" I don't believe you. I can't-"

There was a scraping sound in the front room and the door came open. A man named Brennan stood in the doorway, a strip of plastic in one hand. In the other was a slightly oversized leather attache case. In it, Fortunato knew, was a disassembled hunting bow and a rack of broadhead arrows. "Fortunato," he said. "Sorry, but I-" His eves moved to Veronica, who had peeled off her T-shirt and was holding her. breasts in her hands.

"Hi," she said. "Wanna fuck me? All it takes is money." She teased her nipples with her thumbs and licked her lips. "How much you got? Two dollars? Buck and a half?" Tears ran out of her eyes and a line of mucus leaked out of one nostril. "Shut up," Fortunato said. "Shut the fuck up."

"Why don't you slap me around'?" she said. "That's what a pimp's supposed to do, isn't it?"

Fortunato looked back at Brennan. "Maybe you should come back later," he said.

"I don't know if it can wait," Brennan said. "It's the Astronomer."

7:00 a.m.

By the time he got to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Jack wished he had taken his electric track-maintenance car and sped uptown playing hopscotch with the trains. But what the hell, he'd thought as he'd ascended the stairs to the passenger levels of the City Hall station-this was a holiday. He didn't want to think about work. What he wanted to do more than anything else was to get all his clothes laundered, read a few chapters of the new Stephen King novel, The Cannibals, and maybe wander up to Central Park to have some cheap vended hot dogs with Bagabond and the cats.

But then the uptown 7th Avenue express had screeched into the station, and it had seemed like a good idea to step aboard. As the train sped uptown though Tribeca, the Village, and Chelsea, Jack noticed through the smeared panes that the stations seemed awfully busy for a holiday-at least this early. When he got off at Times Square and walked the block west in the tiled tunnels beneath 42nd, he overheard one transit cop disgustedly say to his partner, "Wait'll you take a gander topside. It looks like a cross between spring break at Lauderdale and the Bronx Zoo."

He came up for air at Eighth Avenue, ascending out of the strong morning scent of disinfectant barely masking the smell of vomit. The street population looked to Jack like any rush hour weekday morning, except that the average age looked fairly youthful, and gray suits had been replaced by considerably more garish attire.

Jack stepped off the curb to avoid having to confront a swaggering trio of teenaged boys-normals by the look of them-who wore outrageous styrofoam headgear. The hats fea tured tentacles, drooping lips, segmented legs, horns, melting eyes, and other, more unappetizing appendages that jiggled and bobbed with the wearer's movements.

One of the boys put his thumbs to his cheekbones and wagged his fingers at passersby. "Ooga, booga," he cried. "We muties! We bad!" His pals laughed uproariously.

A block further, Jack passed one of the sidewalk sellers peddling the foam hats. "Hey!" the vendor called. "Hey, c 'mere, c'mere. Y' don't got to be a joker to look like one. T'day's your chance to act like one. You interested?"

Jack shook his head wordlessly, scratched the back of his hand, and walked on.

"Hey!" yelled the man to another potential customer. "Be a joker for a day! Tomorrow you can go back to being yerself " Jack shook his head. He wasn't sure now whether it would be better to go on being depressed, or just go back and rip out the hat vendor's throat. He looked at his watch. Five before seven. The bus would be in. The salesman's life was temporarily safe.

The Port Authority building was a darker gray, bulking large in the chill gray of the Manhattan morning. Then Jack noted that most of the human traffic seemed to be exiting rather than entering the building. It reminded him of an Avenue A apartment after the exterminators set off their chemical bombs-an exodus of cockroaches carpeting every exit.

He fought his way through one of the main doors, ignoring the hulking men importuning, "Hey, man, want a cab? Want an escort in to your bus?" Most of the storefronts along the interior promenade were locked and dark, but the snack bars were doing a land-office business.

Jack looked at his watch again. 7:02. Ordinarily he would have stopped and appreciated the huge "42nd St. Carousel" kinetic sculpture, a glass box enclosing a marvelous and musi cal Rube Goldberg contraption, but now there was no time. Less than no time.

He checked the arrival board. The bus he wanted was coming in at a gate three levels up. Merde! The escalators were broken. Most of the foot traffic was coming down. Jack made his way up the stationary metal flights. He felt like a salmon struggling upstream to spawn.

Only a minor current of the incoming tidal crest of humanity seemed to be the usual sorts of people who arrived in Manhattan bv bus. Most seemed either to be tourists-Jack wondered whether this many people would actually be coming into the city for this particular holiday-or jokers themselves. Jack noted wryly that the normals were obliged by the constraints of the stairs and escalator steps to associate much more closely with jokers than they might otherwise have wished.

Then someone elbowed him painfully in the side, and the opportunity for musing was over. By the time he reached the third level and stepped outside the down-traveling crowd, Jack felt as if he'd used as much energy as he would normally burn climbing to the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

Somebody in the crush patted him on the rear. "Watch it, jerk," he said without rancor, not looking.

He found the section holding the gate he wanted. The area was packed. It looked as if at least half a dozen coaches had arrived and were unloading simultaneously. He waded into the aimless melee and aimed himself at the right gate number. He stopped to allow a dozen traditionally garbed nuns to move past him at right angles. A big joker with leathery skin and pronounced tusks protruding from beneath his upper lip tried to muscle through the nuns. "Hey, move it, penguins!" he veiled. Another joker, one with huge puppy-like brown eyes and what appeared to be stigmata wounds on his palms, voiced exception. The shouting match looked as if it might escalate into something more violent. Naturally an increasingly dense crowd of onlookers stopped to gawk.

Jack tried to bypass the mess. He stumbled into an apparent normal, who shoved back. "Sorry!"

The normal was well over six feet tall, and proportionately muscled. "Buzz off."

And then Jack saw her. It was Cordelia. He knew that as surely as he knew anything, though he hadn't seen her before in his life. Elouette had sent pictures the Christmas previous, but the photographs didn't do the young woman justice. Looking at Cordelia, Jack thought, was like looking at his sister when she'd been three decades younger. His niece was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was a faded crimson with screaming yellow letters spelling out FERRIC JAGGER. Jack recognized the name even though he wasn't terribly interested in heavy metal groups. He could also make out some sort of pattern made up of lightning bolts, a sword, and what looked like a swastika.

Cordelia was about ten yards away, on the other side of a thick flow of disembarking passengers. She held a battered floral-print suitcase with one hand, a leather handbag with the other. A tall, slender, expensively dressed Hispanic man was trying to help her with the suitcase. Jack was instantly suspicious of any helpful stranger wearing a purple pinstripe suit, slouch hat, and a fur-trimmed coat. It looked like baby harpseal pelts.

"Hey!" Jack shouted. "Cordelia! Over here! It's meJack!"