Peter looked at it. then up at the cop. “I don’t get it.”

“Did you stop in Fallon.”

“No—”

There was a creak as Mary’s door opened, a clunk as she shut it behind her, then the scuff of her sneakers on the sandy shoulder as she walked toward the back of the car.

“Sure we did,” she said. She looked at the fragment of metal in the big hand (Deirdre’s registration and Peter’s driver’s license were still in the cop’s other one), then up at the cop’s face. She didn’t seem scared now—not as scared, anyway—and Peter was glad. He was already calling himself nine kinds of paranoid idiot, but you had to admit that this particular close encounter of the cop kind had had its (do you really think that’s wise) peculiar aspects.

“Pit-stop, Peter, don’t you remember. We didn’t need gas, you said we could do that in Ely, but we got sodas so we wouldn’t feel guilty about asking to use the rest-rooms—”

She looked at the cop and tried on a smile. She had to crane back to see his face. To Peter she looked like a little girl trying to coax a smile out of Daddy after Daddy had gotten home from a bad day at the office. “The restrooms were very clean.”

He nodded. “Was that Fill More Fast or Berk’s Conoco you stopped at.”

She glanced uncertainly at Peter. He turned his hands up at shoulder level. “1 don’t remember,” he said. “Hell, I barely remember stopping.”

The cop tossed the useless chunk of screw back over his shoulder and into the desert, where it would lie undis-turbed for a million years, unless it caught some inquisi-tive bird’s eye. “But I bet you remember the kids hanging around outside. Older kids, mostly.

One or two maybe too old to actually be kids at all. The younger ones with skate-boards or on Rollerblades.”

Peter nodded. He thought of Mary asking him why the people were here—why they came and why they stayed.

“That was the Fill More Fast.” Peter looked to see if the cop was wearing a nametag on one of his shirt pockets, but he wasn’t. So for now, at least, he’d have to stay just the cop.

The one who looked like the Marlboro Man in the magazine ads. “Alfie Berk won’t have em around any-more. Kicked em the hell out.

They’re a dastardly bunch.”

Mary cocked her head at that, and for a moment Peter could see the ghost of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“Are they a gang.” Peter asked. He still didn’t see where this was going.

“Close as you’d get in a place as small as Fallon,” the cop said. He raised Peter’s license to his face, looked at it, looked at Peter, lowered it again. But he did not offer to give it back. “Dropouts, for the most part. And one of their hobbies is kifing out-of-state license plates. It’s like a dare thing. I imagine they got yours while you were in buying your cold drinks or using the facilities.”

“You know this and they still do it.” Mary asked. “Fallon’s not my town. I rarely go there. Their ways are not my ways.”

“What should we do about the missing plate.” Peter—asked. “I mean, this is a mess. The car’s registered in Oregon, but my sister has gone back to New York to live. She hated Reed—”

“Did she.” the cop asked. “Gosh, now!”

Peter could feel Mary’s eyes shift to him, probably wanting him to share her moment of amusement, but that didn’t seem like a good idea to him. Not at all.

“She said going to school there was like trying to go to school in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert,” he said. “Anyway, she flew back to New York. My wife and I thought it would be fun to go out and get the car for her, bring it back to New York. Deirdre packed a bunch of her—stuff in the trunk… clothes, niostlv…

He was babbling again, and he made himself stop. “So what do I do. We can’t very well drive all the way across the country with no license plate on the back of the car, can we.”

The cop walked toward the front of the Acura, moving very deliberately. He still had Peter’s license and Deir-dre’s canary-yellow registration slip in one hand. His Sam Browne belt creaked. When he reached the front of the car he put his hands behind his back and stood frowning down at something. To Peter he looked like an interested patron in an art gallery. Dastardly, he’d said. A dastardly bunch. Peter didn’t think he had ever actually heard that word used in conversation. — The cop walked back toward them. Mary moved next to Peter, but her fright seemed gone. She was looking at the big — man with interest, that was all.

“The front plate’s okay,” the cop said. “Put that one on the back. You won’t have any problem getting to New York on that basis.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “Okay. Good idea.”

“Do you have a wrench and screwdriver. I think all my tools ’re back sitting on a bench in the town garage.” The cop grinned. It lit his whole face, informed his eyes, turned-him into a different man. “Oh. These’re yours.” He held out the license and registration.

“There’s a little toolkit in the trunk, I think,” Mary said. She sounded giddy, and that was how Peter felt. Pure relief, he supposed. “I saw it while I was putting in my makeup case.

Between the spare tire and the side.”

“Officer, I want to thank you,” Peter said.

The big cop nodded. He wasn’t looking at Peter, though; his gray eyes were apparently fixed on the moun-tains off to his left. “Just doing my job.”

Peter walked to the driver’s door of the car, wondering why he and Mary had been so afraid in the first place.

That’s nonsense, he told himself as he pulled the keys out of the Ignition switch, They were on a smile-face keychain, which was pretty much par for the course—Deirdre’s course, anyway. Mr. Smiley-Smile (her name for him) was his sister’s trademark. She put happy yellow ones on the flaps of most of her letters, the occasional green one with a downturned mouth and a blah tongue stuck out if she happened to be having a bad day. 1 wasn’t afraid, not really. Neither was Mary.

Boink, a lie. He had been afraid, and Mary… well, Mary had been damned close to terrified.

Okay—maybe we were a little freaked, he thought, picking out the trunk key as he walked to the back of the car again. So sue us. The sight of Mary standing next to the big cop was like some sort of optical illusion; the top of her head barely came up to the bottom of his ribcage.

Peter opened the trunk. On the left, neatly packed (and covered with Hefty bags to keep the road dust off them), were Deirdre’s clothes. In the center, Mary’s makeup case and their two suitcases—his n hers—were wedged in between the green bundles and the spare tire. Although “tire” was much too grand a word for it, Peter thought. It was one of those blow-up doughnuts, good for a run to the nearest service station. If you were lucky.

He looked between the doughnut and the trunk’s side-wall. There was nothing there.

“Mare, I don’t see—”

“There.” She pointed. “That gray thing. That’s it. it’s worked its way in back of the spare, that’s all.”

He could have snaked his arm into the gap, but it seemed easier just to lift the uninflated rubber doughnut out of the way. He was leaning it against the back bumper when he heard Mary’s sudden intake of breath. It sounded as if she had been pinched or poked.

“Oh hey,” the big cop said mildly. “What’s this.” Mary and the cop were looking into the trunk. The cop looked interested and slightly bemused. Mary’s eyes were bulging, horrified. Her lips were trembling. Peter turned, looking into the trunk again, following their gaze. There was something in the spare-tire well. It had been under the doughnut.

For a moment he either didn’t know what it—was or didn’t want to know what it was, and then that crawling sensation started in his lower belly again. This time there was also a sense of his sphincter’s not loos-ening but dropping, as if the muscles which ordinarily held it up where it belonged had dozed off. He became aware that he was squeezing his buttocks together, but even that was far away, in another time zone. He felt an—all-too-brief certainty that this was a dream, had to be.