he thought. The bug!

His gloved hand ran under the inside lip of the desk front. The bug he'd come here to replace wasn't there.

I am in some s.h.i.t, he thought very slowly.

"Looking for this, Mr. Czanek?"

Czanek ducked, doused his light, and pulled the Charter snub from his ankle holster. The desk lamp flicked on. Some husky kid in a T shirt and jeans faced him from the desk. Between the kid's fingers was Czanek's tiny 49 MHz transmitter.

"I found the other ones too," the kid said. His face was pale. He was smiling. "The ones in Besser's house and Winnie's office."

"Don't move," Czanek said. "I gotta think."

"What's to think? You're caught."

Czanek c.o.c.ked his piece. "Who the f.u.c.k are you?"

"The name's Tom. I used to be a student, but now I'm a...guess you'd call me a myrmidon. Ever read Lovecraft?" Tom's smile stretched to hideous thinness. "I'm a haunter of the dark."

"You're gonna be the haunter of the morgue if you don't start talking. You're a paid tail, like me. You work for the dean's wife, don't you?"

Tom laughed huskily. "That h.o.r.n.y sleaze? No way. She doesn't even like me-she calls me 'the thing.' I'll bet she m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es fifteen times a day. She'll do it right in front of you, she doesn't care. She can't help herself. It's the influence of the labyrinth."

"Who do you work for!" Czanek demanded.

"I work for the Supremate."

There was that word again. Supremate. Probably a gang leader. The kid must be burned out on dust; he was no P.I. "Who tipped you about the bugs I planted? Was it Jervis? The dean? Who?"

"It was the sisters," Tom explained. "They work for the Supremate too. They're his daughters, his children."

The kid was flaked. What good would killing him do? These sisters, whoever they were, must know about Czanek too, along with Besser and Winnie. If I kill the kid, I gotta kill them all.

"You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mr. Czanek."

Too much was going on at once; Czanek couldn't think. Like how did the kid get into the office? It had been empty, Czanek was sure of that. And he was sure he'd locked the door behind him.

"All right," Czanek said. "Here's what we're going to do. You and me are going to walk out that door, nice and easy like, and then we're going for a little ride."

"Wrong," Tom said. Suddenly he had something huge in his hands. It looked like a long, wide bladed ax. "You're gonna stand there like a good little boy while I put this through your head. Nice and easy like. Then I'm going to bury you."

Now even Czanek spared a laugh. "Where were you when the brains were handed out? I've got a gun. See?"

"I don't mind loud noises," Tom said. "You can go hard or easy. Your choice, man."

It had to be drugs, PCP or something. There was all kinds of s.h.i.t on the street that made you stone crazy and fearless as a sewer rat. But Czanek couldn't stand here all night. He had to make his move now. "I'm not fooling around here. If you don't drop that ax, I'm going to have to kill you."

"Oh, it's not an ax," Tom obliged. "It's called a beam hewer. Colonial guys used them to cut rafters and s.h.i.t. And it'll do a job on a human head too. You should've seen Sladder."

Jesus, Czanek realized. I'm gonna have to pop this guy.

The blade's edge glittered. The pitch of Tom's voice rumbled down. "Sorry, Mr. Czanek. I'm afraid your time is up."

Czanek shouted "Don't!" as Tom, the Achillean myrmidon, the haunter of the dark, raised the hewer high above his head.

Czanek emptied the Charter in five evenly s.p.a.ced taps. The impact of the slugs mowed the kid down like a hinged duck in a shooting gallery.

Czanek stood in grainy, hot silence. Gun smoke stung his eyes. Unaffected, he stared down at the dead boy.

Then the dead boy got up.

Tom's smile never wavered. His clean white T shirt bore no evidence of blood, just gritty black powder marks. The grouped slugs had punched a smoking hole in the middle of his chest. It was a deep hole.

"Don't worry," Tom said. "I won't charge you for the shirt."

Again, Czanek thought: I am in some s.h.i.t.

The empty piece fell out of his hand when the girl entered the room. There was a strange, resonant hum, and a shrinking line of light that was black.

But the girl was just a child. She stood caped in black, a white face in the room's dark. Her gentle aura filled Czanek's head.