"Of all the smart people in the world, Thomas, not any one of them handles hard ship better than you do, and most not as well."

He knew she meant what she said, and her words made him happy, even if he didn't quite believe life was ever hard for smart people.

She stayed a while. Made sure he was okay. Then she made sure Derek was still snoring.

Thomas sat at the worktable. Tried to make more poems.

After a while he went to the window. Rain was coming dow now. It trickled on the gla.s.s. The afternoon was almost gone. Night was soon coming down on top of the rain.

He put his hands against the gla.s.s. He stared into the rain into the gray day, into the nothingness of the night that was slowly sneaking up on them.

The Bad Thing was still out there. He could feel it. A man but not a man. Something more than a man. Very bad. Ugly-nasty. He'd felt it for days, but he hadn't sent a warning to Bobby since last week because the Bad Thing wasn't coming any closer. It was far away, right now Julie was safe, and if he sent too many warnings to Bobby, then Bobby would stop paying attention to them, and when the Bad Thing finally showed up, Bobby wouldn't believe in it any more, and then it would get to Julie because Bobby wouldn't be paying attention.

What Thomas most feared was that the Bad Thing would take Julie to the Bad Place. Their mother went to the Bad Place when Thomas was two years old, so he'd never known her. Then their dad went to the Bad Place later, leaving Thomas with just Julie.

He didn't mean h.e.l.l. He knew about Heaven and h.e.l.l. Heaven was G.o.d's.

The devil owned h.e.l.l. If there was a Heaven, he was sure his mom and dad went there. You wanted to go up to Heaven if you could. Things were better there. In h.e.l.l, the aides weren't nice.

But, to Thomas, the Bad Place wasn't just h.e.l.l. it was Death. h.e.l.l was a bad place, but Death was the Bad Place. Death was a word you couldn't picture. Death meant everything stopped, went away, all your time ran out, over, done, kaput. How could you picture that? A thing wasn't real if you couldn't picture it. He couldn't see Death, couldn't get a picture of it in his head, not if he thought about it the way other people seemed to think about it. He was just too dumb, so he had to picture it in his head as a place. They said Death came to take you, and it had come to take his father one night, his heart had attacked him, but if it came to take you, then it had to take you to some place.

And that was the Bad Place. It's where you were taken and never allowed to come back. Thomas didn't know what happened to a person there. Maybe nothing nasty. Except you weren't allowed to come back and see people you loved, which made it nasty enough, no matter if the food was good over there. Maybe some people went on to Heaven, some to h.e.l.l, but you couldn't come back from either one, so both were part of the Bad Place, just different rooms. And he wasn't sure Heaven and h.e.l.l were real, maybe all there was in the Bad Place was darkness and!" and so much empty s.p.a.ce that when you went over there you couldn't even find the people who'd gone ahead of you.

That scared him most of all. Not just losing Julie to the Place, but not being able to find her when he went over there himself.

He was already afraid of the night. All that big empty place off the world. So if just the night itself was so scary, Bad Place would be lots worse. It was sure to be bigger to the night, and daylight never came in the Bad Place.

Outside, the sky got darker.

Wind blew the palms.

Rain ran down the gla.s.s.

The Bad Thing was far away.

But it would come closer. Soon.

CANDY WAs having one of those days when he could not accept that his mother was dead. Every time he crossed a threshold or turned a corner, he expected to see her. He thought he heard her rocking in the parlor, humming softly to herself as she knitted a new afghan, but when he went in there to look, the rocking chair was filmed with dust and draped with a shawl of cobwebs. Once, he hurried into the kitchen, expecting to find her in a brightly flowered house dress overlaid with a ruffle-trimmed white ap.r.o.n, dropping neat spoonsful of cookie batter on baking sheets or perhaps mixing a cake, but, of course, she was not there. In a moment of acute emotional turmoil, Candy raced upstairs, certain that he would find his mother in bed, but when he burst into her room, he remembered that it was his room now, and that she was gone.

Eventually, to jar himself out of that strange and troubling mood, he went into the backyard and stood by her lonely grave in the northeast corner of the large property. He had buried her there, seven years ago, under a solemn winter sky similar to the one that currently hid the sun, with a hawk circling above just as one circled now. He had dug her grave, wrapped her in sheets scented with Channel No. 5, and lowered her into the ground secretly, because interment on private property, was not designated as a grave site, was against the law. If he had allowed her to be buried elsewhere, he would have had to go live there with her, for he could not have endured being separated from her mortal remains for any great length of time.

Candy dropped to his knees.

Over the years the original mound of earth had settled, until her grave was marked by a shallow concavity. The gra.s.s was spa.r.s.er there, the blades coa.r.s.e, wiry, different from the rest of the lawn, though he did not know why; even in the months following her burial, the gra.s.s above her had not flourished No headstone memorialized her pa.s.sing; although the back yard was sheltered by the high hedge, he could not risk calling] attention to her illegal resting place.

Staring at the ground before him, Candy wondered if a stone would help him accept her death. If every day he could see her name and the date of her death deeply cut into a sliver of marble, that sight should slowly but permanently engrave his loss upon his heart, sparing him days like this, when he was disturbed by a queer forgetfulness and by a hope that could never be fulfilled.

He stretched out on the grave, his head turned to one side with an ear against the earth, as if he half expected to hear her speaking to him from her subterranean bed. Pressing his back hard into the unyielding ground, he longed to feel the vitality that she had once radiated, the singular energy that had flowed from her like heat from the open door of a furnace, but he was nothing. Though his mother had been a special woman, Candy knew it was absurd to expect her corpse, after seven years radiate even a ghost of the love that she had lavished upon when she was alive; nevertheless, he was grievously disappointed when not even the faintest aura shimmered up through the dirt from her sacred bones.

Hot tears burned in his eyes, and he tried to hold them back But a faint rumble of thunder pa.s.sed through the sky, an few fat droplets of rain began to fall, and neither the storm his tears could be restrained.

She lay only five or six feet beneath him, and he was overcome by an urge to claw his way down to her. He knew flesh would have deteriorated, that he would find only bow cradled in a vile muck of unthinkable origin, but he was to hold her and be held, even if he had to arrange her skeleton arms around himself in a staged embrace. He actually rip at the gra.s.s and tore up a few handsful of topsoil. Soon, however, he was wracked by powerful sobs that swiftly exhausted him and left him too weak to struggle with reality any way She was dead.

Gone.

Forever.

As the cold rain fell in greater volume, pounding on Candy's back, it seemed to leech his hot grief from him and fill him instead, with icy hatred. Frank had killed their mother; he must pay for that crime with his own life. Lying on a muddy grave and weeping like a child would not bring Candy one step closer to vengeance. Finally he got up and stood with his hands fisted at his sides, letting the storm sluice some of the mud and grief from him.

He promised his mother that he would be more relentless and diligent in his pursuit of her killer. The next time he got a lead on Frank, he would not lose him.

Looking up at the cloud-choked and streaming sky, addressing his mother in Heaven, he said, "I'll find Frankie, kill him, crush him, I will. I'll smash his skull open and cut his hateful brain into pieces and flush it down a toilet."

The rain seemed to penetrate him, driving a chill deep into his marrow, and he shuddered.

"If I find anyone who lifted a hand to help him, I'll cut their hands off. I'll tear out the eyes of anyone who looked at Frankie with sympathy. I swear I will. And I'll cut out the tongues of any b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who spoke kind words to him." Suddenly the rain fell with greater force than before, hammering the gra.s.s flat, crackling through the leaves of a nearby oak, stirring a chorus of whispers from the Eugenias. It snapped against his face, making him squint, but he did not lower his eyes from Heaven.

"If he's found anyone to care about, anyone at all, I'll take them away from him like he took you from me. I'll break them open, get the blood out of them, and throw them away like garbage." He had made these same promises many times during the past seven years, but he made them now with no less pa.s.sion than he had before.

"Like garbage," he repeated through clenched teeth.

His need for vengeance was no less fierce now than it had been on the day of her murder seven years ago. His hatred of Frank was, if anything, harder and sharper than ever.

"Like garbage.

" An ax of lightning cleaved the conclusive sky. Briefly a long, jagged laceration gaped open in the dark clouds, which for a moment seemed to him not like clouds at all but like the infinitely strange and throbbing body of some G.o.dlike being, and through the lightning-rent flesh he thought he glimpsed the shining mystery beyond.

Clint DREADED the rainy season in southern California. Most of the year was dry, and in the on-again-off-again drought of the past decade, some winters were marked by a few storms. When rain finally fell, the natives seemed to have forgotten how to drive in it. As gutters overflowed, the street clogged with traffic. The freeways were worse; they looked like infinitely long car washes in which the conveyors had broken down.

While the gray light slowly faded out of that Monday afternoon, he drove first to Palomar Laboratories in Costa Mesa. It was a large, single-story concrete-block building one block west of Bristol Avenue.

Their medical-lab division an any blood samples, Pap smears, and biopsies, among other things but they also performed industrial- and geological-samples a.n.a.lyses of all kinds.

He parked his Chevy in the adjoining lot. Carrying a plastic bag from Von's supermarket, he sloshed through the deep ditches, head bent against the driving rain, and went into the small reception lounge, dripping copiously.

An attractive young blonde sat on a stool behind the counter at the reception window. She was wearing a white uniform and a purple cardigan. She said, "You should have an umbrella."

Clint nodded, put the supermarket bag on the counter, and began to untie the knot in the straps, to open it.

"At least a raincoat," she said.

From an inside jacket pocket, he withdrew a Dakota & & Dakota & card, pa.s.sed it to her.

"Is this who you want billed?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Have you used our service before?"

"Yeah."

"You have an account?"

"Yeah."

"I haven't seen you in here before."

"No."

"My name's Lisa. I've only been here about a week. Never had a private eye come in before, least since I've started."

From the large white sack he withdrew three smaller, clear, Ziploc bags and lined them up side by side.

"You got a name?" she asked, c.o.c.king her head, smiling at him.

"Clint."

"You go around without an umbrella or raincoat in this weather, Clint, you'll catch your death, even as st.u.r.dy as you look."

"First, the shirt," Clint said, pushing that bag forward.

"We want the bloodstains a.n.a.lyzed. Not just typed. We want the whole nine yards. A complete genetic workup too. Take samples from four different parts of the shirt, because there might be more than one person's blood on it. If so, do a workup on both."

Lisa frowned at Clint, then at the shirt in the bag. She began filling out an a.n.a.lysis order.

"Same program on this one," he said, pushing forward the second bag. It contained a folded sheet of Dakota & Dakota stationery that was mottled with several spots of blood. Back at the office, Julie had sterilized a pin in a match flame, stuck Frank Pollard's thumb, and squeezed the crimson samples onto the paper.

"We want to know if any of the blood on the shirt matches what's on this stationery."

The third bag contained the black sand.

"Is this a biological substance?" Lisa asked.

"I don't know. Looks like sand."

"Because if it's a biological substance, it should go to our medical division, but if it's not biological it should go to the industrial lab."

"Send a little to both. And put a rush on it."

"Costs more."

"Whatever."

As she filled out the third form, she said, "There's a few beaches "in Hawaii with black sand, you ever been there?"

.'No.

"Kaimu. That's the name of one of the black beaches. Comes from a volcano, somehow. The sand, I mean."

"You like beaches?"

"Yeah." She looked up, her pen poised over the form, and gave a big smile. Her lips were full. Her teeth were very white. "love the beach. Nothing I like better than putting on a bathing suit and soaking up some sun, really just baking in the sun, I don't care what they say about a tan being bad for you. I'm short anyway, you know? Might as well look good while we're here. Besides, being in the sun makes me feel... oh, not exactly, because I don't mean it saps my energy, just that it makes me feel full of energy, but a lazy energy, so the way a lioness walks-you know?-strong-looking but The sun makes me feel like a lioness."

He said nothing.

She said, "It's erotic, the sun. I guess that's what I'm trying to say.

You lay out in the sun enough, on a nice beach, all your inhibitions sort of melt away." He just stared at her.

After she finished filling out the a.n.a.lysis orders, gave him copies, and attached each order to the correct sample, said, "Listen, Clint, we're living in a modern world, figuring He didn't know what she meant.

She said, "We're all liberated these days, am I right? a girl finds a guy attractive, she doesn't have to wait for to make the move."

Oh, Clint thought.

Leaning back on her stool, maybe to let him see how her full b.r.e.a.s.t.s filled out her white uniform blouse, she smiled said, "Would you be interested in a dinner, movie?"

"No."

Her smile froze.

"Sorry," he said.

He folded the copies of the work orders and put them in his jacket pocket from which earlier he had withdrawn a business card.

She was glaring at him, and he realized he'd hurt her feelings.

Searching for something to say, all he could come up with was, "I'm gay."

She blinked and shook her head as if recovering from a stunning blow.

Like sun piercing clouds, her smile broke through the gloom on her face.

"Had to be to resist this package, I guess."

"Sorry."

"Hey, it's not your fault. We are what we are, huh?"

He went into the rain again. It was getting colder. The sky looked like the ruins of a burned-out building to which the fire department had arrived too late: wet ashes, dripping cinders.

AS NIGHT fell on that rainy Monday, Bobby Dakota stood at the hospital window and said, "Not much of a view, Frank. Unless you're keen on parking lots."

He turned and surveyed the small, white room. Hospitals always gave him the creeps, but he did not express his true feeling to Frank.

"The decor sure won't be featured in Architectural Digest anytime soon, but it's comfy enough. You've got TV, nurses, and three meals a day in bed. I noticed that some of the nurses are real lookers, too, but please try to keep your hands off the nuns, okay?"

Frank was paler than ever. The dark circles around his eyes had grown like spreading inkblots. He not only looked like he belonged in a hospital but as if he had been there already. He used the power controls to tilt the bed up.