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.

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!

He was on his way out the door when his eye fell on last night’s take and he remembered that he had meant to call Nat Copeland in Portsmouth. He went back into the bedroom, dug through the clothes which were balled helter-skelter in his top bureau drawer, and finally came up with a battered address book. He went back into the kitchen, sat down, and dialled the number he had. He doubted that he would actually catch Nat in, but it was worth a try.

The coke buzzed and whipsawed in his head, but he could already feel the rush tapering off. A headshot of cocaine made a new man of you. The only trouble was, the first thing the new man wanted was another one, and Ace’s supply was severely depleted.

“Yeah?” a wary voice said in his ear, and Ace realized he had beaten the odds again-his luck was in.

“Nat!” he cried.

“Who the fuck says so?”

“I do, old boss! I do!”

“Ace? That you?”

“None other! How you doin, ole Natty?”

“I’ve been better.” Nat sounded less than overjoyed to hear from his old machine-shop buddy at Shawshank. “What do you want, Ace?”

“Now, is that any way to talk to a pal?” Ace asked reproachfully.

He cocked the phone between his ear and shoulder and pulled a pair of rusty tin cans toward him.

One of them had come out of the ground behind the old Treblehorn place, the other from the cellar-hole of the old Masters farm, which had burned flat when Ace was only ten years old. The first can had contained only four books of S amp; H Green Stamps and several banded packets of Raleigh cigarette coupons. The second had contained a few sheafs of mixed trading stamps and six rolls of pennies. Except they didn’t look like regular pennies.

They were white.

“Maybe I just wanted to touch base,” Ace teased. “You know, check on the state of your piles, see how your supply of K-Y’s holdin out.

Things like that.”

“What do you want, Ace?” Nat Copeland repeated wearily.

Ace plucked one of the penny-rolls out of the old Crisco can.

The paper had faded from its original purple to a dull wash pink.

He shook two of the pennies out into his hand and looked at them curiously. If anyone would know about these things, Nat Copeland was the guy.

He had once owned a shop in ICttery called Copeland’s Coins and Collectibles. He’d also had his own private coin collectionone of the ten best in New England, at least according to Nat himself. Then he too had discovered the wonders of cocaine. In the four or five years following this discovery, he had dismantled his coin collection item by item and put it up his nose. In 1985, police responding to a silent alarm at the Long John Silver coinshop in Portland had found Nat Copeland in the back room, stuffing Lady Liberty silver dollars into a chamois bag. Ace met him not long after.

“Well, I did have a question, now that you mention it.”

“A question? That’s all?”

“That’s absolutely all, good buddy.”

“All right.” Nat’s voice relaxed the smallest bit. “Ask, then. I don’t have all day.”

“Right,” Ace said. “Busy, busy, busy. Places to go and people to eat, am I right, Natty?” He laughed crazily. It wasn’t just the blow; it was the day. He hadn’t gotten in until first light, the coke he had ingested had kept him awake until almost ten this morning in spite of the drawn shades and his physical exertions, and he still felt ready to eat steel bars and spit out tenpenny nails. And why not? Why the fuck not? He was standing on the rim of a fortune.

He knew it, he felt it in every fiber. “Ace, is there really something on that thing you call your mind or did you phone just to rag me?”