'He sort of lived that way, too-like half of him was missing.'

'He sort of did,' she agreed.

Because I knew what that felt like, I said, 'I've suddenly got more sympathy for the guy.'

We hugged, and she said, 'We need you here, Oddie.'

'I need me here,' I agreed. 'You're everything a friend should be, Terri, and nothing that one shouldn't.'

'When would it be a good idea for me to start worrying?'

'Judging by the look on your face,' I said, 'you already have.'

'I don't like you going down there in the tunnels. It feels like you're burying yourself alive.'

'I'm not claustrophobic,' I a.s.sured her as I stepped out of the kitchen, onto the exterior landing.

'That's not what I meant. I'm giving you six hours, then I'm calling Wyatt Porter.'

'I'd rather you wouldn't do that, Terri. I'm as sure as I've ever been about anything-I've got to do this alone.'

'Are you really? Or is thissomething else?'

'What else would it be?'

Clearly, she had a specific fear, but she didn't want to put it into words. Instead of answering me, or even searching my eyes for an answer, she scanned the sky.

Dirty clouds were scudding in from the north-northeast. They looked like scrub rags that had swabbed a filthy floor.

I said, 'There's more to this than Simon's jealousies and obsessions. A weirdness, I don't know what, but a SWAT team isn't going to bring Danny out of there alive. Because of my gift, I'm his best chance.'

I kissed her on the forehead, turned, and started down the steps toward the alley.

'Is Danny dead already?' she asked.

'No. Like I said, I'm being drawn to him.'

'Is that true?'

Surprised, I halted, turned. 'He's alive, Terri.'

'If Kelsey and I had been blessed with a child, he could've been as old as you.'

I smiled. 'You're sweet.'

She sighed. 'All right. Eight hours. Not a minute more. You might be a clairvoyant or a medium, or whatever it is you are, but I've got women's intuition, by G.o.d, and that counts for something, too.'

No sixth sense was required for me to understand that it would be pointless to try to negotiate her up from eight hours to ten.

'Eight hours,' I agreed. 'I'll call you before then.'

After I had started down the open stairs again, she said, 'Oddie, the main reason you came here really was to borrow my phone- wasn't it?'

When I stopped and looked up again, I saw that she had come off the landing, onto the first step.

She said, 'I guess for my own peace of mind, I've got to lay it out thereYou didn't come here to say good-bye, did you?'

'No.'

'True?'

'True.'

'Swear to G.o.d.'

I raised my right hand as though I were an Eagle Scout making a solemn pledge.

Still dubious, she said, 'It would be s.h.i.tty of you to go out of my life with a lie.'

'I wouldn't do that to you. Besides, I can't get where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I've got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can-that's how I buy the ticket to where I want to be. You know what I mean?'

'Yeah.' Terri settled down on the top step. 'I'll sit here and watch you go. It feels like bad luck to turn my back on you just now.'

'Are you okay?'

'Go. If he's alive, go to him.'

I turned away from her and descended the stairs once more.

'Don't look back,' she said. 'That's bad luck, too.'

I reached the bottom of the stairs and followed the alleyway to the street. I didn't look back, but I could hear her softly crying.

FIFTEEN.

I DID NOT SCOUT FOR OBSERVERS, DID NOT LOITER IN the hope that an ideal opportunity would arise, but walked directly to the nine-foot chain-link barrier and scaled it. I dropped onto the property of the Maravilla County Flood-Control Project less than ten seconds after reaching the alley side of the fence.

Few people expect bold trespa.s.sing in daylight. If anyone saw me scale the fence, he would most likely a.s.sume that I was one of the authorized personnel referenced on the gate sign and that I had lost my key.

Clean-cut young men, neatly barbered and beardless, are not readily suspected of nefarious activity. I am not only barbered and beardless but have no tattoos, no earring, no eyebrow ring, no nose ring, no lip ring, and have not subjected my tongue to a piercing.

Consequently, the most that anyone might suspect about me is that I am a time-traveler from some distant future in which the oppressive cultural norms of the 1950s have been imposed once more on the populace by a totalitarian government.

The slump-stone utility building featured screened ventilation cutouts under the eaves. They were not large enough to admit even a trim young man with a low-profile haircut.

Earlier in the morning, peering through the chain-link, I had noticed that the hardware on the plank doors appeared ancient. It might have been installed back when California's governor believed in the healing potential of crystals, confidently predicted the obsolescence of the automobile by 1990, and dated a rock star named Linda Ronstadt.

On closer inspection, I saw that the lock cylinder was not only old but cheap. The collar did not feature a guard ring. This offered a level of security half a step up from a padlock.

During the walk here from the Grille, I had paused in Memorial Park to take a pair of st.u.r.dy locking tongs from my backpack. Now I withdrew them from under my belt and used them to rip the lock cylinder out of the door.

That was a noisy business, but it lasted no more than half a minute. Boldly, as if I belonged there, I went inside, found a light switch, and closed the doors behind me.

The shed contained a rack of tools, but primarily it served as a vestibule from which to gain access to the network of storm drains under Pico Mundo. Wide spiral stairs led down.

On the twisting staircase, picking out the perforated metal treads with my flashlight, I was reminded of the back stairs at the Jessup house. For a moment, it seemed that I had been swept into some dark game in which I had already once circled the board and had been brought by the roll of the dice to another dangerous descent.

I didn't turn on the stair lights because I didn't know if perhaps the same switch activated service lamps in the storm drains, which would announce my presence sooner than necessary.

I counted the steps, calculating eight inches for each riser. I descended over fifty feet, much deeper than I expected.

At the bottom, a door. The half-inch-diameter latch bolt could be operated from either side.

I thumbed off the flashlight.

Although I expected the bolt to sc.r.a.pe, the hinges to creak, instead the door opened without protest. It was remarkably heavy but smooth in action.

Blind and breathless, listening for a hostile presence, I heard nothing. When I had heard enough of it, I felt sufficiently safe to use the flashlight again.

Beyond the threshold lay a corridor that led to my right: twelve feet long, five feet wide, a low ceiling. Following it, I discovered that it was an L, with an eight-foot short arm. Here stood another heavy door with a bolt action that worked from both sides.

This arrangement of access to the storm drains was more elaborate than I had imagined-and seemed unnecessarily complicated.

Again I doused the flashlight. Again the door eased open with not a sound.

In the absolute darkness, I listened and heard a faint silken sinuous sound. My mind's eye conjured an immense serpent slithering through the gloom.

Then I recognized the whisper of easy-flowing water as it slid without turbulence along the smooth walls of the conduit.

I switched on the flashlight, crossed the threshold. Immediately beyond lay a two-foot-wide concrete walkway, which seemed to lead to infinity both to my left and to my right.

A foot and a half below the walkway, gray water, perhaps taking much of its color by reflection from the concrete walls of the drain, swept past not in a churning rush but in a stately flow. The beam of the flashlight st.i.tched silver filigrees across the gently undulating surface.

Based on the arc of the walls, I estimated that the water in the center of the channel measured, at its deepest, eighteen inches. Next to the walkway, it would plumb at less than a foot.

The storm drain appeared to be approximately twelve feet in diameter, a ma.s.sive artery in the body of the desert. It bored away toward some distant dark heart.

I'd been concerned that switching on the service lamps in this maze would alert Simon that I was coming. But a flashlight would pinpoint me for anyone waiting in the darkness ahead.

Taking the only logical alternative to feeling my way in the dark, I retreated through the stairwell door and found a pair of switches. The nearest one brightened the drain.

Returning to the walkway, I saw that sandwiches of gla.s.s and wire protected lamps embedded in the ceiling of the tunnel at thirty-foot intervals. They did not shed the equivalent of daylight in this deep realm; repet.i.tive bat-wings of shadow scalloped the walls, but visibility proved good enough.

Although this was a storm drain, not a sewer, I had expected a foul smell if not a full stink. The cool air had a dank scent, but it wasn't offensive, and had that almost appealing limy smell common to concrete places.

Most of the year, these pa.s.sages carried no water. They dried out and therefore did not support lingering molds of any kind.

I considered the moving water for a moment. We'd not had rain in five days. This couldn't be the last runoff from the heights in the eastern part of the county. The desert isn't that slow to drain.

The clouds crawling down the northeast sky when I'd left Terri's place might have been the outrunners of a storming horde still hours distant.

You might wonder why a desert county would need flood-control tunnels as elaborate as these. The answer has two parts, one involving climate and terrain, the other geopolitics.

Although we have little rain in Maravilla County, when storms come, they are frequently fierce deluges. Large parts of the desert are less sand than shale, less shale than rock, with little soil or vegetation to absorb a downpour or to slow the runoff from higher elevations.

Flash floods can turn low-lying desert areas into vast lakes. Without aggressive diversion of storm runoff, a significant portion of Pico Mundo would be at risk.

We can go a year without a monster storm that makes us think nervously of Noah-and then have five the next year.

Nevertheless, flood control in desert towns usually consists of a network of concrete V ditches, weather-carved arroyos, and culverts feeding either a natural dry riverbed or one engineered to carry water away from human habitations. If not for the fact that Fort Kraken, a major air-force base, backed up to Pico Mundo, we would be served by an equally low-tech and imperfect system.

For six decades, Fort Kraken had been one of the nation's most vital military resources. The flood-control system that benefited Pico Mundo had been constructed largely to ensure that the runways and the vast facilities of the base were protected from Mother Nature in her most thunderous moods.

Some believe that under Kraken lies a deep-rock command-and-control complex that was designed to ride out nuclear strikes by the former Soviet Union and to serve as a governmental center for the reconstruction of the southwestern United States subsequent to an atomic war.

Following the end of the Cold War, Fort Kraken was downsized but not decommissioned as were many other military bases. Some say that because a chance exists that we may one day face an aggressive China armed with thousands of nuclear missiles, this hidden facility is maintained in readiness.

Rumors have it that these tunnels serve clandestine functions in addition to flood control. Maybe they disguise the venting of that deep-rock complex. Maybe some of them double as secret entrances.

All this may be true or it may be the equivalent of the urban legend that claims pet alligators, flushed down toilets when they were babies and grown to full adulthood, live in the New York City sewer system, feeding on rats and unwary sanitation workers.

One of the people who believe all or part of the Kraken story is Horton Barks, publisher of the Maravilla County Times Maravilla County Times. Mr. Barks also claims that twenty years ago, while hiking in the Oregon woods, he had a pleasant dinner of trail mix and canned sausages with Big Foot.

Being the person I am, with the experiences I've had, I tend to believe him about the Sasquatch.

Now, in search of Danny Jessup, trusting to my unique intuition, I turned right and followed the service walkway upstream, through ordered patterns of shadow and light, toward one kind of storm or another.

SIXTEEN.

A BOBBING TENNIS BALL, A PLASTIC BAG PULSING AS IF it were a jellyfish, a playing card-the ten of diamonds-a gardening glove, a cl.u.s.ter of red petals that might have been cyclamen: Every object on the gray tide was luminous with mysterious meaning. Or so it all seemed to me, for I had fallen into a mood mood for meaning. for meaning.

Because this water poured into the flood-control system not from Pico Mundo but from a storm far to the east, it carried less flotsam than it would later if the volume increased and the downpour washed in from city streets.