"Who's talking to me?"

"Okay, so I'm a ventriloquist. A medium. Channeling people who don't like you for starters. And can hurt you bad."

"And you want-"

"To make sure you stay on the right side of the tracks."

"Al, you know, that's not where I feel comfortable."

"Next time I see you-"

"It'll be official?" Jack asked.

"It won't be polite," Sciortino said.

Jack opened the door.

"I appreciate the warning," he said.

"Be smart," Sciortino said.

The sound of the slamming car door was hollow in the cold night.

Sciortino watched until Jack turned down toward the Hudson.

"Fuck me," he said and slowly drove away.

3.

Jack's house creaked in the wind. Through the cracked window opposite the foot of his bed, Jack watched the sky change from black to gray to purple to streaky red. He heard an owl hoot. In the distance, a truck downshifted. The damp morning air held a whiff of skunk.

Dragging the quilt off the bed and pulling it around his shoulders like a cloak, Jack, feet arching from the cold of the bare wood floor, walked across the room to the window and gazed out at the mist rising from the damp earth.

Through the cracked window, almost motionless in the rising mist, Jack saw two rabbits fucking.

One rabbit hunched over the other, which made spasmodic motions.

The rabbit on top had its teeth fastened to the back of the bottom rabbit's neck. Like cats. When they fuck.

With a shiver of revulsion, Jack realized he wasn't watching two rabbits fucking.

He was watching a weasel killing a rabbit.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

1.

Jack parked in front of the lodge at Hague Fish & Game.

The hall smelled of freshly waxed floors. Stale popcorn, rancid butter. The grain of the knotty pine walls made swirls: galaxies, cyclones.... The room was filled with hunting trophies-a red fox with reflecting glass eyes posed on a birch log; the head of a six-point whitetail over the stone fireplace; a feral hog, its flat snout looking like industrial tubing; a huge walleye on a plaque; two raccoons; a bobcat snarling.

Guns and bows were hung on the wall to the right of the entrance. A couple of old couches and easy chairs faced the big flat-screen TV next to the fireplace. In front of the couch, on a coffee table made of a huge spool for electric power cables, were gun, hunting, and fishing magazines. A couple of old National Geographics. Some out-of-date Albany and local newspapers.

Weaver-a retired Sears appliance salesman; Jack couldn't remember his first name-was getting himself a cup of coffee from the stainless steel twenty-cup urn on the bar counter.

"I'm looking for my brother," Jack said.

Weaver nodded at the urn. "Help yourself, Jackie."

"I'm okay, Ned." Weaver's name came to Jack.

"Bix's on the trail," Weaver said, "fixing up the targets. Likes to keep them trim."

Jack nodded and left the lodge.

2.

Jack walked up one of the trails behind the lodge. Here and there, leaves had begun to turn, yellow or tipped with red. To the left and right of the trail, deep into the woods, half hidden-if you didn't know to look, you might miss them-were life-size targets of rabbits, bobcat, bear, squirrels, deer, a curious wolf, halfway up a tree a porcupine.... A few of them, newly touched up by Bix, looked glossy. The air midtrail was touched with paint and turpentine.

Jack whistled two notes, high and low, their childhood signal.

From somewhere ahead, Bix whistled back. He emerged from a stand of pines, carrying in each hand three paint cans by their wire handles. One of the cans, empty of paint, held a quiver of paint brushes.

"You look like hell, baby brother," Bix said.

"I keep running into things," Jack said.

"Maybe instead of running into things you should be running away from things."

Side by side, they walked back up the path toward the lodge. Sunlight through the branches dappled their heads, shoulders. Over their heads came the metal-on-metal whan-whan-whan of a nuthatch, which seemed to keep pace with them, the call sometimes behind, sometimes ahead. A snake rippled out of the dappled path. Jack heard it whisper away into the underbrush to their right.

"Tell me what you need," Bix said.

"I need backup," Jack said.

"Over lunch," Bix said, "you tell me what kind of trouble you got in since I saw you the other night, okay?"

On the way to the Chief Taghanick Diner, at the intersection of Routes 203 and 66, Jack blinked his lights at a car heading the other way, which was about to make a left turn in front of Jack's car.

"What're you doing, Jackie?" Bix asked.

"Letting him"-indicating the turning car-"know to go first," Jack said.

"Where you been, kid?" Bix asked. "Can't do that anymore. We got Pakis up here now. You flash your light at them, they think you mean you try to cross in front of me, you son of a bitch, I'll ram you, kill you, your family, anyone in your car."

"As I was pulling away from the house," Robert had said, "a car was about to turn the corner. I flashed my high beams. You know, what truckers do. To let him know I'd wait. He could turn first. He flashed back. So I started across the intersection, and the son of a bitch hit his accelerator. He almost broadsided me. In the rearview, I saw him park in front of Jean's building and go in...."

"Pakis," Bix said. "Crazy SOBs. We can't even drive like we used to."

"Let me give you a rain check on lunch," Jack told Bix. "I think I'm going to find something I've been looking for in our local Paki community...."

3.

The half a dozen Pakistani families in Mycenae lived together in a derelict 1950s motel off Route 9G, halfway to Kingston. Four generations, uncles and aunts, cousins, about fifty people all together, spread out in thirty-some rooms on the two floors of the old L-shaped building. In places the green stucco had flaked away from the concrete blocks beneath. The shadow of the second-floor balcony angled across the first floor faade. The empty pool had a scarlike crack in the bluish concrete. Old cars and trucks filled the parking lot. The motel office had collapsed in the middle as if a giant had stepped on it. The broken neon sign tilted, the arrow that used to point toward the rooms now aimed up past the electrical power lines at the sky.

"It's haunted, you know," said Kipp, the young Pakistani, who seemed to be the clan spokesman, a tall man with a neat mustache in a peach-colored V-neck sweater and chinos. "By the ghost of a little girl. Six, seven. In jeans and a T-shirt. Once, twice a week, she roller-skates down the halls, singing Hound Dog, you know the Elvis song."

In a sweet tenor, standing in the parking lot, one hand on the top of the chain-link fence around the ruined pool, Kipp sang the song's opening. Various relatives watched from the balcony. When he finished, they clapped. He mock bowed, right, left.

"The ghost got a better voice than me," Kipp said. "But loud. She wakes people up. Ever since we moved in last June. No one gets any sleep. Pain in the ass."

Jack showed Kipp the photo of Jean from the local newspaper clip about her death.

"I seen her," Kipp said. "With my nephew, Hussein, we call him Stickman. 'Cause he's so thin, you know. 'Cause he does so much drugs. He only comes home when he runs out of money. He only runs out of money when he's too strung out to rob some 7-Eleven. I say, Why you robbing 7-Elevens? Boy's crazy. He'll get caught. He'll want my help. Not me. I won't lift this finger. Petty larceny. I read the law books. Take night courses at Hudson Valley Community College. My family needs a lawyer. This country, every family needs a lawyer. Lawyer, doctor, teacher. And someone to slap the kids back in line. My brother, he's a big guy, tried to slap Stickman back in line. That's when he leaves. Good. What this family don't need is a thief."

"I want to talk to him," Jack said. "About this girl."

"This dead one?" Kipp said. "You think he can tell you how she died?"

"It's a shot," Jack said. "Someone may have seen him at her house just before."

Kipp shrugged.

"Try the auto body out on Horatio," he said, meaning Horatio Seymour Avenue.

"Seed's?" Jack asked. "He works there?"

"He sleeps in the junkers," Kipp said. "You see him, don't tell him we talked."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

1.

Seed's Autobody was hidden behind a seven-foot-high corrugated and galvanized fence, two blocks long and one block wide. Bucky Seed, the grandson of the original owner, was in his seventies, a spry, wiry bantamweight with faded tattoos covering both arms. Every day, he scavenged in the municipal trash cans. If you had an old box spring or refrigerator the town garbage collector wouldn't pick up, Bucky would load it on his pickup for anywhere from five to fifteen dollars and add it to his collection. The lot, which under Bucky's grandfather and father had been a garage and auto body shop, was now a junkyard. Behind the old garage, which hadn't been used for that purpose for thirty years, since Bucky's dad died, was a collection of old cars, motors shot, shattered windows, floors rusted out.

For a few years in the early eighties when Bucky, never married, inherited the place, he held nightly games of Magick, a sword-and-sorcery card game, which attracted the area's oddball teenagers, who, walking to the lot in their inevitable ankle-length coats, looked like big, ambulatory bats. The second time kids were busted for smoking dope at his place Bucky disbanded the games, which parents had objected to, assuming more than cards and marijuana were involved in Bucky's nights. No one ever proved anything, but the place developed a creepy reputation. Because Bucky never sold anything except the occasional cannibalized Seventies Datsun headlight, no one understood how he made a living. His expenses were minimal: He lived in the old shop, ate canned tuna-there were bins of dirty empty tuna cans behind the shop-and drank jug wine. But he always had money to gas up his truck. And once a week he frequented one of the Columbiaville Street whorehouses, where, rumor had it, he didn't fuck, but bathed.

Every two or three years, his neighbors signed petitions and tried to close him down. On his galvanized fence, he'd painted an American flag. With only forty-eight stars. Below the sloppily painted Save Local Businesses-Fight Prop. 65, was the recently added Save Seed's Autobody-Authentic Historic Mycenae Landmark.

Two Dobermans prowled the yard, but they had never attacked anyone, not even the kids who slipped past the fence to tease and torment Bucky. The new generation, if they played games like Magick, did it on the Internet.

Occasionally, if for example the kids were setting off cherry bombs, Bucky ran out of the shop, sometimes in his boxers, occasionally in pajama bottoms-once, for reasons no one could explain, in scuba gear-firing an old Saturday Night Special into the air.

Jack could easily believe Stickman slept in one of Bucky's junkers.

2.

The moon glinted off the household appliances. Behind a row of dishwashers, rank upon rank, stood ovens, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, top freezers in one line and side freezers in another. Beyond that, fading into the dark, were hot water tanks, radiators and, almost obscured in the shadow of the shop, a row of some large insectlike machinery Jack couldn't identify.

The junkyard smelled of scorched plastic, oil, and dog shit. One of the Dobermans pricked up its ears when Jack slipped through a break in the fence, raised its head to blink at Jack, and then went back to sleep, chin on forelegs. The other Doberman came around a pile of scrap metal, sniffed Jack's shoes, and raised its head for Jack to scratch behind its ears. The dog's breath smelled of tuna fish.