He started for the kitchen door, then made himself switch the gadget off and go back to the counter. He didn't want to waste time putting the battery cover back in place - not when he was primed for battle - but the last bit of sanity still flickering in his mind a.s.sured him that he had no choice. If his hand slipped while he was dealing with the thing, the batteries might pop out of the open compartment, and then where would he be? Why, facing the James Gang with an unloaded gun, of course.

So he fiddled the battery cover back on, cursing when it wouldn't fit and turning it in the other direction.

'You wait for me, now!' he called back over his shoulder. 'I'm coming! We're not done yet!'

At last the battery cover snapped down. Howard strode briskly back through the living room with the hedge-clippers held at port arms. His hair still stood up in punk-rock quills and spikes. His shirt - now torn out under one arm and burned in several places - flapped against his round, tidy stomach. His bare feet slapped on the linoleum. The tattered remains of his nylon socks swung and dangled about his ankles.

Feeney yelled through the door, 'I called them, birdbrain! You got that? I called the cops, and I hope the ones who show up are all bog-trotting Irishmen, just like me!'

'Blow it out your old tan tailpipe,' Howard said, but he was really paying no attention to Feeney. Dennis Feeney was in another universe; this was just his quacking, unimportant voice coming in over the sub-etheric.

Howard stood to one side of the bathroom door, looking like a cop in a TV show . . . only someone had handed him the wrong prop and he was packing a hedge-clipper instead of a.38. He pressed his thumb firmly on the power b.u.t.ton set high on the handle of the hedge-clippers. He took a deep breath . . . and the voice of sanity, now down to a mere gleam, offered a final thought before packing up for good.

Are you sure you want to trust your life to a pair of electric hedge-clippers you bought on sale?

'I have no choice,' Howard muttered, smiling tightly, and lunged inside.

The finger was still there, still arced out of the sink in that stiff curve that reminded Howard of a New Year's Eve party-favor, the kind that makes a farting, honking sound and then unrolls toward the unsuspecting bystander when you blow on it. It had filched one of Howard's loafers. It was picking the shoe up and slamming it petulantly down on the tiles again and again. From the look of the towels scattered about, Howard guessed the finger had tried to kill several of those before finding the shoe.

A weird joy suddenly suffused Howard - it felt as if the inside of his aching, woozy head had been filled with green light.

'Here I am, you nitwit!' he yelled. 'Come and get me!'

The finger popped out of the shoe, rose in a monstrous ripple of joints (Howard could actually hear some of its many knuckles cracking), and floated rapidly through the air toward him. Howard turned on the hedge-clippers and they buzzed into hungry life. So far, so good.

The burned, blistered tip of the finger wavered in front of his face, the split nail weaving mystically back and forth. Howard lunged for it. The finger feinted to the left and slipped around his left ear. The pain was amazing. Howard simultaneously felt and heard a grisly ripping sound as the finger tried to tear his ear from the side of his head. He sprang forward, seized the finger in his left fist, and sheared through it. The clippers lugged down as the blades. .h.i.t the bone, the high buzzing of the motor becoming a rough growl, but it had been built to clip through small, tough branches and there was really no problem. No problem at all. This was Round Two, this was Double Jeopardy, where the scores could really change, and Howard Mitla was racking up a bundle. Blood flew in a fine haze and then the stump pulled back. Howard blundered after it, the last ten inches of the finger hanging from his ear like a coat hanger for a moment before dropping off.

The finger lunged at him. Howard ducked and it went over his head. It was blind, of course. That was his advantage. Grabbing his ear like that had just been a lucky shot. He lunged with the clippers, a gesture which looked almost like a fencing thrust, and sheared off another two feet of the finger. It thumped to the tiles and lay there, twitching.

Now the rest of it was trying to pull back.

'No you don't,' Howard panted. 'No you don't, not at all!'

He ran for the sink, slipped in a puddle of blood, almost fell, and then caught his balance. The finger was blurring back down the drain, knuckle after knuckle, like a freight-train going into a tunnel. Howard seized it, tried to hold it, and couldn't - it went sliding through his hand like a greased and burning length of clothesline. He sliced forward again nevertheless, and managed to cut off the last three feet of the thing just above the point where it was whizzing through his fist.

He leaned over the sink (holding his breath this time) and stared down into the blackness of the drain. Again he caught just a glimpse of retreating white.

'Come on back anytime!' Howard Mitla shouted. 'Come back anytime at all! I'll be right here, waiting for you!'

He turned around, releasing his breath in a gasp. The room still smelled of drain-cleaner. Couldn't have that, not while there was still work to do. There was a wrapped cake of Dial soap behind the hot-water tap. Howard picked it up and threw it at the bathroom window. It broke the gla.s.s and bounced off the crisscross of mesh behind it. He remembered putting that mesh in - remembered how proud of it he had been. He, Howard Mitla, mild-mannered accountant, had been TAKING CARE OF THE OLD HOMESTEAD. Now he knew what TAKING CARE OF THE OLD HOMESTEAD was really all about. Had there been a time when he had been afraid to go into the bathroom because he thought there might be a mouse in the tub, and he would have to beat it to death with a broomhandle? He believed so, but that time - and that version of Howard Mitla - seemed long ago now.

He looked slowly around the bathroom. It was a mess. Pools of blood and two chunks of finger lay on the floor. Another leaned askew in the basin. Fine sprays of blood fanned across the walls and stippled the bathroom mirror. The basin was streaked with it.

'All right,' Howard sighed. 'Clean-up time, boys and girls.' He turned the hedge-clippers on again and began to saw the various lengths of finger he had cut off into pieces small enough to flush down the toilet.

The policeman was young and he was Irish - O'Bannion was his name. By the time he finally arrived at the closed door of the Mitla apartment, several tenants were standing behind him in a little knot. With the exception of Dennis Feeney, who wore an expression of high outrage, they all looked worried.

O'Bannion knocked on the door, then rapped, and finally hammered.

'You better break it down,' Mrs. Javier said. 'I heard him all the way up on the seventh floor.'

'The man's insane,' Feeney said. 'Probably killed his wife.'

'No,' said Mrs. Dattlebaum. 'I saw her leave this morning, just like always.'

'Doesn't mean she didn't come back again, does it?' Mr. Feeney asked truculently, and Mrs. Dattlebaum subsided.

'Mr. Mitter?' O'Bannion called.

'It's Mitla' Mrs. Dattlebaum said. 'With an l.'

'Oh, c.r.a.p,' O'Bannion said, and hit the door with his shoulder. It burst open and he went inside, closely followed by Mr. Feeney. 'You stay here, sir,' O'Bannion instructed.

'The h.e.l.l I will,' Feeney said. He was looking into the Kitchen, with its strew of implements on the floor and the splatters of vomit on the kitchen cabinets. His eyes were small and bright and interested. 'The guy's my neighbor. And after all, I was the one who made the call.'

'I don't care if you made the call on your own private hotline to the Commish,' O'Bannion said. 'Get the h.e.l.l out of here or you're going down to the station with this guy Mittle.'

'Mitla,' Feeney said, and slunk unwillingly toward the door to the hallway, casting glances back at the kitchen as he went.

O'Bannion had sent Feeney back mostly because he didn't want Feeney to see how nervous he was. The mess in the kitchen was one thing. The way the place smelled was another - some sort of chemistry-lab stink on top, some other smell underneath it. He was afraid the underneath smell might be blood.

He glanced behind him to make sure that Feeney had gone back all the way - that he was not lingering in the foyer where the coats were hung - and then he advanced slowly across the living room. When he was beyond the view of the onlookers, he unsnapped the strap across the b.u.t.t of his pistol and drew it. He went to the kitchen and looked all the way in. Empty. A mess, but empty. And . . . what was that splattered across the cabinets? He wasn't sure, but judging by the smell - A noise from behind him, a little shuffling sound, broke the thought off and he turned quickly, bringing his gun up.

'Mr. Mitla?'

There was no answer, but the little shuffling sound came again. From down the hall. That meant the bathroom or the bedroom. Officer O'Bannion advanced in that direction, raising his gun and pointing its muzzle at the ceiling. He was now carrying it in much the same way Howard had carried the hedge-clippers.

The bathroom door was ajar. O'Bannion was quite sure this was where the sound had come from, and he knew it was where the worst of the smell was coming from. He crouched, and then pushed the door open with the muzzle of his gun.

'Oh my G.o.d,' he said softly.

The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse after a busy day. Blood sprayed the walls and ceiling in scarlet bouquets of spatter. There were puddles of blood on the floor, and more blood had run down the inside and outside curves of the bathroom basin in thick trails; that was where the worst of it appeared to be. He could see a broken window, a discarded bottle of what appeared to be drain-cleaner (which would explain the awful smell in here), and a pair of men's loafers lying quite a distance apart from each other. One of them was quite badly scuffed.

And, as the door swung wider, he saw the man.

Howard Mitla had crammed himself as far into the s.p.a.ce between the bathtub and the wall as he could get when he had finished his disposal operation. He held the electric hedge-clippers on his lap, but the batteries were flat; bone was a little tougher than branches after all, it seemed. His hair still stood up in its wild spikes. His cheeks and brow were smeared with bright streaks of blood. His eyes were wide but almost totally empty - it was an expression Officer O'Bannion a.s.sociated with speed-freaks and crackheads.

Holy Jesus, he thought. The guy was right - he DID kill his wife. He killed somebody, at least. So where's the body?

He glanced toward the tub but couldn't see in. It was the most likely place, but it also seemed to be the one object in the room which wasn't streaked and splattered with gore.

'Mr. Mitla?' he asked. He wasn't pointing his gun directly at Howard, but the muzzle was most certainly in the neighborhood.

'Yes, that's my name,' Howard said in a hollow, courteous voice. 'Howard Mitla, CPA, at your service. Did you come to use the toilet? Go right ahead. There's nothing to disturb you now. I think that problem's been taken care of. At least for the time being.'

'Uh, would you mind getting rid of the weapon, sir?'

'Weapon?' Howard looked at him vacantly for a moment, and then seemed to understand. 'These?' He raised the hedge-clippers, and the muzzle of Officer O'Bannion's gun for the first time came to rest on Howard himself.

'Yes, sir.'

'Sure,' Howard said. He tossed the clippers indifferently into the bathtub. There was a clatter as the battery-hatch popped out.

'Doesn't matter. The batteries are flat, anyway. But . . . what I said about using the toilet? On more mature consideration, I guess I'd advise against it.'

'You would?' Now that the man was disarmed, O'Bannion wasn't sure exactly how to proceed. It would have been a lot easier if the victim were on view. He supposed he'd better cuff the guy and then call for backup. All he knew for sure was that he wanted to get out of this smelly, creepy bathroom.

'Yes,' Howard said. 'After all, consider this, Officer: there are five fingers on a hand . . . just one hand, mind you . . . and . . . have you ever thought about how many holes to the underworld there are in an ordinary bathroom? Counting the holes in the faucets, that is? I make it seven.' Howard paused and then added, 'Seven is a prime - which is to say, a number divisible only by one and itself.'

'Would you want to hold out your hands for me, sir?' Officer O'Bannion said, taking his handcuffs from his belt.

'Vi says I know all the answers,' Howard said, 'but Vi's wrong.' He slowly held out his hands.

O'Bannion knelt before him and quickly snapped a cuff on Howard's right wrist. 'Who's Vi?'

'My wife,' Howard said. His blank, shining eyes looked directly into Officer O'Bannion's. 'She's never had any problem going to the bathroom while someone else is in the room, you know. She could probably go while you were in the room.'

Officer O'Bannion began to have a terrible yet weirdly plausible idea: that this strange little man had killed his wife with a pair of hedge-clippers and then somehow dissolved her body with drain-cleaner - and all because she wouldn't get the h.e.l.l out of the bathroom while he was trying to drain the dragon.

He snapped the other cuff on.

'Did you kill your wife, Mr. Mitla?'

For a moment Howard looked almost surprised. Then he lapsed back into that queer, plastic state of apathy again. 'No,' he said. 'Vi's at Dr. Stone's. They're pulling a complete set of uppers. Vi says it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Why would I kill Vi?'

Now that he had the cuffs on the guy, O'Bannion felt a little better, a little more in control of the situation. 'Well, it looks like you offed someone.'

'It was just a finger,' Howard said. He was still holding his hands out in front of him. Light twinkled and ran along the chain between the handcuffs like liquid silver. 'But there are more fingers than one on a hand. And what about the hand's owner?' Howard's eyes shifted around the bathroom, which had now gone well beyond gloom; it was filling up with shadows again. 'I told it to come back anytime,' Howard whispered, 'but I was hysterical. I have decided I . . . I am not capable. It grew, you see. It grew when it hit the air.'

Something suddenly splashed inside the closed toilet. Howard's eyes shifted in that direction. So did Officer O'Bannion's. The splash came again. It sounded as if a trout had jumped in there.

'No, I most definitely wouldn't use the toilet,' Howard said. 'I'd hold it, if I were you, Officer. I'd hold it just as long as I possibly could, and then use the alley beside the building.'

O'Bannion shivered.

Get hold of yourself, boyo, he told himself sternly. You get hold of yourself, or you'll wind up as nutty as this guy.

He got up to check the toilet.

'Bad idea,' Howard said. 'A really bad idea.'

'What exactly happened in here, Mr. Mitla?' O'Bannion asked. 'And what have you stored in the toilet?'

'What happened? It was like . . . like . . . ' Howard trailed off, and then began to smile. It was a relieved smile . . . but his eyes kept creeping back to the closed lid of the toilet. 'It was like Jeopardy,' he said. 'In fact, it was like Final Jeopardy. The category is The Inexplicable. The Final Jeopardy answer is, "Because they can." Do you know what the Final Jeopardy question is, Officer?'

Fascinated, unable to take his eyes from Howard's, Officer O'Bannion shook his head.

'The Final Jeopardy question,' Howard said in a voice that was cracked and roughened from screaming, 'is: "Why do terrible things sometimes happen to the nicest people?" That's the Final Jeopardy question. It's all going to take a lot of thought. But I have plenty of time. As long as I stay away from the . . . the holes.'

The splash came again. It was heavier this time. The vomitous toilet seat b.u.mped sharply up and down. Officer O'Bannion got up, walked over, and bent down. Howard looked at him with some interest.

'Final Jeopardy, Officer,' said Howard Mitla. 'How much do you wish to wager?'

O'Bannion thought about it for a moment . . . then grasped the toilet seat and wagered it all.

Sneakers.

John Tell had been working at Tabori Studios just over a month when he first noticed the sneakers. Tabori was in a building which had once been called Music City and had been, in the early days of rock and roll and top-forty rhythm and blues, a very big deal. Back then you never would have seen a pair of sneakers (unless they were on the feet of a delivery boy) above lobby-level. Those days were gone, though, and so were the big-money producers with their reet pleats and pointy-toed snakeskin shoes. Sneakers were now just another part of the Music City uniform, and when Tell first glimpsed these, he made no negative a.s.sumptions about their owner. Well, maybe one: the guy really could have used a new pair. These had been white when they were new, but from the look of them new had been a long time ago.

That was all he noticed when he first saw the sneakers in the little room where you so often ended up judging your neighbor by his footwear because that was all you ever saw of him. Tell spied this pair under the door of the first toilet-stall in the third-floor men's room. He pa.s.sed them on his way to the third and last stall. He came out a few minutes later, washed and dried his hands, combed his hair, and then went back to Studio F, where he was helping to mix an alb.u.m by a heavy-metal group called The Dead Beats. To say Tell had already forgotten the sneakers would be an overstatement, because they had hardly registered on his mental radar screen to begin with.

Paul Jannings was producing The Dead Beats' sessions. He wasn't famous in the way the old be-bop kings of Music City had been famous - Tell thought rock-and-roll music was no longer strong enough to breed such mythic royalty - but he was fairly well-known, and Tell himself thought he was the best producer of rock-and-roll records currently active in the field; only Jimmy Iovine could come close.

Tell had first seen him at a party following the premiere of a concert film; had, in fact, recognized him from across the room. The hair was graying now, and the sharp features of Jannings's handsome face had become almost gaunt, but there was no mistaking the man who had recorded the legendary Tokyo Sessions with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, and Al Kooper some fifteen years earlier. Other than Phil Spector, Jannings was the only record producer Tell could have recognized by sight as well as by the distinctive sound of his recordings - crystal-clear top ends underscored by percussion so heavy it shook your clavicle. It was that Don McLean clarity you heard first on the Tokyo Sessions recordings, but if you wiped the treble, what you heard pulsing along through the underbrush was pure Sandy Nelson.

Tell's natural reticence was overcome by admiration and he had crossed the room to where Jannings was standing, temporarily unengaged. He introduced himself, expecting a quick handshake and a few perfunctory words at most. Instead, the two of them had fallen into a long and interesting conversation. They worked in the same field and knew some of the same people, but even then Tell had known there was more to the magic of that initial meeting than those things; Paul Jannings was just one of those rare men to whom he found he could talk, and for John Tell, talking really was akin to magic.

Toward the end of the conversation, Jannings had asked him if he was looking for work.

'Did you ever know anyone in this business who wasn't?' Tell asked.

Jannings laughed and asked for his phone number. Tell had given it to him, not attaching much importance to the request - it was most likely a gesture of politeness on the other man's part, he'd thought. But Jannings had called him three days later to ask if Tell would like to be part of the three-man team mixing The Dead Beats' first alb.u.m. 'I don't know if it's really possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,' Jannings had said, 'but since Atlantic Records is footing the bills, why not have a good time trying?' John Tell saw no reason at all why not, and signed on for the cruise immediately.

A week or so after he first saw the sneakers, Tell saw them again. He only registered the fact that it was the same guy because the sneakers were in the same place - under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's. There was no question that they were the same ones; white (once, anyway) high tops with dirt in the deep creases. He noticed an empty eyelet and thought, Must not have had your own eyes all the way open when you laced that one up, friend. Then he went on down to the third stall (which he thought of, in some vague way, as 'his'). This time he glanced at the sneakers on his way out, as well, and saw something odd when he did: there was a dead fly on one of them. It lay on the rounded toe of the left sneaker, the one with the empty eyelet, with its little legs sticking up.

When he got back to Studio F, Jannings was sitting at the board with his head clutched in his hands.

'You okay, Paul?'

'What's wrong?'

'Me. I was wrong. I am wrong. My career is finished. I'm washed up. Eighty-sixed. Over-done-with-gone.'

'What are you talking about?' Tell looked around for Georgie Ronkler and didn't see him anywhere. It didn't surprise him. Jannings had periodic fugues and Georgie always left when he saw one coming on. He claimed his karma didn't allow him to deal with strong emotion. 'I cry at supermarket openings,' Georgie said.

'You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,' Jannings said. He pointed with his fist at the gla.s.s between the mixing room and the performance studio. He looked like a man giving the old n.a.z.i Heil Hitler salute. 'At least not out of pigs like those.'

'Lighten up,' Tell said, although he knew Jannings was perfectly right. The Dead Beats, composed of four dull b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and one dull b.i.t.c.h, were personally repulsive and professionally incompetent.

'Lighten this up,' Jannings said, and flipped him the bird.

'G.o.d, I hate temperament,' Tell said.

Jannings looked up at him and giggled. A second later they were both laughing. Five minutes after that they were back to work.