“Don’t,” Mary said, wincing. “Don’t talk about it.”

“But I can’t stop thinking about it!” she shouted, and something about that jagged on Johnny Marinville’s ear as nothing else she’d said had. She made a visible effort to get herself under control, then went on. “What got me past that was the sound of people outside. I got up on my knees and crawled over to the door. I saw four people across the street, by the Owl’s. Two were Mexican-the Escolla boy who works on the crusher up at the mine, and his girlfriend. I don’t know her name, but she’s got a blonde streak in her hair-natural, I’m almost sure-and she’s awfully pretty. Was awfully pretty. There was another woman, quite heavy, I’d never seen her before. The man with her I’ve seen playing pooi with you in Bud’s, Tom. Flip somebody.”

“Flip Moran. You saw the Flipper.”

She nodded. “They were working their way up the other side of the street, trying cars, looking for keys. I thought about mine, and how we could all go together. I started to get up. They were passing that little alley over there, the one between the storefront where the Italian restaurant used to be and The Broken Drum, and Entragian came roaring right out of the alley in his cruiser. Like he’d been waiting for them. Probably he was waiting for them. He hit them all, but I think your friend Flip was the only one killed outright.

The others just went skidding off to one side, like bowling-pins when you miss a good hit. They kind of grabbed each other to keep from falling down. Then they ran. The Escolla boy had his arm around his girlfriend. She was crying and holding her arm against her breasts. It was broken. You could see it was, it looked like it had an extra joint in it above the elbow. The other woman had blood pouring down her face. When she heard Entragian coming after them-that big, powerful engine—she spun around and held her hands up like she was a crossing guard or something. He was driving with his right hand and leaning out the window like a locomotive engineer. He shot her twice before he hit her with the car and ran her under. That was the first really good look I got at him, the first time I knew for sure who I was dealing with.”

She looked at them one by one, as if trying to measure the effect her words were having.

“He was grinning. Grinning and laughing like a kid on his first visit to Disney World.

Happy, you know. Happy.”

Audrey had crouched there at the laundrymat door, watching Entragian chase the Escolla boy and his girl north on Main Street with the cruiser. He caught them and ran them down as he had the older woman-it was easy to get them both at once, she said, because the boy was trying to help the girl, the two of them were running together. When they were down, Entragian had stopped, backed up, backed slowly over them (there had been no wind then, Audrey told them, and she had heard the sound of their bones snapping very clearly), got out, walked over to them, knelt between them, put a bullet in the back of the girl’s head, then took off the Escolla boy’s hat, which had stayed on through everything, and put a bullet in the back of his head.

“Then he put the hat back on him again,” Audrey said.

“If I live through this, that’s one thing I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live-how he took the boy’s hat off to shoot him, then put it back on again. It was as if he was saying he understood how hard this was on them, and he wanted to be as considerate as possible.”

Entragian stood up, turned in a circle (reloading as he did), seeming to look everywhere at once. Audrey said he was wearing a big, goony smile. Johnny knew the kind she meant. He had seen it. In a crazy way it seemed to him he had seen all of this-in a dream, or another life.

It’s just dem old kozmic Vietnam blues again, he told himself. The way she described the cop reminded him of certain stoned troopers he had run with, and certain sto-ries he had been told late at night-whispered tales from grunts who had seen guys, their own guys, do terrible, unspeakable things with that same look of immaculate good cheer on their faces. It’s Vietnam, that’s all, coming at you like an acid flashback.

All you need now to com-plete the circle is a transistor radio sticking out of some-one’s pocket, playing “People Are Strange” or “Pictures of Matchstick Men.”

But was that all. A deeper part of him seemed to doubt the idea. That part thought something else was going on here, something which had little or nothing to do with the paltry memories of a novelist who had fed on war like a buzzard on carrion… and had subsequently produced exactly the sort of bad book such behavior probably warranted.

All right, then-if it’s not you, what is it.

“What did you do then.” Steve asked her.

“Went back to the laundrymat office. I crawled. And when I got there, I crawled into the kneehole under the desk and curled up in there and went to sleep. I was very tired. Seeing all those things… all that death… it made me very tired.

“It was thin sleep. I kept hearing things. Gunshots, explosions, breaking glass, screams. I have no idea how much of it was real and how much was jvst in my mind. When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I was sore all over, at first I thought it had all been a dream, that I might even still be camping. Then I opened my eyes and saw where I was, curled up under a desk, and I smelled bleach and laundry soap, and realized I had to pee worse than ever in my life. Also, both my legs were asleep.

“I started wiggling out from under the desk, telling myself not to panic if I got a little stuck, and that was when I heard somebody come into the front of the store, and I yanked myself back under the desk again. It was him. I knew it just by the way he walked. It was the sound of a man in boots.

“He goes, ‘Is anyone here.’ and came up the aisle between the washers and dryers. Like he was following my tracks, In a way he was. It was my perfume. I hardly ever wear it, but putting on a dress made me think of it, made me think it might make things go a little smoother at my meeting with Mr. Symes.” She shrugged, maybe a little embarrassed.

“You know what they say about using the tools.”

Cynthia looked blank at this, but Mary nodded.

“It smells like Opium,’ he says. ‘Is it, miss. Is that what you’re wearing.’ I didn’t say anything, just curled up there in the kneehole with my arms wrapped around my head. He goes, ‘Why don’t you come out. If you come out, I’ll make it quick. If I have to find you, I 11 make it slow.’ And I wanted to come out, that’s how much he’d gotten to me. How much he’d scared me I believed he knew for sure that I was still in there some where, and that he was going to follow the smell of my perfume to me like a bloodhound, and I wanted to get out from under the desk and go to him so he’d kill me quick I wanted to go to him the way the people at Jonestown must have wanted to stand in line to get the Kool-Aid. Only I couldn’t. I froze up again and all I could do was lie there and think that I was going to die needing to pee. I saw the office chair-I’d pulled it out so I could get into the knee hole of the desk-and I thought, ‘When he sees where the chair is, he’ll know where I am.’ That was when he came into the office, while I was thinking that. ‘Is someone in here.’ he goes. ‘Come on out. I won’t hurt you. I just want to question you about what’s going on. We’ve got a big problem. — Audrey began to tremble, as Johnny supposed she had trembled while she had been hedgehogged in the kneehole of the desk, waiting for Entragian to come the rest of the way into the room, find her, and kill her. Except she was smiling, too, the kind of smile you could hardly bring yourself to look at.

“That’s how crazy he was.” She clasped her shaking hands together in her lap. “In one breath he says that if you come out he’ll reward you by killing you quick; in the next he says he just wants to ask you a few questions Crazy. But I believed both things at once.