“Wait,” she said, struggling with his grip. “I have to feed Mandrake.”

This was not true, but Hammerhead didn’t know that, and he seemed to realize that it was something he didn’t dare interfere with. He hesitated, then pulled her close and planted a wide-mouthed kiss on her, an embrace she neither resisted nor accepted.

“Hurry up,” he said into her ear, in a voice thick with passion. “I’ve been waiting for this forever.”

He let her go and strode out of the building. Marguerite lifted the pendant off over her head and gazed at it, still looking troubled, but fascinated, too.

“If you’re going to be leaving, Mandrake could use some soup,” Monks said.

She looked up at him swiftly, then spun away, clasping the pendant tight in her fist and hurrying back into the kitchen.

He returned to his chair, bemused by the exchange but too burdened by his other worries to try to make sense of it. Mandrake was still withdrawn and listless, not responding to Monks’s attempts to draw him out. At first, Monks had thought it was from the shock of seeing the violent attack last night.

But Mandrake’s forehead had gotten noticeably warmer during the night, and he was developing a weak but ugly cough. Mucus was forming in his nose, streaking his upper lip. Monks feared that he was coming down with a virus, or even pneumonia.

That could easily precipitate a coma. Then the end would not be far off, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that Monks could do about it.

His watch read 10:14 A.M. That left just seven hours of daylight to find a way out of here.

By mid-afternoon, the rain was coming down in sheets, driven by lashing gusts of wind that blew the trees around like candle flames. The gloom was already indistinguishable from twilight. The camp seemed almost deserted. Sidewinder continued to skulk around, taking refuge under the eaves of a shed, apparently forbidden to go inside; and a couple of the other men had stopped into the lodge to make sandwiches. But Monks had been alone with Mandrake for the past hour. With the rain, there wasn’t much incentive to wander around.

He walked to the kitchen to check out something that he had noticed on one of his trips back from the washhouse-a gap in the old rock-and-mortar foundation, where the kitchen water and drain pipes ran in. Probably the plumbing had been added some time after the lodge was built, requiring a space for a man to slither in under the floor. The water pipe was wrapped with insulation, suggesting that it was prone to freezing. Monks had done a fair amount of plumbing on his own house, and once in a while the weather got cold enough that he needed to thaw a pipe. It was a lot easier when there was access to it from both ends.

He opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink. A section of the heavy plank floor had been cut out for the pipes, then replaced with two pieces of half-inch plywood, about eighteen by twenty-four inches, joining in the middle with hemispherical cuts around the pipes.

The plywood was not nailed down.

He quickly removed the items under the sink-cleaning supplies and a bucket to catch drips from the leaky drain-and lifted the plywood sections. He could just see a gray patch of twilight through the foundation’s gap, fifteen feet away. It opened out the back, on the opposite side of the lodge from Sidewinder’s watch point.

It would be a tough squirm for a good-sized man. But a good-sized desperate man could make it.

He replaced the stuff under the sink, mentally going through all the factors he could bring to mind. Then he walked to the lodge’s door and stepped out into the rain.

Sidewinder walked to meet him, unhappily drawn forth from his cover.

“Where you going, man?” he said.

“To visit my son,” Monks said, continuing his walk toward Glenn’s cabin. He had been watching it from the lodge’s windows, and had seen Glenn a couple of times, hurrying to the washhouse or on some errand. But he had not seen Shrinkwrap. He was hoping that she was gone.

“I’m already fucking soaked,” Sidewinder complained. “I was outside all night and I haven’t slept. Freeboot’s making me stay on duty, ’cause-”

“Because you asked me that question last night?” Monks interrupted. Sardonic words came to his mind-Sorry I caused you trouble-but he had already made enough enemies here.

Instead, he said, “I’d have worried about eating that raw meat, too. I think Freeboot overreacted.”

“Yeah,” Sidewinder said, seeming slightly cheered by the sympathy.

“Look, I’m not going to try anything, are you kidding?” Monks said. “You can stay where you were and watch the door. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Sidewinder glanced around nervously, as if fearing that Freeboot would materialize and smite him for this slackness. Then he nodded and hurried back to his shelter. But he unslung his rifle and stood at watchful attention.

Smoke was rising from the stovepipe of Glenn’s cabin, a thin plume barely visible in the rain. Monks knocked sharply on the door, and braced himself for the possibility of facing the hostile Shrinkwrap.

But it was Glenn who answered, opening the door just a few inches. He looked bleary, surprised to see his father. If he noticed Monks’s missing chunk of hair, he gave no sign of it. But, then, Glenn was a good enough actor to pull that off.

“Let me in,” Monks said. “It’s pouring.”

Glenn’s face turned reluctant, and he seemed about to object, but Monks pushed the door open and stepped past him.

Immediately, Monks saw at least one reason for Glenn’s hesitation. There was a woman in the room, but not Shrinkwrap. It was Motherlode, lounging on the bed, watching the screen of a laptop computer that was playing a video-a Tom and Jerry cartoon, it looked like.

She stared at Monks blank-eyed, then glanced furtively at the dresser. He followed her gaze to a syringe-one that had been pilfered from Mandrake’s supply-and a bottle of Percocets. There were other items that Monks recognized as being used to render the pills injectable-a porcelain coffee cup for grinding them up and mixing them into solution, a soggy wad of tissues for straining it, and a length of surgical rubber tubing.

One syringe. Two people.

“I hurt my back,” Motherlode said.

She was wearing sweatclothes, and Glenn was fully dressed; the situation did not appear to be a sexual one. Monks figured that was none of his concern anyway. He just wanted to get her out of here.

“Mandrake would really like to see you,” he told her. “Now would be a good time.”

Her eyes focused a little more.

“I can’t-” she began.

“Try to overcome your pain,” he said, with a harsh edge. He held her gaze, letting some of his anger show in his own.

Pouting, she got up and put on an anorak, not forgetting to collect her Percocets before she went reluctantly out the door.

Glenn slapped his own thigh in anger. “Now you come in and fuck up my party. This ain’t my room at home, Rasp.”

Monks stepped to a window and watched Motherlode hurry off through the rain. As he had expected, she did not go toward the lodge to visit her child.

“She’s been stealing these from Mandrake,” he said, showing Glenn the syringe. He set it back on the dresser. “You ever hear that it’s not smart to share a needle?”

Glenn shrugged, but he looked uneasy. “I hardly ever shoot anymore.”

“This must be a special occasion.”

“If you’re nice to her, she’ll share.” Glenn grinned slyly, displaying his black-spotted teeth. “Sometimes ’codes are a good way to chill out. Especially when you’ve been doing a lot of crank.”

“That’s what you’re using mostly? Meth?”

“Yeah. Shrinkwrap got me off junk.”

“By getting you on speed?”

“Sort of. Freeboot doesn’t like hard dope for the people he’s got to count on. It slows you down, makes you unreliable.”