He didn’t answer. There was a thump from beneath them as the tar quit. The cop pulled the knob that turned on the headlights, but they didn’t seem to help much; what she saw were two bright cones shining into a world of roiling dust. Every now and then a tLlmhleweed would fly in front of them, headed east. Gravel rumbled beneath the tires and pinged against the undercarriage.

They passed a long, ramshackle building with rusty metal sides-a factory or some kind of mill, she thought-and then the road tilted up. They started to climb the embankment.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, just tell me what you want.”

“Uck,” he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who’s got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.

They passed two pickup trucks, a dumptruck, and a yellow-ghost backhoe. all parked together inside the first Switchback the road made on its way to the top.

“If you’re going to kill me, make it quick,” she said in her trembly voice. “Please don’t hurt me. Do that much, at least, promise you won’t hurt me.”

But the slumped, bleeding figure behind the wheel of the cruiser promised her nothing. It simply drove through the flying dust, guiding the car to the crest of the bulwark. The cop didn’t hesitate at the top hut crossed the rim and started down, leaving the wind above them as he did. Ellen looked back, wanting to see some last light, but she was too late.

The walls of the pit had already hidden what remained of the sunset. The cruiser was descending into a vast lake of darkness, an abyss that made a joke of the headlights.

Down here, night had already fallen.

You’ve had a conversion, Reverend Martin once told David. This was near the beginning. It was also around the time that David began to realize that by four o’clock on most Sunday afternoons. Reverend Gene Martin was no longer strictly sober. It would still be some months, however, before David realized just how much his new teacher drank. In fact, yours is the only genuine conversion I’ve ever seen, perhaps the only genuine one I’ll ever see. These are not good times for the God of our fathers, David. Lot of people talking the talk, not many walking the walk.

David wasn’t sure that “conversion” was the right word for what had happened to him, but he hadn’t spent much time worrying about it. Something had happened, and just coping with it was enough. The something had brought him to Reverend Martin, and Reverend Martin-drunk or not-had told him things he needed to know and set him tasks that he needed to do. When David had asked him, at one of those Sunday-afternoon meetings (soundless basketball on the TV that day), what he should be doing, Reverend Martin had responded promptly. “The job of the new Christian is to meet God, to know God, to trust God, to love God. That’s not like taking a list to the supermarket, either, where you can dump stuff into your basket in any order you like. It’s a progression, like working your way up the math ladder from counting to calculus. You’ve met God, and rather spectacularly, too. Now you’ve got to get to know him.”

“Well, I talk to you,” David had said.

“Yes, and you talk to God. You do, don’t you. Haven’t given up on the praying.”

“Nope. Don’t often hear back, though.”

Reverend Martin had laughed and taken a sip from his teacup. “God’s a lousy conversationalist, no question about that, but he left us a user’s manual. I suggest you consult it.”

“Huh.”

“The Bible,” Reverend Martin had said, looking at him over the rim of his cup with bloodshot eyes.

So he had read the Bible, starting in March and fin-ishing Revelation (“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen”) just a week or so before they had left Ohio. He had done it like homework, twenty pages a night (weekends off), making notes, memorizing stuff that seemed important, skipping only the parts Reverend Martin told him he could skip, mostly the begats. And what he remembered most clearly now, as he stood shiv-ering at the sink in the jail cell, dousing himself with icy water, was the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. King Darius hadn’t really wanted to throw Danny in there, but his advisers had mousetrapped him somehow. David had been amazed at how much of the Bible was politics.

“You STOP THAT!” his father screamed, startling David out of his thoughts and making him look around. In the growing gloom Ralph Carver’s face was long with terror, his eyes red with grief. In his agitation he sounded like an eleven-year-old himself, one having a hell of a tantrum. “Stop that RIGHT NOW, do you hear me.”

David turned back to the sink without answering and began to splash water on his face and in his hair. He remembered King Darius’s parting advice to Daniel before Daniel was led away: “Thy God whom thou ser-vest in your days and nights will deliver thee.” And some-thing else, something Daniel had said the next day about why God had shut the lions’ mouths—“David! DAVID!”

But he wouldn’t look again. Couldn ‘t. He hated it when his father cried, and he had never seen or heard him cry like this. It was awful, as if someone had cut open a vein in his heart.

“David, you answer me!”

“Put a sock in it, pal,” Marinville said.

“You put a sock in it,” Mary told him.

“But he’s getting the coyote riled!”

She ignored him. “David, what are you doing.”

David didn’t answer. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could discuss rationally, even if there was time, because faith wasn’t rational. This was something Rev erend Martin had told him over and over again, drilling him with it like some important spelling rule, i before e except after C: sane men and women don’t believe in God That was all, that was flat. You can’t say it from the pulpit, because the congregation ’d run you out of town, but it’s the truth. God isn’t about reason; God is about faith and belief God says, “Sure, take away the safety net. And when that’s gone, take away the tightrope, too He filled his hands with water once more and splashed it over his face and into his hair.

His head. That would be where he succeeded or failed, he knew that already. It was the biggest part of him, and he didn’t think there was much give to a person’s skull.

David grabbed the bar of Irish Spring and began to lather himself with it. He didn’t bother with his legs, there would be no problem there, but worked from the groin on up, rubbing harder and generating more suds as he went His father was still yelling at him, but now there was no time to listen. The thing was, he had to be quick… and not just because he was apt to lose his nerve if he stopped too long to think about the coyote sitting out there. If he let the soap dry, it wouldn’t serve to grease him; it would gum him up and hold him back instead.

He gave his neck a fast lube-job, then did his face and hair. Eyes slitted, soap still clutched in one hand, he padded to the cell door. A horizontal bar crossed the ver tical ones about three feet off the floor. The gap between the vertical bars was at least four inches and maybe five The cells in the holding area had been built to hold men brawny miners, for the most part-not skinny eleven year-old boys, and he didn’t expect much trouble slipping through.

At least until he got to his head.

Quick, hurry, don ‘t think, trust God.

He knelt, shivering and covered with green soapslime from the hips on up, and began rubbing the cake of soap up and down, first on the inside of one white-painted ver-tical bar, then on the other.

Out by the desk, the coyote got to its feet. Its growl rose to a snarl. Its yellow eyes were fixed intently on David Carver. Its muzzle wrinkled back in an unpleas-antly toothy grin.