Hammerhead shook his head decisively. “Nobody gave me orders for that.”

Monks hobbled outside in his socks like a convict on an old-time chain gang, Hammerhead and his rifle trailing just behind. It was the first time that he had been out of the lodge since arriving late last night-the first time he’d seen the camp in daylight. His impression of being in an earlier century was strengthened. The place consisted of a several-acre clearing with a dozen or so old log buildings and sheds, situated in a small canyon ringed with rocky crags. The vehicle that had brought him here was gone, and there were no others, nor any sign of electrical power. Steep slopes covered with fir and pine rose in all directions as far as he could see. The only man-made things in the entire vista besides the buildings were a few distant switchback logging roads that looked long disused. The single exit was a rutted dirt trail barely wide enough to drive on.

The afternoon was dark, a premature twilight, the sky heavy with blanketing clouds rolling in off the Pacific. The wind had risen and the air had a brisk, even wild, feel. Without doubt, a winter rain was going to roll in soon. Those tended to last for days, and in the mountains, they could readily turn to snow. The sun was invisible, but he guessed which way west lay from the wind, and his sense that the terrain in that direction was opening down toward the sea.

“Wait here,” Hammerhead said.

Monks watched him walk to meet Marguerite, who was coming toward them with a folded towel in her hands. In the lonely dusk, with her long hair blowing in the wind, she looked like a tragic figure from an early romantic novel, a fallen woman moving toward some doomed assignation.

When Hammerhead got to her, she handed him the towel. They spoke briefly. The import was unclear, but she turned her head aside and hurried on to the lodge.

Hammerhead came back and, in grim silence, marched Monks onward.

The washhouse looked like something at a national park campground, with separate men’s and women’s entrances marked by crudely carved wooden signs. Hammerhead gave Monks the towel and, to Monks’s relief, let him go in alone.

The floor was concrete, with a drain in its center. There was a big porcelain laundry basin and a showerhead, both cold water only, and Monks was surprised to see a flush toilet. Presumably, the plumbing was fed by gravity flow from a spring or stream. An old Stihl calendar featuring two bare-breasted women holding chainsaws was tacked to a wall. That was the only decorative touch. The basin and toilet were gummy with stains and scum, the floor caked with the mud of tromping boots.

The towel had a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a bar of Ivory soap wrapped up inside. Monks felt like a prisoner of war who had just gotten a care package from the Red Cross. The sleep had done him a world of good. There was even a certain pleasure in simply being alone for the first time since he had gotten here.

He stripped, turned on the shower, and stepped in, baring his teeth in fierce elation at its chilling spray.

When they got back to the lodge, Monks paused outside the door and stepped close to Hammerhead, peering into his square face.

“What are you looking at?” Hammerhead demanded.

“Your left eye. That tic.”

“I got a tick on my eye?” he said in alarm. One hand rose quickly to touch it, fingers searching.

“No. Tic. T-I-C. Like a twitch.” Monks fluttered his own left eyelid in demonstration.

“That’s bullshit. I don’t have any tic.”

“You probably don’t even notice it. Ever get headaches?”

“No.”

“Really? I don’t mean killers. Just sort of low-level tension.”

A pause. Then, suspiciously, “Maybe. Like, if I got a hangover.”

“It might feel like a hangover,” Monks agreed. “How about voices? You know, buzzing around in your brain, trying to get you to do things?”

“What the fuck you talking about, man?” Hammerhead stepped back, the rifle shifting nervously in his grip.

“Never mind,” Monks said. “It’s probably nothing.”

Hammerhead swallowed hard. Then he swung the gun’s barrel viciously toward the lodge’s door.

“Get on inside.”

Smiling very faintly, Monks got on inside.

A few minutes later, Monks walked again across the dusky, windy camp to talk with his son for the first time in almost five years. Hammerhead had come into the lodge to inform him dourly that Freeboot had given his okay. Monks’s status seemed to be rising. He had not been cabled up again, and he was being granted visiting privileges.

The cabin that Hammerhead took him to was one of half a dozen that were scattered among the other buildings. Its small windows were caked with grime, and it shared the sense of neglect, almost squalor, that Monks had noticed around the camp in general. Most military operations were sticklers for neatness. But, it was undoubtedly a lot more fun to hustle around with radios and guns than to do anything as mundane as cleaning.

As they walked, Hammerhead glanced at him several times nervously, almost furtively, as if he wanted to ask a question, but couldn’t bring it to his lips. Monks offered no encouragement.

As he raised his fist to knock on the door, he realized that someone inside was playing a guitar. The past rose up to twist his gut. Glenn had fooled around with guitars throughout his adolescence. As with his studies, he had showed plenty of ability but little discipline.

There was no response to the knock. Monks opened the door and leaned in.

Glenn was sitting cross-legged on a large pillow on the floor, bent over a steel-stringed acoustic guitar. His left hand slid easily up and down the neck, coaxing out the sweet dark strains of Skip James’s great Delta blues. “Hard Time Killing Floor,” Glenn’s quavering voice rose to join the music.

“If I ever get off this killin’ floor, Lord, I’ll never get down so low no more. Mmm-hmmh, mmm, mmm-mmm-hmmh-”

Abruptly, Glenn slapped the strings to silence and looked up.

“I ain’t got nothing to say to you, Rasp,” Glenn said. “I’m only doing this because Freeboot said I have to.”

Monks noted the use of his own old navy nickname, short for Rasputin, given to him because of his thick tangled eyebrows. Under other circumstances it might have been joking or even affectionate, but here it was clearly a taunt. He noted the grammar, too. Glenn had not been brought up to say “ain’t got.” His kinky ginger-colored hair bushed out from his head Afro style. A silvery skull-shaped earring, a punkish affectation, hung from his left ear.

“I’m not here to read you out, Glenn. I’d just like to know how you’re doing.”

“Call me Coil. Glenn was a middle-class white motherfucker. He’s gone, man.”

“All right, Coil it is. Because you’re wound really tight?”

“You got it.” Glenn bared his teeth in a defiant grin, and Monks’s gut twisted again. Dark blotches were starting to form on Glenn’s teeth and gums. Monks had seen similar ones in the ER. They were blisters that came from methamphetamine.

“You mind telling me how much of that stuff you’re using?” Monks said.

“What stuff?” Glenn said innocently.

“Speed. And whatever else.”

Glenn shrugged. “As much as I want. It’s not hurting me.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Jesus, Rasp.” Glenn slapped the guitar neck again, this time angrily. “You’re in the door thirty seconds and already you’re on my case.”

Monks exhaled, biting off his next questions: Have you shared needles? Had an AIDS test?

“Okay,” he said. “I’m concerned, that’s all.”

Glenn pulled a cigarette out of a pack and lit it. Monks saw with slight relief that it was a Marlboro 100-at least it was filtered. The cabin reeked of smoke. There was an ashtray stuffed with dead butts on the floor beside Glenn, along with a bottle of screw-cap Tokay wine. Paperback sci-fi novels, computer magazines, and what looked like adult comic books were scattered around. This seemed to be Glenn’s corner, and it had the feel of a teenager’s bedroom. But it was made eerie by the clear evidence that Glenn was living with a much older woman. Instead of a mountain man’s hard and narrow bunk, there was a new, expensive queen-sized bed covered by a duvet. Through the open door to the small attached bathroom, crude and concrete-floored like the washhouse, Monks glimpsed a wooden clothes-drying rack hung with lingerie.