Jim was sitting in the truck, messing around with something, and Boone was watching intently. I went over, stood on the running board, and looked. Jim had pulled one of his homemade bows out from behind the seat.

"This is the Nez Perce model," he explained. "See, the limbs are strengthened with a membrane that comes from the inside of a ram's horn. They used bighorn sheep, but I get by using domesticateds."

"What the fuck are you going to do with that, Jim?"

"What the fuck are you going to do when you catch Dolmacher, S.T.? Remember? Your gun's on the bottom of that lake."

"Wasn't planning on shooting him anyway."

"You're a real prize, you know that? What do you think we're doing here? It's my understanding that we're going after a psycho with a gun."

"Only because we have to have his knowledge. We won't have that if we fill him full of arrows."

"You underestimate me, S.T" Jim pulled a bundle of arrows out from behind the seat. The shafts were straight and smooth, feathers at the back as usual, but without heads.

"Fishing arrows," Boone said.

Jim nodded and held one up for me. One short barb stuck backwards from the point, and a short perpendicular piece was lashed to the shaft about three inches behind that.

"This keeps it from going all the way through the fish, the barb keeps it from pulling out. Now, a game arrow, with the big head, that kills by severing a lot of blood vessels. The animal bleeds to death. But this will just stick into a big animal and annoy him."

I guess I still looked skeptical.

"Look, the guy said Dolmacher has a black belt in this game. If you think he's going to let us sneak up close enough to pluck the gun out of his hand, you're nuts."

"Okay. But if the Secret Service comes after us, you have to toss all that crap into the bushes."

"Obviously. Hell, this isn't for assassinations anyhow. It's the equivalent of a CO2 gun with paint pellets."

BOONE INSISTED that he was the one. "Hell, you just tried to blow the guy up a week ago," he kept pointing out. "Your face is a 3-D wanted poster. They'll pop you. But everyone's forgotten about me. Unless Pleshy's secretly in the whaling business."

I couldn't argue with any of that. We agreed that Jim and I were going to hike up the trail and Boone was going to take the truck. He would swing around to the site of the Lumbermen's Festival and scope out the place. There wasn't any point in planning this out, because it was all random. If Fleshy happened to walk past him, he'd take the opportunity to stand up and state his case, get some media glare on Pleshy's reaction. If it was impossible to get near Fleshy, he'd forget about that, head for the back of the crowd and look for a tall, pale, psychotic nerd with his hand in his coat.

"Maybe we should call the cops and tell them Dolmacher's out there," Jim said at the last minute.

This was not an idea that had occurred to me. Frankly, if Fleshy ate a few bullets it was okay with me. I was worried about Dolmacher-probably the only guy in the world who knew how to stop this impending global catastrophe. He could easily get shot in the bargain. Even if he didn't, they'd truck him off to the loony bin where he wouldn't be of any use.

"Screw Fleshy. We have to co-opt Dolmacher."

"If we warn them, they'll step up their security," Boone said. "We won't be able to get close to Fleshy."

"We have plenty of time to chase down Dolmacher," Jim explained. "And if we give the cops a complete description, they'll spend all their effort looking for him. That'll make it easier for anyone who doesn't look like Dolmacher to get close."

"Jim's right," Boone said. "If this all falls apart and we get popped, and Dolmacher gets found, they'll want to know why we didn't warn them. They'll say we're all working together. If we warn them, we're set up as good guys."

So we drove half a mile down the road to a gas station with a payphone, and I called the cops. We decided it should be me, because whatever I said would get recorded, and it would look good if we had this proof that I was terribly concerned about Pleshy's welfare.

"I can't give my identity because I'm being framed for a crime I didn't commit," I said, "and which only an asshole would think I really did-" Boone kicked me in the leg "-but this should help prove my innocence. I think an attempt is going to be made on Alvin Pleshy's life today at the Lumbermen's Festival." And I gave a complete description of Dolmacher, emphasizing all the ways he didn't look like Boone, and there were plenty of those.

"Uh... okay. Okay. Okay," the woman at the police station kept murmuring, all through the conversation. Definitely the shy type. Not equipped for presidential assassinations.

Finally, then, Boone dropped us off at the trail and headed around for the Festival.

Here I was totally incompetent, so I just followed Jim. He was wearing a kind of bulky, tattered overcoat that he kept in his truck for purposes like changing the oil. He had his bow underneath. It looked kind of stupid, but anything was better than brandishing a primitive weapon around the SS. He was half-running down the trail in kind of a crouch, keeping his head turned to one side. I was glad he knew bow hunting, that would help us. But I got to thinking about Dolmacher's black belt in survivalism, and I wondered just how clever and paranoid he was. There was only a mile, maybe a mile-and-a-half, of forest between us and the festival site: across some flats, up a ridge, down the other side. He had plenty of time. Wouldn't it make sense to go in a ways, then double back on the trail to see if we were being followed?

Naah. Who would follow him, why would he worry?

Because he'd been holding up drugstores. Maybe someone had gotten his license plate number. Maybe-I was just putting myself in his shoes, here-maybe his car had been noticed and they were sending in the cops.

How would cops do it? A frontal assault. Dozens of men, spaced a few feet apart, combing the whole area. He couldn't gun them all down.

Well, maybe he could, if he had a silenced weapon. And I wouldn't put it past Dolmacher to own a silencer, or even a submachine gun. He'd always had an obsession for Uzi's and MAC-10s and such in college; this had clearly continued into his wiser years, and now, God help him, he had enough income to supply an arsenal.

Poor Dolmacher. All that priceless knowledge, that world-saving information about the bug, attached to a stunted personality. If we could stop him-not if, damn it, we were going to stop him-we'd have to deal with that personality for the next several days. A grim prospect either way.

Next question: what would he do if a couple of individuals came after him? First of all, they'd never find him without a dog. Jim knew a few things about tracking, but I doubted he was that good. If they did find him, they'd be in danger. Witness Bathtub Man.

Where the hell was Jim, anyway? I'd looked away and then he was gone. I went on for a few yards and stopped. Wouldn't be very smart to call out his name. There was kind of a gap in the foliage along the trail, so I stepped into it, wandered a few yards into the forest, and there he was, pissing on a tree.

"He probably came this way," Jim said.

"I don't get it. How can you tell?" I've never understood trackers.

He shrugged, continuing what was turning out to be an epic piss. "I can't tell. But the festival is off in this direction. There's an obvious opening in the trees here, it's just the easiest way to go. There are some tracks right there that look pretty fresh."

He nodded and I looked. The ground was wet and kind of muddy. Someone's size 13s had definitely passed through here. Not that Dolmacher was that tall. His wrists and ankles were like broomsticks. But his hands and feet belonged on a pro basketball player. Whoever it was, he'd been wearing those heavy-duty Vibram-soled running shoes that affluent people nowadays used instead of ten-ton waffle-stompers. Good traction combined with light weight.