From her other pocket she took a sealed business envelope.
Typed on the front in capital letters was this:
A MESSAGE FOR THE INTREPID TREASURE-HUNTER.
Polly put the envelope n the can, pressed the cover back down, and dropped it into the hole again. She used the shovel to fill in the hole, working quickly and carelessly. All she wanted right now was to get the hell out of here.
When she was done, she walked away fast. The shovel she slung into the high weeds. She had no intention of taking it back to the barn, no matter how mundane the explanation of the sound she had heard might be.
When she reached her car, she opened first the passenger door and then the glove compartment. She pawed through the litter of paper inside until she found an old book of matches. It,took her four tries to produce one small flame. The pain had almost entirely left her hands, but they were shaking so badly that she struck the first three much too hard, bending the paper heads uselessly to the side.
When the fourth flared alight, she held it between two fingers of her right hand, the flame almost invisible in the hot afternoon sunlight, and took the matted pile of trading stamps and dirty pictures from her jeans pocket. She touched the flame to the bundle and held it there until she was sure it had caught. Then she cast the match aside and dipped the papers down to produce the maximum draft. The woman was malnourished and hollow-eyed. The dog looked mangy and just smart enough to be embarrassed. It was a relief to watch the surface of the one photograph she could see bubble and turn brown. When the pictures began to curl up, she dropped the flaming bundle into the dirt where a woman had once beaten another dog, this one a Saint Bernard, to death with a baseball bat.
The flames flared. The little pile of stamps and photos quickly crumpled to black ash. The flames guttered, went out... and at the moment they did, a sudden gust of wind blew through the stillness of the day, breaking the clot of ash up into flakes. They whirled upward in a funnel which Polly followed with eyes that had gone suddenly wide and frightened. Where, exactly, had that freak gust of wind come from?
Oh, please! Can't you stop being so damnedAt that moment the growling sound, low, like an idling outboard motor, rose from the hot, dark maw of the barn again. It wasn't her imagination and it wasn't a creaking board.
It was a dog.
Polly looked that way, frightened, and saw two sunken red circles of light peering out at her from the darkness.
She ran around the car, bumping her hip painfully against the right side of the hood in her hurry, got in, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. She turned the ignition key. The engine cranked over... but did not start.
No one knows where I am, she realized. No one but Mr. Gaunt... and he wouldn't tell.
For a moment she imagined herself trapped out here, the way Donna Trenton and her son had been trapped. Then the engine burst into life and she backed out of the driveway so fast she almost ran her car into the ditch on the far side of the road. She dropped the transmission into drive and headed back to town as fast as she dared to go.
She had forgotten all about washing her hands.
4
Ace Merrill rolled out of bed around the same time that Brian Rusk was blowing his head off thirty miles away.
He went into the bathroom, shucking out of his dirty skivvies as he walked, and urinated for an hour or two. He raised one arm and sniffed his pit. He looked at the shower and decided against it. He had a big day ahead of him. The shower could wait.
He left the bathroom without bothering to flush-if it's yellow, let it mellow was an integral part of Ace's philosophy-and went directly to the bureau, where the last of Mr. Gaunt's blow was laid out on a shaving mirror. It was great stuff-easy on the nose, hot in the head. It was also almost gone. Ace had needed a lot of goPower last night, just as Mr. Gaunt had said, but he had a pretty good idea there was more where this had come from.
Ace used the edge of his driver's license to shape a couple of lines. He snorted them with a rolled-up five-dollar bill, and something that felt like a Shrike missile went off in his head.
"Boom!" cried Ace Merrill in his best Warner Wolf voice. "Let's go to the videotape!"
He pulled a pair of faded jeans up over his naked hips and then got into a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt. It's what all the well-dressed treasure-hunters are wearing this year, he thought, and laughed wildly.
My, that coke was fine!