"Bad or good?"

"You were in it."

"Say no more."

"In a hot-air balloon."

"Is that right."

"Canary yellow with an orange stripe."

Krome said, "I'd have preferred to be on a handsome steed."

"White or black?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Yeah, right." JoLayne rolled her eyes.

"As long as it runs," Krome said.

"Maybe next time." She yawned and sat down on the floor, folding her long legs under her bottom. "You've been a busy bee, no?"

He told her he'd lined up some money to finance the chase. Of course she wanted to know where he'd gotten it, but Krome fudged. The newspaper's credit union, unaware of his resignation the day before, had been pleased to make the loan. JoLayne Lucks would've raised hell if he'd told her the truth.

"I already wired three thousand toward your Visa bill," he said, "to keep the bastards going."

"Your own money!"

"Not mine, the newspaper's," he said.

"Get outta here."

"Ever heard of an expense account? I get reimbursed for hotels and gas, too."

Krome, sounding like quite the big shot. He wasn't sure if JoLayne Lucks was buying the lie. Her toes were wiggling, which could mean just about anything.

She said, "They must really want this story."

"Hey, that's the business we're in."

"The news biz, huh? Tell me more."

"The men who beat you up," Krome said, "they haven't cashed your Lotto ticket yet. I checked with Tallahassee. They haven't even left their names."

"They're waiting to make sure I don't go to the police. Just like you predicted."

"They'll hold out a week, maybe ten days, before that ticket burns a crater in their pocket."

"That isn't much time."

"I know. We'll need some breaks to find them."

"And then ... ?"

She'd asked the same thing earlier, and Krome had no answer. Everything depended on who the creeps were, where they lived, what they'd bought at that gun show. That the men had remembered to steal the night videotape from the Grab N'Go showed they weren't as stupid as Krome had first thought.

JoLayne reminded him that her Remington was in the trunk. "The nice thing about shotguns," she said, "is the margin of error."

"Oh, so you've shot people before."

"No, Tom, but I do know the gun. Daddy made sure of that."

Krome handed her the phone. "Call the nice folks at Visa. Let's see what our party boys are up to."

Sinclair had told no one at The Registerthat Tom Krome had resigned, in the hope it was a cheap bluff. Good reporters were temperamental and impulsive; this Sinclair remembered from newspaper management school.

Then the woman who covered the police beat came to Sinclair's office with a xeroxed report he found highly disturbing. The windows of Krome's house had been shot out by persons unknown, and there was no sign of the owner. In the absence of fresh blood or corpses, the cops were treating the incident as a random act of vandalism. Sinclair thought it sounded more serious than that.

He was pondering his options when his sister Joan phoned from Grange. Excitedly she told Sinclair the latest rumor: The Lotto woman, JoLayne Lucks, left town the night before with a white man, supposedly a newspaper writer.

"Is that your guy?" Joan asked.

Sinclair felt clammy as he fumbled for a pen and paper. Having never worked as a reporter, he had no experience taking notes.

"Start again," he implored his sister, "and go slowly."

But Joan was chattering on with more gossip: The clerk at the Grab N'Go had skipped out, too – the one who'd originally said he sold the winning lottery ticket to JoLayne Lucks and then later changed his mind.

"Whoa," said Sinclair, scribbling spastically. "Run that by me again."

The shaky store clerk was a new twist to the story. Joan briefed her brother on what was known locally about Shiner. Sinclair cut her off when she got to the business about the young man's mother and the Road-Stain Jesus.

"Back up," he said to Joan. "They're traveling together – the clerk, this writer and the Lucks woman? Is that the word?"

His sister said: "Oh, there's all sorts of crazy theories. Bermuda is my personal favorite."

Sinclair solemnly jotted the word "Bermuda" on his notepad. He added a question mark, to denote his own doubts. He thanked Joan for the tip, and she gaily promised to call back if she heard anything new. After hanging up, Sinclair drew the blinds in his office – a signal (although he didn't realize it) to his entire staff that an emergency was in progress.

In solitude, Sinclair grappled with his options. Tom Krome's fate concerned him deeply, if only in a political context. An editor was expected to maintain the illusion of control over his writers, or at least have a sketchy idea of their whereabouts. The situation with Krome was complicated by the fact that he was regarded as a valuable talent by The Register'smanaging editor, who in his lofty realm was spared the daily anxiety of working with the man. It was Sinclair's cynical theory that Krome had won the managing editor's admiration with a single feature story – a profile of a controversial performance artist who abused herself and occasionally audience members with zucchini, yams and frozen squab. With great effort Krome had managed to scavenge minor symbolism from the young woman's histrionics, and his mildly sympathetic piece had inspired the National Endowment for the Arts to reinstate her annual grant of $14,000. The artist was so grateful she came to the newspaper to thank the reporter (who was, as always, out of town) and ended up chatting instead with the managing editor himself (who, of course, asked her out). A week later, Tom Krome was puzzled to find a seventy-five-dollar bonus in his paycheck.

Was life fair? Sinclair knew it didn't matter. He was left to presume his own career would suffer if Krome turned up unexpectedly in a hospital, jail, morgue or scandal. Yet Sinclair was helpless to influence events, because of two crucial mistakes. The first was allowing Krome to quit; the second was not informing anybody else at the newspaper. So as far as Sinclair's bosses were aware, Krome still worked for him.

Which meant Sinclair would be held accountable if Krome died or otherwise got in trouble. Because Sinclair had neither the resourcefulness nor the manpower to find his lost reporter, he energetically set about the task of covering his own ass. He spent two hours drafting a memorandum that recounted his last meeting with Tom Krome, describing at length the severe personal stress with which the man obviously had been burdened. Sinclair's written account culminated with Krome's shrieking that he was quitting, upending Sinclair's desk and stomping from the newsroom. Naturally Sinclair had refused to accept his troubled friend's resignation, and discreetly put him on excused medical leave, with pay. Out of deference to Krome's privacy, Sinclair had chosen to tell no one, not even the managing editor.

Sinclair reread the memorandum half a dozen times. It was an adroit piece of management sophistry – casting doubt on an employee's mental stability while simultaneously portraying oneself as the loyal, yet deeply worried, supervisor.

Perhaps Sinclair wouldn't need the fable to bail himself out. Perhaps Tom Krome simply would forget about the nutty Lotto woman and return to work at The Register,as if nothing had happened.

But Sinclair doubted it. What little he could read of his own wormlike scribbles made his stomach churn.

Bermuda?

Chub couldn't decide where to stash the stolen lottery ticket – few hiding places were as ingenious as Bode Gazzer's condom. At first Chub tucked the prize inside one of his shoes; by nightfall it was sodden with perspiration. Bode warned him that the lottery bureau wouldn't cash the ticket if it was "defaced," a legal term Bode broadly interpreted to include wet and stinky. Dutifully Chub relocated the ticket in the box of hollowpoints that he carried with him at all times. Again Bode Gazzer objected. He pointed out that if Chub got trapped in a fire, the ammunition would explode in his trousers and the Lotto numbers would be destroyed.