Duke stopped laughing, but he was still smiling. Unabashed. 'It's a clustermug,' he said. 'Isn't that your word, Big Jim? And in my experience, sometimes laughing is the only way to dea] with a clustermug.'

'I have no idea what you're talking about!'Rennie almost shouted.

The Dinsmore boys stepped back from him and stood beside their father.

'I know.' Duke spoke gently. 'And that's okay. All you need to understand right now is that I'm the chief law enforcement officer on the scene, at least until the County Sheriff gets here, and you're, a town selectman. You have no official standing, so I'd like you to move back.'

Duke raised his voice and pointed to where Officer Henry Morrison was stringing yellow tape, stepping around two largeish pieces of airplane fuselage to do it. 'I'd like everyone to move back and let us do our job! Follow Selectman Rennie. He's going to lead you behind the yellow tape.'

'I | don't appreciate this, Duke,' Rennie said.

'God bless you, but I don't give a shit,' Duke said. 'Get off my scene, Big Jim. And be sure to go around the tape. No need for Henry to have to string it twice.'

'Chief Perkins, I want you to remember how you spoke to me today. Because I will.'

Rennie stalked toward the tape. The other spectators followed, most looking over their shoulders to watch the water spray off the diesel-smudged barrier and form a line of wetness on the road. A couple of the sharper ones (Ernie Calvert, for instance) had already noticed that this line exactly mimicked the border between Motton and The Mill.

Rennie felt a childish temptation to snap Hank Morrison's carefully strung tape with his chest, but restrained himself. He would not, however, go around and get his Land's End slacks snagged in a mess of burdocks. They had cost him sixty dollars. He shuffled under, holding up the tape with one hand. His belly made serious ducking impossible.

Behind him, Duke walked slowly toward the place—where Jackie had suffered her collision. He held one hand outstretched before him like a blind man prospecting his way across an unfamiliar room.

Here was where she had fallen down… and here…

He felt the buzzing she had described, but instead of passing, it deepened to searing pain in the hollow of his left shoulder. He had just enough time to remember the last thing Brenda had said—Take care of your pacemaker— and then it exploded in his chest with enough force to blow open his Wildcats sweatshirt, which he'd donned that morning in honor of this afternoon's game. Blood, scraps of cotton, and bits of flesh struck the barrier.

The crowd aaahed.

Duke tried to speak his wife's name and failed, but hi; saw her face clearly in his mind. She was smiling. Then, darkness.

4

The kid was Benny Drake, fourteen, and a Razor. The Razors were a small but dedicated skateboarding club, frowned on by the local constabulary but not actually outlawed, in spite of calls from Selectmen Rennie and Sanders for such action (at last March's town meeting, this same dynamic duo had succeeded in tabling a budget item that would have funded a safe-skateboarding area on the town common behind the bandstand).

The adult was Eric 'Rusty' Everett, thirty-seven, a physician's assistant working with Dr Ron Haskell, whom Rusty often thought of as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Because, Rusty would have explained (if he'd anyone other than his wife he could trust with such disloyalty), he so often remains behind the curtain while I do the work.

Now he checked the state of young Master Drake's last tetanus shot. Fall of 2009, very good. Especially considering that young Master Drake had done a Wilson while cement-shooting and torn up his calf pretty good. Not a total jake, but a lot worse than simple roadrash.

'Power's back on, dude,' young Master Drake offered.

'Generator, dude,' Rusty said.'Handles the hospital and tae Health Center. Radical, huh?'

'Old-school,' young Master Drake agreed.

For a moment the adult and the adolescent regarded the six-inch gash in Benny Drake's calf without speaking. Cleaned of dirt and blood, it looked ragged but no longer downright awful. The town whistle had quit, but far in the distance, they could hear sirens. Then the fire whistle went off, making them both jump.

Ambulance is gonna roll, Rusty thought. Sure as shit. Twitch and Everett ride again. Better hurry this up.

Except the kid's face was pretty white, and Rusty thought there were tears standing in his eyes.

'Scared?' Rusty asked.

'A little,' Benny Drake said. 'Ma's gonna ground me.'

'Is that what you're scared of?' Because he guessed that Benny Drake had been grounded a few times before. Like often, dude.

'Well… how much is it gonna hurt?'

Rusty had been hiding the syringe. Now he injected three cc's of Xylocaine and epinephrine—a deadening compound he still called Novocain. He took his time infiltrating the wound, so as not to hurt the kid any more than he had to. 'About that much.'

'Whoa,' Benny said. 'Stat, baby. Code blue.'

Rusty laughed. 'Did you full-pipe before you Wilsoned?' As a long-retired boarder, he was honestly curious.

'Only half, but it was toxic!' Benny said, brightening. 'How many stitches, do you think? Norrie Calvert took twelve when she ledged out in Oxford last summer.'

'Not that many,' Rusty said. He knew Norrie, a mini-goth whose chief aspiration seemed to be killing herself on a skateboard before bearing her first woods colt. He pressed near the wound with the needle end of the syringe. 'Feel that?'

'Yeah, dude, totally. Did you hear, like, a bang out there?' Benny pointed vaguely south as he sat on the examining table in his under-shorts, bleeding onto the paper cover.

'Nope,' Rusty said. He had actually heard two: not bangs but, he was afraid, explosions. Had to make this fast. And where was The Wizard? Doing rounds, according to Ginny. Which probably meant snoozing in the Cathy Russell doctors' lounge. It was where The Wonderful Wiz did most of his rounds these days.

'Feel it now?' Rusty poked again with the needle. 'Don't look, looking is cheating.'

"No, man, nothin. You're gooiin wit me.'

'I'm not. You're numb.' In more ways than one, Rusty thought. 'Okay, here we go. Lie back, relax, and enjoy flying Cathy Russell Airlines.' He scrubbed the wound with sterile saline, debrided, then trimmed with his trusty no. 10 scalpel.'Six stitches with my very best four-oh nylon.'