TWENTY-EIGHT.

EYES CLOSED, PALE, UNMOVING, DANNY LOOKED DEAD. Only the throb of a pulse in his temple and the tension in his jaw muscles revealed that he was alive, and in the grip of dread.

He resembles that actor, Robert Downey Jr., though without the edge of heroin-addict glamour that would give him true star quality in contemporary Hollywood.

Past the face, the resemblance to any any actor drops to zero. Danny has a lot better brain than any movie star of the past few decades. actor drops to zero. Danny has a lot better brain than any movie star of the past few decades.

His left shoulder is somewhat misshapen from excess bone growth during the healing of a fracture. That arm twists unnaturally from shoulder to wrist, with the consequence that it doesn't hang straight at his side, and the hand twists away from his body.

His left hip is deformed. The right leg is shorter than the other. The right tibia thickened and bowed as it healed from a break. His right ankle contains so much excess bone that he has only forty percent function in that joint.

Strapped to the hotel-room chair, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest, he could have been a fairy-tale character. The handsome prince suffering under a witch's spell. The love child of a forbidden romance between a princess and a kind troll.

I closed the door behind me before I said softly, 'Wanna get out of here?'

His blue eyes opened, owlish with surprise. Fear made room for mortification, but he didn't appear to be at all relieved.

'Odd,' he whispered, 'you shouldn't have come.'

Dropping the backpack, zipping it open, I whispered, 'What am I gonna do? There was nothing good on TV'

'I knew you'd come, but you shouldn't, it's hopeless.'

From the backpack, I withdrew a fishing knife, flipped the blade out of the handle. Always the optimist.'

'Get out of here while you can. She's crazier than a syphilitic suicide bomber with mad-cow disease.'

'I don't know anybody else who says stuff like that. Can't leave you here when you talk that good.'

His ankles were bound to the chair legs with numerous turns of duct tape. Bonds of tape wound around his chest, securing him to the back of the chair. In addition, his arms were taped to the arms of the chair at the wrists and at the crooks of the elbows.

I started sawing rapidly at the loops of tape that bound his left wrist.

'Odd, stop it, listen, even if you have time to cut me loose, I can't stand up-'

'If your leg's broken or something,' I interrupted, 'I can carry you at least to a hiding place.'

'Nothing's broken, that's not it,' he said urgently, 'but if I stand up, it'll detonate.'

Although I finished freeing his left wrist, I said, 'Detonate. That's a word I like even less than decapitate decapitate.'

'Check out the back of the chair.'

I went around behind him to have a look. Being a guy who has seen a few movies as well as some weird action in real life, I at once recognized the kilo of plastic explosives held to the back of the chair by the same tape that bound Danny.

A battery, lots of colorful wires, an instrument that resembled a small version of a carpenter's level (with the indicator bubble measuring a perfect horizontal plane), and other arcane paraphernalia suggested that whoever had put the bomb together had a flair for such work.

Danny said, 'The instant I raise my a.s.s off the chair-boom. If I try to walk walk with the chair and the level measures too far off the horizontal-boom.' with the chair and the level measures too far off the horizontal-boom.'

'We have a problem here,' I agreed.

TWENTY-NINE.

IN WHISPERS, IN MURMURS, WITH BATED BREATH, SOTTO voce SOTTO voce, in voce velata velata, softly we conducted the conversation, not solely because the syphilitic-suicide-bomber-mad-cow woman and her pals might hear us, but I think also because we superst.i.tiously felt that the wrong word, spoken too loud, would trigger the bomb.

Stripping the spelunker's strap off my arm and setting it aside with the flashlight, I said, 'Where are they?'

'I don't know. Odd, you have to get out of here.'

'Do they leave you by yourself for long periods?'

'They check in maybe once an hour. She was just here about fifteen minutes ago. Call Wyatt Porter.'

'This isn't in his jurisdiction.'

'So he'll call Sheriff Amory.'

'If police get into this, you'll die.'

'So who do you want to call-the sanitation department?'

'I just know you'll die. The way I know things. Can this package be detonated whenever they want?'

'Yeah. She showed me a remote control. She said it would be as easy as changing TV channels.'

'Who is she?'

'Her name's Datura. Two guys are with her. I don't know their names. There was a third sonofab.i.t.c.h.'

'I found his body. What happened to him?'

'I didn't see it. He wa.s.strange. So are the other two.'

As I began to cut the tape on his left forearm, I said, 'What's her first name?'

'Datura. I don't know her last. Odd, what're you doing? I can't get up from this chair.'

'You might as well be ready ready to get up in case the situation changes. Who is she?' to get up in case the situation changes. Who is she?'

'Odd, she'll kill you. She will. You've got to get out of here.'

'Not without you,' I said, sawing the tape that bound his right wrist to the chair.

Danny shook his head. 'I don't want you to die for me.'

'Then who am I gonna die for? Some total stranger? What sense does that make? Who is she?'

He let out a low sound of abject misery. 'You're gonna think I'm such a loser.'

'You're not a loser. You're a geek, I'm a geek, but we're not losers.'

'You're not a geek,' he said.

Cutting the second set of bonds on his right arm, I said, 'I'm a fry cook when when I'm working, and when I added a sweater vest to my wardrobe it was more change than I could handle. I see dead people, and I talk to Elvis, so don't tell me I'm not a geek. Who is she?' I'm working, and when I added a sweater vest to my wardrobe it was more change than I could handle. I see dead people, and I talk to Elvis, so don't tell me I'm not a geek. Who is she?'

'Promise you won't tell Dad.'

He wasn't talking about Simon Makepeace, his biological father. He meant his stepfather. He didn't know Dr. Jessup was dead.

This wasn't the best time to tell him. He would be devastated. I needed him to be focused, and game.

Something he saw in my eyes, in my expression, made him frown, and he said, 'What?'

'I won't tell him,' I promised, and turned my attention to the bonds securing his right ankle to the leg of the chair.

'You swear?'

'If I ever tell him, I'll give back my Venusian-methane-slime-beast card.'

'You still have it?'

'I told told you I'm a geek. Who is Datura?' you I'm a geek. Who is Datura?'

Danny took a deep breath, held it until I thought that he was going after a Guinness World Record, then let it out with two words: 'Phone s.e.x.'

I blinked at him, briefly confused. 'Phone s.e.x?'

Blushing, mortified, he said, 'I'm sure this is a colossal surprise to you, but I've never done the real thing with a girl.'

'Not even with Demi Moore?'

'b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' he hissed.

'Could you you have pa.s.sed up a shot like that?' have pa.s.sed up a shot like that?'

'No,' he admitted. 'But being a virgin at twenty-one makes me the king of losers.'

'No way I'm gonna start calling you Your Highness Your Highness. Anyway, a hundred years ago, guys like you and me would be called gentlemen. Funny what a big difference a century makes.'

'You?' he said. 'Don't try to tell me you are a member of the club. I'm inexperienced but I'm not naive.'

'Believe what you want,' I said, sawing the bonds at his left ankle, 'but I'm a member in good standing.'

Danny knew that Stormy and I had been an item since we were sixteen, in high school. He didn't know that we'd never made love.

As a child, she had been molested by an adoptive father. For a long time, she'd felt unclean.

She wanted to wait for marriage before we did the deed because she felt that by delaying our gratification, we would be purifying her past. She was determined that those bad memories of abuse would not haunt her in our bed.

Stormy had said s.e.x between us should feel clean and right and wonderful. She wanted it to be sacred; and it would have been.

Then she died, and we never experienced that one bliss together, which was all right, because we experienced so many others. We packed a lifetime into four years.

Danny Jessup didn't need to hear any details. They are my most private memories, and precious to me.

Without looking up from his left ankle, I said, 'Phone s.e.x?'

After a hesitation, he said, 'I wanted to know what it was like to talk about it, you know, with a girl. A girl who didn't know what I look like.'

I took longer cutting the tape than was required, keeping my head down, giving him time.

He said, 'I have some money of my own.' He designs web sites. 'I pay the bills for my phone. Dad didn't see the nine-hundred-number charges.'

Having freed his ankle, I busied myself cleaning the tape-gummed blade of the knife on my jeans. I couldn't cut the bonds around his chest because the same loops held the bomb level and in place.

'For a couple minutes,' he continued, 'it was exciting. But then pretty soon it seemed gross. Ugly.' His voice quavered. 'You probably think I'm a pervert.'

'I think you're human. I like that in a friend.'

He took a deep breath and went on: 'It seemed gross and then stupid. So I asked the girl, could we just talk, not about s.e.x, about other things, anything. She said sure, that was all right.'

Phone-s.e.x services charge by the minute. Danny could have held forth for hours about the qualities of various laundry soaps, and she would have pretended to be enthralled.

'We chatted half an hour, just about things we like and don't like-you know, books, movies, food. It was wonderful, Odd. I can't explain how wonderful it was, the glow glow I got from it. It was just it was so nice.' I got from it. It was just it was so nice.'

I wouldn't have thought that the word nice nice could break my heart, but it almost did. could break my heart, but it almost did.

'That particular service will let you make an appointment with a girl you like. I mean for another conversation.'

'This was Datura.'

'Yes. The second time I talked to her, I found out she has this real fascination with the supernatural, ghosts and stuff.'

I folded shut the knife and returned it to my backpack.