The road to the old foundry is coming up on the right, quickly, too quickly to turn in, really, but Lee turns in anyway. Terry plants one hand on the back of Merrin’s seat and bites down on a cry. The passenger-side tires catch soft gravel and fling it into the trees, leave a deep four-foot-long gouge.

Brush scrapes at the bumper. The Cadillac thumps and bangs in the ruts, still going too fast, the highway disappearing behind them. Up ahead is a chain stretched across the road. Lee brakes hard, the steering wheel shimmying in his hands, back end slewing. The car stops with the headlights touching the chain, actually stretching it across the grille. Merrin opens her door, sticks her head out, and retches. Once. Again. Fucking Ig; right now Terry hates him.

He’s not feeling too high on Lee either, flinging the car around like that. They’ve definitely come to a stop, and yet a part of Terry feels as if they’re still moving, still sliding to the side. If he had his joint on hand, he’d hurl it out the window-the thought of putting the thing in his mouth repulses him, would be like swallowing a live cockroach-only he doesn’t know what he did with it, doesn’t seem to be holding it anymore. He touches his scraped and tender temple again and winces.

Rain taps slowly on the windshield. Except it isn’t rain, not anymore. Just water drops blowing from the branches above. Not five minutes before, the torrent was coming down so hard that the rain bounced when it hit the road, but in the usual way of summer thundershowers it has blown away as quickly as it blew in.

Lee gets out and goes around the side of the car and crouches beside her. He murmurs something to her, his voice calm, reasonable. However she answers him, he doesn’t like it. He repeats his offer, and this time her reply is audible, her tone unfriendly. “No, Lee. I just want to go home and get into some dry things and be by myself.”

Lee stands up, walks around to the trunk, pops it, fishes something out of it. A gym bag.

“Got gym clothes. Shirt. Pants. They’re dry and warm. Plus, there’s no sick on them.”

She thanks Lee and climbs out into the humid, buggy, wet, blowing night, hangs Terry’s sport coat over her shoulders. Merrin reaches for the bag, but for a moment Lee doesn’t release it.

“You had to do it, you know. It was crazy, thinking that you could-that either of you could-”

“I just want to change, okay?”

Pulling the gym bag away from him and starting down the road, Merrin crosses through the headlights, her skirt swishing around her legs and her blouse rendered briefly transparent by the intense glare. Terry catches himself staring, forces himself to look away, and so sees Lee staring as well. He wonders, for the first time, if maybe good old Lee Tourneau is carrying a little bit of a torch for Merrin Williams-or at least a hard-on. Merrin continues down the road, walking at first in the tunnel of brightness carved out by the headlights, then stepping off the gravel and into darkness. It is the last time Terry will ever see her alive.

Lee stands in the open passenger-side door, staring after her, like he doesn’t know whether to get back in the car or not. Terry wants to tell him to sit down but can’t summon up the will or the energy. Terry stares after her himself for a short time, and then he can’t hack it. He doesn’t like the way the night seems to be breathing, swelling and contracting. The headlights are catching one corner of the open field below the foundry, and he doesn’t like the way the wet grass lashes at the darkness, in constant uneasy motion. He can hear it through the open door. It hisses, like the snake exhibit at the zoo. Also: He still has a faint but stomach-turning sensation of sideways motion, of sliding helplessly away toward someplace he doesn’t want to go. The ache in his right temple isn’t helping either. He picks up his feet and lies down on the backseat.

That’s better. The mottled brown upholstery is moving, too, like billows of slow-moving cream in a lightly stirred cup of coffee, but that’s okay, a good thing to see when you’re stoned, a safe thing. Not like wet grass swaying ecstatically in the night.

He needs something to think about, something soothing, needs a daydream to ease his queasy mind. Production is lining up guests for next season, the usual mix of what’s happening and what happened, black and white, Mos Def and Def Leppard, the Eels and the Crowes and every other animal in the pop-culture bestiary, but what Terry is really excited about is Keith Richards, who was in the Viper Room with Johnny Depp a few months ago and told Terry he thought the show was fuckin’ darlin’ and said he’d be de-fuckin’-lighted to be on, anytime, all roit, just fuckin’ ask already, and wot took you so fuckin’ long? That’d be a hell of a thing, get Richards on, give him the whole last half hour. The execs at Fox hate when Terry dumps the usual format and turns the show into a concert-he has been told it sends half a million viewers right over to Letterman-but as far as Terry is concerned, the execs can suck Keith Richards’s stringy, overworked cock.

In a while he begins to drift. Perrish the Thought is performing with Keith Richards in front of a festival crowd, maybe eighty thousand people, who have, for some reason, gathered at the old foundry. They’re playing “Sympathy for the Devil,” and Terry has agreed to do the lead vocal, because Mick is in London. Terry glides toward the mike and tells the leaping, ecstatic crowd that he is a man of wealth and taste, which is a line from the song but which is also true. Then Keith Richards lifts his Telecaster and plays the old devil blues. His ragged-ass, broken-bottle guitar solo is an unlikely lullaby, but good enough to ease Terry Perrish down into fitful sleep.

He wakes once, briefly, when they’re back on the road, the Caddy rushing along a smooth ribbon of night, Lee behind the wheel and the passenger seat empty. Terry has his sport coat back, spread carefully across his legs and lap, something Merrin must’ve done when she returned to the car, a typically thoughtful gesture. Although, the coat is soaking wet and dirty and there’s something heavy holding it in his lap, lying on top of it. Terry gropes for it, picks up a wet stone the size and shape of an ostrich egg, wiry strands of grass and muck on it. That stone means something-Merrin stuck it there for a reason-but Terry is too dazed and muzzy-headed to get the joke. He puts the rock on the floor. It’s got sticky stuff on it, like snail guts, and Terry wipes his fingers on his shirt, straightens his sport coat across his thighs, and settles back down.

His left temple is still throbbing where he banged it diving in back-feels sore and raw-and when he presses the back of his left hand to it, he sees he is bleeding again.

“Did Merrin get off okay?” Terry asks.

“What?” Lee says.

“Merrin? Did we take care of her?”

Lee drives for a while without reply. Then he says, “Yes. Yes, we did.”

Terry nods, satisfied, and says, “She’s a good kid. I hope her and Ig work it out.”

Lee just drives.

Terry feels himself sliding back into his dreams of being onstage with Keith Richards, before an ecstatic crowd that is performing for him as much as he is performing for them. But then, tottering on the very edge of consciousness, he hears himself ask a question he didn’t know was even on his mind.

“What’s with the rock?”

Lee says, “Evidence.”

Terry nods to himself-this seems a reasonable answer-and says, “Good. Let’s stay out of jail if we can.”

Lee laughs, a harsh, wet, coughlike sound-cat with a hairball in its throat-and it comes to Terry that he has never heard the guy laugh before and doesn’t much like it. Then Terry is gone, settling himself back into unconsciousness. This time, though, there are no dreams waiting for him, and he frowns in his sleep, wearing the look of a man trying to work out a nagging clue in a crossword puzzle, something he should know the answer to.