Cain't wait to watch this one again. It was a real hoot what some of those dirty chicks did.

He bellied over to the kitchen table and put the tape down. That nutty postman had also given him the rest of the regular mail, which Junior flipped through now. Buncha's.h.i.t, he thought. Here was one letter from the county supervisor of elections, urging him to register to vote. Fat chance. Phone bill, power bill, water and sewage bill. Least we got the money to pay, he thought. Felps paid well, and he and Ricky both were hoping the man would want more work.

There was one more letter in the pile, but . . . Don't look like no bill, at least. It was addressed specifically to Junior, in scratchy handwritten scrawl.

There was no return address.

(II).

It was dirty work, but that was what Ricky Caudill was cut out for. He didn't like to be bored. His brother had done a good job last night, real down and dirty, and the effect was exactly what they'd been hired for. Junior had killed the Hilds in grand style, and Trey had flaked their room at the Stanherd house. So . . .

Tonight's my turn.

It should be a fast, easy job. Those first dozen or so disappearances hadn't done the trick. No dice, Ricky thought. As it turned out, only a handful of Squatters had left. So Felps had this new idea, something on a bigger scale. If the state cops thought the Squatters were running an extensive meth operation, they'd roust them big-time, and Judy would just say to h.e.l.l with it, and sell the land out from under them anyway. Then . . .

Problem solved.

The moon hung low beneath reefs of clouds. Ricky slipped through the woods along a barely visible trail. He didn't hear many cicadas tonight; their season would be ending soon. Ricky felt totally alone and totally at peace. Another hundred yards or so and he'd be at the tree line around the Point.

In one hand he carried his bag of "supplies": two bottles of denatured alcohol, some Breathe-Free sinus medication, a smaller bottle of acetone, matchbooks, and a couple of grams of crystal meth. Most of it would be destroyed in the fire, but there'd still be enough traces left over to convince the police and fire department what had happened. The plan sounded perfectly plausible; all the time you'd hear how meth-heads would accidentally spill a little solvent on their stove elements, and next thing they knew, their trailer was burning down. That was what was going to happen tonight.

In his other hand, he carried a hubcap mallet.

Almost there, Ricky thought. At the wood line, he slowed. The only trick was getting in and out without being seen. He'd already had the place picked out; some Squatter named David Something-or-other had himself a small wooden shack at the western edge of the woods, fairly far away from most of the others.

He crept up, careful not to let the bag crinkle. Moonlight painted one side of the shack luminous white. s.h.i.t . . . He slipped by quickly, then plunged into the darkness of the shack's front side. No lights could be detected from the makeshift windows, but he did hear snoring-a good thing.

And another good thing: out here in the quiet, peaceful boondocks, n.o.body ever locked their doors. h.e.l.l, most of these Squatter shacks didn't even have doors, just curtains or hinged planks, or sheet plastic, like this guy had.

Ricky ever so quietly set the bag of incriminating supplies down on the front stoop; then he stepped through the sheet plastic.

He'd seen David Something-or-other on the docks and around town in the past. Didn't know the guy, but then Ricky didn't a.s.sociate with Squatters, except maybe some of the trashier girls for twenty-dollar tricks, but there weren't many who did that. This guy was in his thirties, it looked like, short like all the Squatters, but built up pretty well from working his a.s.s off all his life hauling crab bushels. Ricky, on the other hand, was more fat than muscle, and without some backup or a knife-or, in this case, a big hard-rubber hubcap mallet-he probably wouldn't stand a chance against this David cracker.

Except when he's asleep, Ricky thought, smiling in the dark.

He supposed about the only thing more despicable than shooting a man in the back was cracking him in the head with a hubcap mallet while he slept like a baby in his own home. This was Ricky's speed.

When he'd slipped through the facsimile of a front door, he plunged into more darkness. Bars of moonlight fell in wedges across the floor. Upon entering, he'd rustled the plastic a little-not much of a sound under regular circ.u.mstances, but loud as holy h.e.l.l when you were trying to kill a man. Ricky gritted his brown teeth at the rustle, then stepped quickly aside so that no moonlight might give him away. He stood dark as a shadow himself.

He let his eyes adjust, roving. A cheap, s.h.i.tty little place like most of them, but it looked clean, much cleaner, in fact, than the cheap, s.h.i.tty little house he shared with his even more demented brother.

He spotted some bookshelves and some cabinets, and a cubby of a kitchen with what looked like a thirty-year-old refrigerator. There was also one of those mini stove/oven combos that folks had in efficiency apartments. Perfect, he thought. His instructions were explicit: drop some of the allergy pills in the bottom of the saucepan and leave it on the stove. It would look to the fire marshal and cops like good ol' David Something-or-other had been cooking the s.h.i.t down with denatured alcohol, the stuff had ignited, and then . the whole joint burned down. He'd leave the other stuff lying around, too, and drag David's dead or unconscious body out of his bed and let him burn up with everything else. If Ricky did it right, the hubcap ' mallet wouldn't crack the skull, so it wouldn't look like murder.

But . . . where is the guy? Ricky wondered.

He could hear him snoring. He strained his vision, then let more things become visible in the room.

There's the cracker.

It was just an old spring cot the guy slept on. Ricky could make out the form of his body, and the short ink-black hair that almost looked darker than the darkness.

Time to rock, he thought, hefting the mallet's weight in his hand. He moved forward in short, silent steps. When he got closer he noticed a roughly cut stone of some kind hanging over the guy's bed; Ricky wouldn't know in a million years that it was specifically a chrysolite stone, said to bid good dreams and protect one's home from evil. The stone wasn't exactly doing a great job tonight.

Another few steps and he was at the head of the cot, looking right down at the stupid rube. The mallet froze high over his head, and in that moment Ricky could see his own shadow thrown against one wall: a shadow of death, a haunter of the dark.

At that single image he smiled, his heart beating faster, because he looked bigger now than he ever had.

"Who the-"

The Squatter's eyes glimmered in the moonlight, wide open. A hand shot upward, but- Thud!

-too late.

One whack with the mallet was all it took. Ricky patted the top of the guy's head, felt no fractures. Good job. Didn't matter if he was dead or not, because he'd surely die in the fire that Ricky would start in a few minutes. David Something-or-other's lights were out for good.

A macabre realization occurred to him then. The last thing this weirdo hillbilly saw in his life . . . was me.

Ricky liked that.

He went back out and grabbed the bag. It didn't take long to put the matchbooks up in a cupboard, along with the acetone and the first bottle of denatured alcohol. Next he pulled a small boiling pot off the wall, set it on the stove, and dropped in a handful of allergy pills.

Now all I gotta do is drag the cracker out of his bed, empty the other bottle of alcohol around the joint . . . and light 'er up.

Ricky liked fires. He'd liked to look at them since he was a kid-when he'd burned his mother and stepfather's house down with them in it. b.i.t.c.h had it comin 'fer lettin' her old man make me 'n' Junior . . . He didn't finish the thought, but it would suffice to say that fires made him feel like a success. They made him feel transcendental . . . not that he had any clue what that meant.

With some huffing, he dragged the Squatter out of the cot and left him to lie across the floor. Ricky didn't notice his chest moving up and down, so he guessed he was dead. Burning the f.u.c.ker up alive had more kick to it, but that was the way the cards fell sometimes.

He noticed a jar on the kitchen counter. Pickled eggs, it looked like. s.h.i.t, yeah! I love pickled eggs. He and Junior had loved them as kids; their mom had made them all the time, before she'd started boozing hard and pa.s.sing out every night, leaving their stepfather free to come into their rooms, and- Well, that was another story.

He opened the jar, was about to grab an egg, but- Holy s.h.i.t!

The stink from the jar hit him in the face like someone dropping a flowerpot on his head.

Smells worse than a f.u.c.kin' pile a' dead dogs.

He put the jar back, revolted; then- "Daddy?"

-his eyes bolted open, and he spun.

s.h.i.t!

There was someone else in the shack.

A slant of moonlight fell right on her, like a spotlight. A girl-mid-teens, he guessed, but it was hard to really tell with these Squatter girls because so many of them blossomed a few years before other girls.

It must've been something in the water.

But whether it was or not scarcely mattered to Ricky. He was all f.u.c.ked-up in the head to begin with, and now-razzed and bristly over busting the cracker's coconut in his own bed and about to turn the joint into a late-night bonfire-he was even more f.u.c.ked-up.

His blood felt hot, excitement tingling on his skin . with his sweat. His crotch felt tight.

"You're not my daddy!" she objected in that weird slur of clan dialect. She cast a worried glance down at the empty cot.

The guy was lying in darkness behind Ricky. She can't see him, he realized. He saw her own cot now, wedged in the comer of the room out of the moonlight. "Aw, now don't'choo worry 'bout your daddy, sweet- , heart. He's outside runnin' a errand, but he'll be right back. Me 'n' him are good buddies."

The girl's lower lip trembled, not that Ricky was looking at her lower lip. He was looking at the rest, though, his l.u.s.t holding his eyes open.

"But I ain't never seen you before," she questioned.

"Oh, well, that's 'cos me'n yer daddy, see, we work together on them crab boats."

Yeah. Ricky was all f.u.c.ked-up in the head, all right, and as for the girl?

Well, never mind what he did to the girl before he set the place ablaze and slipped out into the night.

(III).

Patricia dreamed of smoke and fire. She was running through the woods somewhere near the moonlit water, and though fires raged around her, she felt nothing even remotely like fear. Instead she felt invulnerable, safe. Heat wafted about her, but caused no injury. If anything, it only stoked the heat of her own desires.

"That's what the heat is," a voice calmly pointed out. It was Dr. Sallee sitting in a chair by a stand of trees. "The symbology of the dream mechanism. Our will is guided by conscious and subconscious impulses. It defines us as individuals, in subjective terms that are too complex for the concrete world around us: dreams."

The voice drifted like the smoke. Patricia tried to focus on the doctor's words and discern what they might mean with regard to her specifically, but too many other things nagged at her, such as her calm in the midst of this raging forest fire, and the hot tingling of her skin. She felt flushed; she felt . . .

Oh, G.o.d . . .

"Just a dream," she muttered to herself. At least she knew that. "It's just a dream, so I don't have to worry about it."

"That's right," Dr. Sallee agreed. But why did he look dead all of a sudden? Face drawn and pallid as old wax? The dark suit he wore was dust-tinged, its fabric frayed.

. As though he'd just climbed out of a coffin after being buried for a long, long time.

"The death of Freudian dynamics, I suppose," he said, disheartened. "Psychological thesis is dead in this day and age, I'm afraid. I'm dead."

For whatever reason, then, Patricia laughed.

"But you're right," he repeated. Why had his voice reduced to a dark gurgle? "This is a dream, so you don't have to worry about it."

Patricia peered at him through smoke.

"And you don't have to worry about what you do."

The smoke engulfed him. The fire blazed behind her, so she ran, though she still felt no fear. Her feet crunched twigs and leaves, the earth warm beneath them. Her s.e.xual urgency-her feminine heat-rose with the flames. At one point she broke through the trees, the smoke hanging behind her, and realized she was wandering along the edge of a lake-no. . .

A pond.

The realization seized her then.

This is the pond at Bowen's Field. . . .

Moonlight blared in her face. Even this late at night she could clearly make out her reflection on the pond's gla.s.s-flat surface.

The vision gave her a mild shock.

She stood pantiless in a sheer nightshirt made even more sheer by profuse perspiration. She seemed a caricature of female s.e.xuality, her parts exaggerated by some aspect of the craft of the dream. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were ample in life; in the dream, though, they were even larger, higher, so swollen she could've been pregnant. The damp nightshirt clung to them, making no secret of nipples just as magnified, with fleshy ends prominent as olives. The dream had deepened her curves and widened her hips, and when (with no volition whatsoever) she raised the hem of the nightshirt, she saw that she was not only missing her panties, but missing pubic hair as well.

Her desires squirmed with her nerves. The night's heat drew more sweat from her skin, leaving her in a veneer of indeterminable l.u.s.t.

It was Ernie who rose from the water: naked, his smile sweet and eyes reaching. Patricia's eyes yearned back, but her own smile was clearly one of wantonness, the greed to slake her own needs moistening her. She simply stood there, lifting her hem again up past her navel.

Why should she feel guilty now? It was a dream, and even Dr. Sallee-evidently a doctor whose professional philosophies were dead-had affirmed that she could do what she wanted. And when she'd talked to the real Dr. Sallee on the phone, he essentially told her that she had defeated the trauma of her past.

This dream proved that, didn't it? Here she was at the very site of her rape, but she stood now as a normal and very untraumatized s.e.xual being.

Her sensibilities corroded. She felt lewd, trampish. Was this her real self coming out? Was this the real Patricia? Or was the dream just giving her the luxury of cutting loose in a way she couldn't in real life?

"It's only your s.e.xual socialization evolving," Dr.

Sallee's unseen voice guaranteed. "Superego versus id. The societal verisimilitudes of modem man reinforce the self-maintenance of our regrettable s.e.xual repression."

She tried to make sense of it, but couldn't.

"We're all animals, Patricia. We just act like we're not. Hence the repression and its debilitating effect. Ultimately, it's what? Unnatural."

What am I doing? This is a dream. Am I waiting for my doctor's permission to have s.e.x? She nearly laughed at the absurdity-in a dream no less. The idea behind his comment hawked down on her. We're animals but we pretend that we're not.

"Cavemen didn't repress themselves," the doctor's voice a.s.sured her next. "Neither did cavewomen."

Well . . .

Her eyes hooked on Ernie. He was naked in the Water, on his knees. The dream, too, had augmented him into a puppet of male s.e.xual features all optimized. A broadened back, shoulders, and neck. Chest and biceps like pumped bands of meat. The surreally large genitals rising at the vision of her.

"Come here," she said, a s.l.u.t now. "And bring your mouth. You're going to need it."